“Nowadays we simply cannot wait a few hundred years for something good or bad to happen in the world. Take the migration of peoples which used to drag on over several centuries: today, with our present organization of transport, it could be accomplished in three years; otherwise there would be in profit in it. The same is true of the liquidation of the Roman Empire, the colonisation of the continents, the extermination of the Red Indians, and so on. All these things could have been accomplished incomparably more speedily if they had been put in the hands of entrepreneurs with a lot of capital behind them.”
– Karel Čapek, War With the Newts, 1936 (translated from the Czech by Ewald Osers).
Owch, the satire! If you want to read the book yourself, there’s a (pretty) recent version by David Wylie available here, or more downloadably here.