"When, as we have seen, the Great Pirates let their scientists have free rein in World War I the Pirates themselves became so preoccupied with enormous wealth harvesting that... they, too, became severe specialists as industrial production money makers, and thus they compounded their own acceleration to extinction... But society, as we have seen, never knew that the Great Pirates had been running the world. Nor did society realize... that the Great Pirates had become extinct."
January 1, 1970
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Operating_Manual_for_Spaceship_Earth