17 quotes
The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age.
Technics and Civilization (1934)
However far modern science and technics have fallen short of their inherent possibilities, they have taught mankind at least one lesson: Nothing is impossible.
Technics and Civilization (1934)
Today, the notion of progress in a single line without goal or limit seems perhaps the most parochial notion of a very parochial century.
Technics and Civilization (1934)
War is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society.
Technics and Civilization (1934)
The incentive to mechanization lay in the greater profits that could be extracted through the multiplied and efficiency of the machine.
Technics and Civilization (1934)
Under capitalism time-keeping is not merely a means of co-ordinating and inter-relating complicated functions: it is also like money an independent commodity with a value of its own.
Technics and Civilization (1934)
The machine itself ... is a human product, and its very abstractions make it more definitely human in one sense than those human arts which on occasion realistically counterfit nature.
Technics and Civilization (1934)
That was the danger Samuel Butler jestingly prophesied in Erewhon, the danger that the human being might become a means whereby the machine perpetuated itself and extended its dominion.
Technics and Civilization (1934)
Mechanization and regimentation are not new phenomena in history: what is new is the fact that these functions have been projected and embodied in organized form which dominate every aspect of our existence.
Technics and Civilization (1934)
On one side is the gigantic printing press, a miracle of fine articulation, which turns out the tabloid newspaper: on the other side are the contents of the tabloid itself, symbolically recording the most crude and elementary states of emotion.
Technics and Civilization (1934)
Mechanical instruments, potentially a vehicle of rational human purposes, are scarcely a blessing when they enable the gossip of the village idiot and the deeds of the thug to be broadcast to a million people each day.
Technics and Civilization (1934)
The mechanization of human labor was, in effect, the first step toward the humanization of the machine humanization in the sense of giving the automaton some of the mechanical equivalents of life-likeness.
Technics and Civilization (1934)
By deliberately cutting off certain phases of man's personality, the warm life of private sensation and private feelings and private perceptions, the sciences assisted in building up a more public world which gained in accessibility what it lost in depth.
Technics and Civilization (1934)
Western society is relapsing at critical points into precivilized modes of thought, feeling, and action because it has acquiesced too easily in the dehumanization of society through capitalist exploitation.
Technics and Civilization (1934)
Sport in the sense of a mass-spectacle, with death to add to the underlying excitement, comes into existence when a population has been drilled and regimented and depressed to such an extent that it needs at least a vicarious participation in difficult feats of strength or skill or heroism in order to sustain its waning life-sense.
Technics and Civilization (1934)
Many psychologists have treated literature as a whole as a mere vehicle of withdrawal from the harsh realities of existence: forgetful of the fact that literature of the first order, so far from being a mere pleasure device, is a supreme attempt to face and encompass reality-an attempt beside which a busy working life involves a shrinkage and represents a partial retreat.
Technics and Civilization (1934)
The machine is no longer the paragon of progress and the final expression of our desires: it is merely a series of instruments, which we will use in so far as they are serviceable to life at large, and which we will curtail where they infringe upon it or exist purely to support the adventitious structure of capitalism.
Technics and Civilization (1934)