Machinery

(267 votes)   The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.

Antoine De Saint-Exupery
1900-1944, French Aviator, Writer

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(174 votes)   Freedom from labor itself is not new; it once belonged among the most firmly established privileges of the few. In this instance, it seems as though scientific progress and technical developments had been only taken advantage of to achieve something about which all former ages dreamed but which none had been able to realize.

Hannah Arendt
1906-1975, German-born American Political Philosopher

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(117 votes)   By his machines man can dive and remain under water like a shark; can fly like a hawk in the air; can see atoms like a gnat; can see the system of the universe of Uriel, the angel of the sun; can carry whatever loads a ton of coal can lift; can knock down cities with his fist of gunpowder; can recover the history of his race by the medals which the deluge, and every creature, civil or savage or brute, has involuntarily dropped of its existence; and divine the future possibility of the planet and its inhabitants by his perception of laws of nature.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
1803-1882, American Poet, Essayist

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(108 votes)   For man is not the creature and product of Mechanism; but, in a far truer sense, its creator and producer.

Thomas Carlyle
1795-1881, Scottish Philosopher, Author

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(98 votes)   I find it hard to believe that the machine would go into the creative artist's hand even were that magic hand in true place. It has been too far exploited by industrialism and science at expense to art and true religion.

Frank Lloyd Wright
1869-1959, American Architect

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(97 votes)   The machines that are first invented to perform any particular movement are always the most complex, and succeeding artists generally discover that, with fewer wheels, with fewer principles of motion, than had originally been employed, the same effects may be more easily produced. The first systems, in the same manner, are always the most complex.

Adam Smith
1723-1790, Scottish Economist

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(83 votes)   The cycle of the machine is now coming to an end. Man has learned much in the hard discipline and the shrewd, unflinching grasp of practical possibilities that the machine has provided in the last three centuries: but we can no more continue to live in the world of the machine than we could live successfully on the barren surface of the moon.

Lewis Mumford
1895-1990, American Social Philosopher

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