Mechanization Quotes

Besides black art, there is only automation and mechanization. (Federico García Lorca)
The overwhelming pressure of mechanization evident in the newspaper and the magazine, has led to the creation of vast monopolies of communication. Their entrenched positions involve a continuous, systematic, ruthless destruction of elements of permanence essential to cultural activity. View quote
Harold Innis
Psychic disturbances are the consequences of the sexual chaos of society. For thousands of years, this chaos has had the function of psychically subjecting man to the prevailing conditions of existence, of internalizing the external mechanization of life. It has served to bring about the psychic anchoring of a mechanized and authoritarian civilization by making man incapable of functioning independently. View quote
Wilhelm Reich
How can you [accept] exploitation?' 'How can you like the complete mechanization of work?' 'How can you like bad art?' I have to answer that I accept it as being there, in the world. View quote
Roy Lichtenstein
Typography as the first mechanization of a handicraft is itself the perfect instance not of a new knowledge, but of applied knowledge. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Literacy remains even now the base and model of all programs of industrial mechanization; but, at the same time, locks the minds and senses of its users in the mechanical and fragmentary matrix that is so necessary to the maintenance of mechanized society. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
In the midst of increasing mechanization and technological organization, propaganda is simply the means used to prevent these things from being felt as too oppressive and to persuade man to submit with good grace. When man will be fully adapted to this technological society, when he will end by obeying with enthusiasm, convinced of the excellence of what he is forced to do, the constraint of the organization will no longer be felt by him; the truth is, it will no longer be a constraint, and the police will have nothing to do. The civic and technological good will and the enthusiasm for the right social myths - both created by propaganda - will finally have solved the problem of man. View quote
Jacques Ellul
Paul wondered at what thorough believers in mechanization most Americans were, even when their lives had been badly damaged by mechanization. View quote
Kurt Vonnegut
Man is by nature a pragmatic materialist, a mechanic, a lover of gadgets and gadgetry; and these are the qualities that characterize the "establishment" which regulates modern society: pragmatism, materialism, mechanization, and gadgetry. Woman, on the other hand, is a practical idealist, a humanitarian with a strong sense of noblesse oblige, an altruist rather than a capitalist. View quote
Elizabeth Gould Davis
Mechanization best serves mediocrity. View quote
Frank Lloyd Wright
If the individual were no longer compelled to prove himself on the market, as a free economic subject, the disappearance of this kind of freedom would be one of the greatest achievements of civilization. The technological processes of mechanization and standardization might release individual energy into a yet uncharted realm of freedom beyond necessity. The very structure of human existence would be altered; the individual would be liberated from the work world's imposing upon him alien needs and alien possibilities. The individual would be free to exert autonomy over a life that would be his own. (Herbert Marcuse)
It always demands a far greater degree of courage for an individual to oppose an organized movement than to let himself be carried along with the stream - individual courage, that is, a variety of courage that is dying out in these times of progressive organization and mechanization. During the war practically the only courage I ran across was mass courage, the courage that comes of being one of a herd, and anyone who examines this phenomenon more closely will find it to be compounded of some very strange elements: a great deal of vanity, a great deal of fear - yes, fear of staying behind, fear of being sneered at fear of independent action, and fear, above all, of taking up a stand against the mass enthusiasm of one's fellows. View quote
Stefan Zweig
# General system theory in the narrower sense (G. S. T.), trying to derive from a general definition of "system” as complex of interacting components, concepts characteristic of organized wholes such as interaction, sum, mechanization, centralization, competition, finality, etc., and to apply them to concrete phenomena. While systems theory in the broad sense has the character of a basic science, it has its correlate in applied science, sometimes subsumed under the general name of Systems Science. View quote
Ludwig von Bertalanffy
Even as the population doubled from three to six billion, we managed to race ahead with all kinds of technological and scientific events in agriculture - from using more fertilizers to mechanization to advanced plant breeding. View quote
Nina Fedoroff
The industrial revolution that defined the first half of the 20 century marked the start of modern business, typified by high-volume, large-scale organizations. Mechanization created a culture of business derived from the capabilities and needs of the time. View quote
Steven Sinofsky
Coal being then the chief source of power, much industrial reconstruction depended on there being a plentiful and cheap supply. But the newly nationalized industry was not doing well. Productivity failed to increase in step with increases in mechanization. Men were leaving the mines in large numbers for more attractive opportunities in the factories. Among those who remained, absenteeism averaged 20 percent. Labor disputes were frequent despite improved conditions of employment. Some time earlier the National Coal Board had asked the Institute to make a comparative study of a high producing, high morale mine and a low producing, low morale, but otherwise equivalent mine. View quote
Eric Trist
A lot of the critique of our growing mechanization was actually at its strongest, and arguably at its most perceptive, during the late '60s. View quote
Alan Moore
In the midst of increasing mechanization and technological organization, propaganda is simply the means used to prevent these things from being felt as too oppressive and to persuade man to submit with good grace. View quote
Jacques Ellul
If you ask an economist what's driven economic growth, it's been major advances in things that mattered - the mechanization of farming, mass manufacturing, things like that. The problem is, our society is not organized around doing that. View quote
Larry Page
Our third American Tragedy is Martin Luther King. King was Mario Cuomo and Stevenson another way. Oh, he had some Roosevelt will to power, but Cuomo has a will to power, and Stevenson had a little, maybe more than I'm giving him credit for. He was who you wanted it to be, in a way. Old America. We're singing spirituals again. We're having dreams again. Well, that left mechanization entirely out of the question. There was no Hollywood there. There were no gangsters there. There was no World War II victory there. I hope everyone understands I'm being completely nonracist when I say he was Adlai Stevenson another way. View quote
George W. S. Trow
Conservatives believe man was created in God's image, while liberals believe they are gods. All of the behavioral tics of the liberals proceed from their godless belief that they can murder the unborn because they, the liberals, are themselves gods. They try to forcibly create "equality" through affirmative action and wealth redistribution because they are gods. They flat-out lie, with no higher power to constrain them, because they are gods. They adore pornography and the mechanization of sex because man is just an animal, and they are gods. They revere the U.N. and not the U.S. because they aren't Americans - they are gods. (Ann Coulter)