Men, Machines, and Modern Times, 50th Anniversary Edition

This is man’s first encounter outside himself with something that is exactly like some inside part of himself.

The opposition, where it occurs, of the soldier and the sailor to such change springs from the normal human instinct to protect oneself, and more especially, one’s way of life.

The particular solutions of engineers are on the whole local, limited by time and place and singularity.

it is a poor sort of past that only deals with what has happened.

It is possible, for instance, that in any very strict sense there is no such thing as an inventor or an invention. To put it another and slightly more persuasive way, the act of invention may simply be making conscious, explicit, and regular what has been done for a considerable time unconsciously or by accident. Bessemer changed his society by dis

Since one of the distorting by-products of technology is the collapse of human time, we could find ways to retard tempos to permit normal responses and accommodations.

It is possible, if one sets aside the long-run social benefits, to look upon invention as a hostile act—a dislocation of existing schemes, a way of disturbing the comfortable bourgeois routines and calculations, a means of discharging the restlessness with arrangements and standards that arbitrarily limit.

Man is, not only because he thinks but because he feels, and it is the interaction between these two impressive energies that establishes what people today love to call the human condition.

In the play with which you are all familiar Hamlet had a problem which he defined for himself as follows: What happened to the late King of Denmark, and what should he, Hamlet, do about it? Framing the question accurately—a good program—he took it to a ghost, the most sophisticated mechanism in the late sixteenth century for giving answers to hard