My study of invention in the nineteenth century leads me to conclude that such expulsion was often one of the most important parts of the formal education of the men who did great things in the technology of that marvelous period. And if it wasn’t school that got them into trouble, it was often enough money, or alcohol, or women, or their own

But our mechanical triumph may have produced a mechanical atmosphere we can’t stand. So we may have reached a point where the design of our technology must take into greater account our interior needs.

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.

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

the smaller the understanding of the situation, the more pretentious, often, the form of expression.

All our economic and social arrangements—how we feel about what we do, which is all that culture is—are founded upon the way our industrial energy is organized.

So the first part of the problem appears to be whether we can now in fact discover the means to close the gap between the changes that destroy the old, which was not bad but is not, in the new dispensation, good and useful, and the developments which are to take the place of the old, but which do not take place fast enough. Put another way, can we

That is why the bureaucracy develops in any social system—to collect, retain, and supply this information in an orderly way.