With two sons born eighteen months apart, I operated mainly on automatic pilot through the ceaseless activity of their early child...hood. I remember opening the refrigerator late one night and finding a roll of aluminum foil next to a pair of small red tennies. Certain that I was responsible for the refrigerated shoes, I quickly closed the door and ran upstairs to make sure I had put the babies in their cribs instead of the linen closet.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Whenever the weather licks the pilot instead of him lickin' the weather, he's finished. The first time makes the second time easie...r. And the first thing he knows, he's in trouble when the weather is perfect.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In contrast to revenge, which is the natural, automatic reaction to transgression and which, because of the irreversibility of the... action process can be expected and even calculated, the act of forgiving can never be predicted; it is the only reaction that acts in an unexpected way and thus retains, though being a reaction, something of the original character of action.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Predictions of the future are never anything but projections of present automatic processes and procedures, that is, of occurrence...s that are likely to come to pass if men do not act and if nothing unexpected happens; every action, for better or worse, and every accident necessarily destroys the whole pattern in whose frame the prediction moves and where it finds its evidence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The discussion of the whole problem of technology ... has been strangely led astray through an all-too-exclusive concentration upo...n the service or disservice the machines render to men. The assumption here is that every tool and implement is primarily designed to make human life easier and human labor less painful.... But ... homo faber, the toolmaker, invented tools and equipment in order to erect a world, not ... to help the human life process. The question therefore is not so much whether we are the masters or the slaves of our machines, but whether machines still serve the world and its things, or if, on the contrary, they and the automatic motion of their processes have begun to rule and even destroy world and things.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A man may build a complicated piece of mechanism, or pilot a steamboat, but not more than five out of ten know how the apple got i...nto the dumpling.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What we learn for the sake of knowing, we hold; what we learn for the sake of accomplishing some ulterior end, we forget as soon a...s that end has been gained. This, too, is automatic action in the constitution of the mind itself, and it is fortunate and merciful that it is so, for otherwise our minds would be soon only rubbish-rooms.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Just as the sentence contains one idea in all its fullness, so the paragraph should embrace a distinct episode; and as sentences s...hould follow one another in harmonious sequence, so paragraphs must fit into another like the automatic couplings of railway carriages.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The ruin of the human heart is self-interest, which the American merchant calls self-service. We have become a self- service popul...ace, and all our specious comforts--the automatic elevator, the escalator, the cafeteria--are depriving us of volition and moral and physical energy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for... the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind's eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of the watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »