The white man regards the universe as a gigantic machine hurtling through time and space to its final destruction: individuals in ...it are but tiny organisms with private lives that lead to private deaths: personal power, success and fame are the absolute measures of values, the things to live for. This outlook on life divides the universe into a host of individual little entities which cannot help being in constant conflict thereby hastening the approach of the hour of their final destruction.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This island is made mainly of coal and surrounded by fish. Only an organizing genius could produce a shortage of coal and fish at ...the same time.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A machine is characterized by sustained, autonomous action. It is set up by human hands and then is more or less set loose from hu...man control. It is designed to come between man and nature, to affect the natural world without requiring or indeed allowing humans to come into contact with it. Such is the clock, which abstracts the measurement of time from the sun and the stars: such is the steam engine, which turns coal into power to move ships or pump water without the intervention of human muscles. A tool, unlike a machine, is not self-sufficient or autonomous in action. It requires the skill of a craftsman and, when handled with skill, permits him to reshape the world in his way.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The society of merchants can be defined as a society in which things disappear in favor of signs. When a ruling class measures its... fortunes, not by the acre of land or the ingot of gold, but by the number of figures corresponding ideally to a certain number of exchange operations, it thereby condemns itself to setting a certain kind of humbug at the center of its experience and its universe. A society founded on signs is, in its essence, an artificial society in which man's carnal truth is handled as something artificial.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Away with the cant of "Measures, not men!"Mthe idle supposition that it is the harness and not the horses that draw the chariot al...ong. No, Sir, if the comparison must be made, if the distinction must be taken, men are everything, measures comparatively nothing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All children's books are about ideals. Adult fiction sets out to portray and then explain the world as it really is; books for chi...ldren present it as it should be. Child readers come to them hoping for a certain amount of instruction, but chiefly for stories in which the petty restrictions of ordinary life are removed: they want to encounter people who can fly, geese that lay golden eggs, frogs that turn into princes, spaceships piloted by children, anything that measures up to their ideals of adventure and imagination. Adults, on the other hand, are more likely to want to feed the children a set of moral examples. By all means, let them have their fun, but the opportunity of providing models of ideal behaviour is not to be wasted.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Why, did you ever know a conceited man dare to praise a picture? The one thing he dreads (next to not being noticed) is to be prov...en fallible! If you once praise a picture, your character for infallibility hangs by a thread. Suppose it's a figure-picture, and you venture to say "draws well." Somebody measures it, and finds one of the proportions an eighth of an inch wrong. You are disposed of as a critic! "Did you say he draws well?" your friends enquire sarcastically, while you hang your head and blush. No. The only safe course, if any one says "draws well," is to shrug your shoulders. "Draws well?" you repeat thoughtfully. "Draws well? Humph!" That's the way to become a great critic!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"The room's very hot, with all this crowd," the Professor said to Sylvie. "I wonder why they don't put some lumps of ice in the gr...ate? You fill it with lumps of coal in the winter, you know, and you sit round it and enjoy the warmth. How jolly it would be to fill it now with lumps of ice, and sit round it and enjoy the coolth!"LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsif...ies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »