What makes the computer's representation special is that it can be manipulated so rapidly without direct human intervention. Once ...the program is determined and the machine set to work, the electrons fly until an answer is produced. An abacus can produce an answer mechanically by means of a person who unthinkingly slides the counters according to the rules. And yet the very fact that a human being is needed to push the counters suggests a close link between man and machine. The abacus is a tool rather than a machine, for it extends human technical capabilities while remaining intimately under human control. A machine runs more or less under its own control, with its own sense of purpose and its own inanimate source of power.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 »
If we apply the term revolution to what happened in North America between 1776 and 1829, it has a special meaning. Normally, the w...ord describes the process by which man transforms himself from one kind of man, living in one kind of society, with one way of looking at the world, into another kind of man, another society, another conception of life.... The American case is different: it is not a question of the Old Man transforming himself into the New, but of the New Man becoming alive to the fact that he is new, that he has been transformed already without his having realized it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The North will at least preserve your flesh for you; Northerners are pale for good and all. There's very little difference between... a dead Swede and a young man who's had a bad night. But the Colonial is full of maggots the day after he gets off the boat.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Is it not the chief disgrace in the world, not to be an unit;Mnot to be reckoned one character;Mnot to yield that peculiar fruit w...hich each man was created to bear, but to be reckoned in the gross, in the hundred, or the thousand, of the party, the section, to which we belong; and our opinion predicted geographically, as the north, or the south?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is said that the Negro is ignorant. But why is he ignorant? It comes with ill grace from a man who has put out my eyes to make ...a parade of my blindness,--to reproach me for my poverty when he has wronged me of my money.... If he is poor, what has become of the money he has been earning for the last two hundred and fifty years? Years ago it was said cotton fights and cotton conquers for American slavery. The Negro helped build up that great cotton power in the South, and in the North his sigh was in the whir of its machinery, and his blood and tears upon the warp and woof of its manufactures.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!"... If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offences which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope--fervently do we pray--that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Humanity cries out against this vast enormity:Mnot one man knows a prudent remedy. Blame not, then, the North; and wisely judge th...e South.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Why does man freeze to death trying to reach the North Pole? Why does man drive himself to suffer the steam and heat of the Amazon...? Why does he stagger his mind with the mathematics of the sky? Once the question mark has arisen in the human brain the answer must be found, if it takes a hundred years. A thousand years.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Not one man is forgiven! East, West, North, South! I bite off their dingbats. Christ rots in my mouth.... I curse the seed of my father that put me here for when I die there'll be no one to say: Oh No! Oh dear.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »