It is thus that the few rare lucid well-disposed people who have had to struggle on the earth find themselves at certain hours of ...the day or night in the depth of certain authentic and waking nightmare states, surrounded by the formidable suction, the formidable tentacular oppression of a kind of civic magic which will soon be seen appearing openly in social behavior.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 »
... Whenever the Buffs and Blues met together at public meeting ... disputes and high words arose between them... Everything in Ea...tanswill was made a party question. If the Buffs proposed to new skylight the market-place, the Blues got up public meetings, and denounced the proceeding; if the Blues proposed the erection of an additional pump in the High Street, the Buffs rose as one man and stood aghast at the enormity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Vivacity, leadership, must be had, and we are not allowed to be nice in choosing. We must fetch the pump with dirty water, if clea...n cannot be had.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Fashion required the suppression of all naturalness--'to walk upright, with unbending joints; to shake hands after the pump- handl...e formula; to look inexpressibly indifferent towards everybody and everything; and speak only in a mincing voice was to be a decorous member of society.'LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One may decide that the nipple most nearly resembles a newly ripened raspberry (never, be it noted, the plonk of water on a pond a...t the commencement of a drizzle, a simple bladder nozzle built on the suction principal gum bubble, mole, or birth ward, bumpy metal button, or the painful red eruption of a swelling), but does one care to see his breakfast fruit as a sweetened milky bowl of snipped nips? no.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
the rusty Pump pumps over your sweating face the clear... Water, cold, so cold! you cup your hands And gulp from them the dailiness of life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I can live without it all-- love with its blood pump,... sex with its messy hungers, men with their peacock strutting, their silly sexual baggage, their wet tongues in my ear.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »