The learned professors have been at considerable pains in their attempts to make a distinction between tools and implements on the... one hand, and machinery on the other. Nor have they arrived much of anywhere. The one is continually shading into the other. Here is an ordinary shovel used by a day labourer in a ditch; here is the same shovel with a somewhat thicker handle, containing a pneumatic attachment which is said to improve its digging power; here is a very much larger shovel with curved ends and steel teeth, hitched to an arm that is hitched to a steam engine, which can gobble up a cartload of dirt at one mouthful. Where does the tool stop and the machine begin? A grindstone is widely held to be a primitive tool; a turret lathe is widely held to be a machine. Both spin around. What is the essential difference? The employment of nonhuman power, steam, oil, gas, has been defined as the difference. Well and good. Then everything worked by human hands and legs is a tool only, and bicycles, typewriters, adding machines, sewing machines, foot lathes, clocks, hand-pumps--are not machines. Which is absurd. And what is one to do with treadmills for grinding corn, whose motive power is said by some to be the donkey, and by some the carrot in front of his nose?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Money is like fire, an element as little troubled by moralizing as earth, air and water. Men can employ it as a tool or they can d...ance around it as if it were the incarnation of a god. Money votes socialist or monarchist, finds a profit in pornography or translations from the Bible, commissions Rembrandt and underwrites the technology of Auschwitz. It acquires its meaning from the uses to which it is put.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The great silent movies revolve around the body and the personality of its owner; the great sound comedies revolve about structure... and style--what happens, how it happens, and the way those happenings are depicted. Film comedy, as well as film art in general, was born from delight in physical movement. The essence of early filmmaking was to take some object (animate or inanimate) and simply watch it move.... The sound comedy is far more literary. Given the opportunity to use the essential tool of literature, words, as an intrinsic part of the film's conception, the filmmaker did not hesitate to do so. In silent films, the use of words in titles was intrusive, a deliberate interruption of the cinematic medium and a substitution of the literary one. We stop looking and start reading. But the sound film provided the means to watch the action and listen to the words at the same time. Whereas the silent performer was a physical being,... the sound performer was both physical and intellectual at once.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Just walking around, An object of curiosity to some,... But you are too preoccupied By the secret smudge in the back of your soul To say much, and wander around, Smiling to yourself and others.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In Rousseau's view (1762). . . most of the problems of education are problems of motivation, as teachers try to rush things. They ...talk of geography before the child knows the way around his own backyard. They teach history before the child understand anything about adult motivation. . . . It would be far better, to let questions arise naturally. . . . When a child is self-motivated, the teacher cannot keep him from learning.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Oh, that I were as in the months of old, as in the days when God watched over me; when his lamp shone over my head, and by his lig...ht I walked through darkness; when I was in my prime, when the friendship of God was upon my tent; when the Almighty was still with me, when my children were around me; when my steps were washed with milk, and the rock poured out for me streams of oil! When I went out to the gate of the city, when I took my seat in the square, the young men saw me and withdrew, and the aged rose up and stood...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »