I know no more affecting lesson to our busy, plotting New England brains, than to go into one of our factories with which we have ...lined all the watercourses in the States. A man hardly knows how much he is a machine, until he begins to make telegraph, loom, press, and locomotive, in his own image.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Culture is a sham if it is only a sort of Gothic front put on an iron building--like Tower Bridge--or a classical front put on a s...teel frame--like the Daily Telegraph building in Fleet Street. Culture, if it is to be a real thing and a holy thing, must be the product of what we actually do for a living--not something added, like sugar on a pill.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Today the average inhabitant of the western hemisphere knows a little of everything. He has the newspaper on his breakfast table a...nd wireless within reach. For the evening there is the film, cards, or a meeting to complete a day spent in the office or factory where nothing that is essential has been learnt. With slight variation this picture of a low cultural average holds good over the entire range from factory-hand of clerk to manager or director. Only the personal will to culture, in whatever field and however pursued raises modern man above this level.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Every notable advance in technique or organization has to be paid for, and in most cases the debit is more or less equivalent to t...he credit. Except of course when it's more than equivalent, as it has been with universal education, for example, or wireless, or these damned aeroplanes. In which case, of course, your progress is a step backwards and downwards.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The city is loveliest when the sweet death racket begins. Her own life lived in defiance of nature, her electricity, her frigidair...es, her soundproof walls, the glint of lacquered nails, the plumes that wave across the corrugated sky. Here in the coffin depths grow the everlasting flowers sent by telegraph.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The press, the machine, the railroad, the telegraph are premises whose conclusion once a thousand years have passed no one has dar...ed to draw as yet.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Custer's dead and around the bloody guidon of the immortal Seventh Cavalry lie 212 officers of the main. Sioux and Cheyenne are on... the war path. By military telegraph news of the Custer massacre is flashed across the long, long miles to the southwest. By stagecoach to the hundred settlements and the thousand farms standing under threat of Indian uprising. Pony Express riders know that one more such defeat as Custer's and it would be 100 years before another wagon train dared to cross the plain. And from the Canadian border to the Rio Bravo 10,000 Indians--Comanche, Arapaho, Sioux, and Apache under Sitting Bull, and Crazy Horse, Gaul, and Crow King--are uniting in a common war against the United States cavalry.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »