Ellen Goodman Quotes

We are becoming the servants in thought, as in action of the machine we have created to serve us.

People degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time.

We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.

I am no enthusiast for the TV age, in which I fear mass thought and action will be taken too much in charge of by machinery.

I'm so tired of cyberpunk that says using machines to make your life better makes you less human.

There's an idea that, 'Oh, the more technology you have, or the more you modify your body, the less human you are.' I think that's super gross, and inaccurate, and also offensive to anybody who relies on technology to live.

First you use machines, then you wear machines, and then ...? Then you serve machines.

Technology, in short, cannot teach me how to do without technology.

If India becomes the slave of the machine, then, I say, heaven save the world.

None of the modern machines, none of the modern paraphernalia. . . have any power except over the people who choose to use them.

the car, by bisecting the human outline, diminishes it, producing a race of half-people in a motion not of their own making

I am all for your using machines, but do not let them use you.

The machine is a tool. But it is not a neutral tool. We are deeply influenced by the machine while using it.

Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.

The machine unmakes the man. Now that the machine is so perfect, the engineer is nobody.

Historical fact: People stopped being people in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers rebelled. They quit in droves, unable to accustom their bodies to the new pace of the age. Since then, however, the adaptation has been passed down: we've all inherited it to some degree, so that we plug right into joy-sticks and remotes, to repetitive motions of a hundred kinds.

Sometimes you might think the machines we worship make all the chief appointments, promoting the human beings who seem closest to them.

If you raise the minimum wage, you're going to make people more expensive than a machine.

Progress celebrates victories over nature. Progress makes purses out of human skin. When people were traveling in mail coaches, the world got ahead better than it does now that salesmen fly through the air. What good is speed if the brain has oozed out on the way? How will the heirs of this age be taught the most basic motions that are necessary to activate the most complicated machines? Nature can rely on progress; it will avenge it for the outrage it has perpetrated on it.

The key relationships in the future will not be between people, but between machines and people.

The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies.

Journalistic content is a technical complex expressly intended to adapt man to the machine.

Sexual gratification can only be achieved through the use of machines.

The machines men are so intent on making have carried them very far from the old sweet things.

It may be in the cultural particularities of people — in their oddities — that some of the most instructive revelations of what it is to be generically human are to be found.