Industrial Society Quotes

Industrialization based on machinery, already referred to as a characteristic of our age, is but one aspect of the revolution that is being wrought by technology.

Child labor in the industrial system is destructive and vicious, and that the employment of children in industry has to be forbidden. But this does not solve the problem of the child in industrial society.

The masses in highly industrialized countries like England, the United States, or France are largely de-Christianized. Technology, and the way of life it produces, undermines Christianity far more effectively than do violent measures.

Ever greater grows the mass of the proletariat, ever vaster the army of the unemployed, ever sharper the contrast between oppressors and oppressed, ever fiercer that war of classes between bourgeoisie and proletariat which divides modern society into two hostile camps and is the common characteristic of ever industrial country.

Moreover, there is an unearned increment on capital and on labor, due to the presence, around the capitalist and the laborer, of a great, industrious, and prosperous society.

The force of microelectronics will blow apart all of the monopolies, hierarchies, pyramids and power grids of established industrial society.

How can modern life, with its overpowering proportion of industrial activity and its infinitesimal proportion of military, keep alive the instincts associated with war as against those developed by peace?

Capitalism has socialized production. It has brought thousands of people together in the factory and involved them in new social relationships.

In the industrial age natural, history and cultural artifacts had more utilitarian functions such as the development of industry and the promotion of patriotism.

Politically, resistance to industrialism must force the viability of industrial society into public consciousness and debate. What purpose does this machine serve? What problem has become so great that it needs this solution? Is this invention nothing but, as Thoreau put it, an improved means to an unimproved end? Who are the winners? Who are the losers? Will this invention concentrate or disperse power, encourage or discourage self worth? Can society at large afford it? Can the biosphere?

Among civilized and thriving nations, on the contrary, though a great number of people do no labor at all, many of whom consume the produce of ten times, frequently of a hundred times more labour than the greater part of those who work; yet the produce of the whole labour of the society is so great, that all are often abundantly supplied, and a workman, even of the lowest and poorest order, if he is frugal and industrious, may enjoy a greater share of the necessaries and conveniencies of life than it is possible for any savage to acquire.

One of the most extraordinary things about industrial society of the present day is its idiot lack of memory. Tabloids and movies take the place of mental processes and revolts, crimes, despairs pass off in a dribble of vague words and rubber stamp phrases without leaving a scratch on the mind of the driven instalment-paying, subway-packing mass.

The economic development of industrial society tends inevitably to the ruin of small industries.

However, if we leave the industrial machinery and their energy-distribution networks and leave them also all the people who have routine jobs operating the industrial machinery and distributing its products, and we take away from all the industrial countries all their ideologies and all the politicians and political machine workers, people would keep right on eating. Possibly getting on a little better than before.

Jazz is the folk music of the machine age.

Industrialism is the religion with 'the machine' as the god going to answer all the prayers. Communism and capitalism were just competing sects.

How long can men thrive between walls of brick, walking on asphalt pavements, breathing the fumes of coal and oil, growing, working, dying, with hardly a thought of wind, and sky, and fields of grain, seeing only machine-made beauty, the mineral-like quality of life?

A completely industrialized society is of no consequence to me.

Industrial culture? There has been a phenomena; I don't know whether it's strong enough to be a culture. I do think what we did has had a reverberation right around the world and back.

Adulthood is the ever-shrinking period between childhood and old age. It is the apparent aim of modern industrial societies to reduce this period to a minimum.

The poet, like the lover, is a menace on the assembly line.

James Watt patented his steam engine on the eve of the American Revolution, consummating a relationship between coal and the new Promethean spirit of the age, and humanity made its first tentative steps into an industrial way of life that would, over the next two centuries, forever change the world.

Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion. The industrial society ... recognises nothing except the power to acquire ... No other kind of hope or satisfaction or pleasure can any longer be envisaged within the culture of capitalism.

Industrial societies can only be run successfully by dictators or oligarchs.