Zhou Qunfei Quotes

A tool is usually more simple than a machine; it is generally used with the hand, whilst a machine is frequently moved by animal or steam power.

I have always hated machinery, and the only machine I ever understood was a wheelbarrow, and that but imperfectly.

There was a time when you could make a living by the sweat of your brow. Those days are over!

Where men had once howled and hacked at one another, and fought nip-and-tuck with nature as well, the machines hummed and whirred and clicked, and made parts for baby carriages and bottle caps, motorcycles and refrigerators, television sets and tricycles-the fruits of peace.

Hands make the world each day.

And a revolution of automation finds machines replacing men in the mines and mills of America, without replacing their incomes or their training or their needs to pay the family doctor, grocer and landlord.

Art is the only thing you cannot punch a button for. You must do it the old-fashioned way. Stay up and really burn the midnight oil. There are no compromises.

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

It is a mere question of time when men will succeed in attaching their machinery to the very wheelwork of nature.

There might be new technology, but technological progress itself was nothing new - and over the years it had not destroyed jobs, but created them.

People talk about "job creation," as if that had ever been the aim the industrial economy. The aim was to replace people with machines.

Man makes machines to man the machines that make the machines.

The most precise work is generally done by hand, with hand tools. Some people rely on machines for their precision, and my way of working is backwards. I rely on the machines for doing the gross stock removal and then, when it comes to the final refinements and fitting of joints and things, making things work together, I rely more on sharp-edged tools that I push by hand.

Labor, with its coarse raiment and its bare right arm, has gone forth in the earth, achieving the truest conquests and rearing the most durable monuments. It has opened the domain of matter and the empire of the mind. The wild beast has fled before it, and the wilderness has fallen back.... its triumphal march is the progress of civilization.

The machine itself has begun to do the work of revolution. The State is now generating forces that will accomplish what no revolutionaries could accomplish by themselves.

Nothing increases the number of jobs so rapidly as labor-saving machinery, because it releases wants theretofore unknown, by permitting leisure.

I have been photographing the portrait of an end of an era, as machines and computers replace human workers. What we have in these pictures is an archeology.

Machinery is aggressive. The weaver becomes a web, the machinist a machine. If you do not use the tools, they use you. All tools are in one sense edge-tools, and dangerous.

I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam.

Consider the wheelbarrow. It may lack the grace of an airplane, the speed of an automobile, the initial capacity of a freight car, but its humble wheel marked out the path of what civilization we still have.

But if capitalism had built up science as a productive force, the very character of the new mode of production was serving to make capitalism itself unnecessary.

Technocracy wants to do everything by machinery. Machinery is doing just fine. If it can't kill you, it will put you out of work.

Machines were devised not to do a man out of a job, but to take the heavy labor from man's back and place it on the broad back of the machine.

The spinning wheel is not meant to oust a single man or woman from his or her occupation.

The fact is, that civilization requires slaves. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.