Margaret J. Wheatley Quotes

O, mighty, divinely delimited wisdom of walls, boundaries! I is perhaps the most magnificent of all inventions. Man ceased to be a wild animal only when he build the first wall. Men ceased to be a wild man only when we built the Green Wall, only when, by means of that wall, we isolated our perfect machine world from the irrational, ugly world of trees, birds, and animals.

I have rules for everything.

I love people who try to keep the world in control - because the world is inherently not in control.

I like to think about machines and technology in relation to landscape and architecture.

The Futurists were an art movement in the early 20th century which basically glorified machines and the Industrial Revolution.

People seem to be looking for discipline in a topsy-turvy world.

Organization, not machine. Get that. Organization, not machine.

Instruments, machines, looms will increasingly supplement the strength and skill of men; will augment at the same time the perfection and the precision of manufactures by lessening both the time and the labor needed to produce them

Every man must admit that by means of instruments and machines the labourer can execute tasks he could not possibly perform without them; that he can perform a greater quantity of work in a given time, and that he can perform the work with greater nicety and accuracy than he could possibly do had he no instruments and machines.

A premodern society, a preindustrial society, is one where people wake up whenever they want, there’s a lot of work but that isn’t set off from leisure…. A modern society is one where the bells ring at a certain time and we move from one place to another and people just become parts of a machine which has a very well thought out, pre-thought out way of working.

The marriage of Capital with Science was responsible for the great leap forward into what we live in today. Pure scientists discovered the components into which the natural environment could be decomposed; investors placed their bets on the various methods of decomposition; applied scientists or managers saw to it that the wage workers in their charge carried the project through. Social scientists sought ways to make the workers less human, more efficient and machine-like. Thanks to science, capitalists were able to transform much of the natural environment into a processed world, an artifice, and to reduce most human beings into efficient tenders of the artifice.

... as the world rapidly becomes a civilization of machines, the masters of machines will increasingly be the ones in control of the world.

In the end the question is: Who is to be master, man or his machines? As long as the control over technology rests primarily on economic calculation, the victor is not likely to be man.

I always liked situations where there were very clear rules of what to do.

As for ourselves, we love our machines.

Of all formal things in the world, a clipped hedge is the most formal; and of all the informal things in the world, a forest tree is the most informal.

A child wants some kind of undisrupted routine or rhythm. He seems to want a predictable, orderly world.

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.

All I ever wanted was a world without maps.

The machine yes the machine never wastes anybody's time never watches the foreman never talks back.

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

For most purposes, a man with a machine is better than a man without a machine.

Machine makers always run the risk of becoming totally machine.

The machine conceals the machinations.

It is unworthy of excellent men to lose hours like slaves in the labor of calculation which could be relegated to anyone else if machines were used.