Thomas Hodgskin Quotes

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

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.

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.

The great question, however, for the poor man is, or shortly will be, that of escape from competition with labor-saving machinery

… industry is at present producing as much as it did in 1929. [before the Great Depression] Ordinarily this would mean work for everybody, but since the depression, ten million dollars have been spent in modernizing these particular plants with the result that they are now using ten thousand fewer men than in 1929. Two million dollars more is to be spent shortly on further modernization, and much of the heavy work done in the past by men and skilled men, many of them, will be done by machinery. College and high school boys, who stand on a balcony somewhere and press buttons are preferred for this work today, and four men will do the work of one hundred men before long!

It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being.

One of the objections most frequently urged against machinery is, that it has a tendency to supersede much of the handlabour which was previously employed; and in fact unless a machine diminished the labour necessary to make an article, it could never come into use.

Read the story of the new invention for picking cotton. It may not be perfect yet, it may not work so well in hilly country as on the plains, but it is just a question of time before it is improved. More men and women out of work. Unless we have sense enough to sit down and discuss how to use this new invention and many others, so as to bring happiness, comfort and leisure to human beings and not unemployment, starvation and despair, then we deserve the hard times which surely will come our way.

… increased industrial efficiency makes it possible to procure the means of livelihood with less labor

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

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

Besides black art, there is only automation and mechanization.

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

I'm a machine man, and I head a machine.

Men have become the tools of their tools.

Engineering or technology is all about using the power of science to make life better for people, to reduce cost, to improve comfort, to improve productivity, etc.

Today, most women are surrounded by ingenious gadgets. They don't grow the peas or raise the chicken that they serve for dinner; instead they hunt and gather in the grocery store. They go through catalogs or department stores to buy clothes instead of shearing sheep, carding wool, and weaving cloth for skirts and coats and blankets.

Mechanization best serves mediocrity.

We can go into no mechanic shop, into no manufactory of any description, upon no farm or plantation, or travel a mile on our railroads or in our steamboats, without seeing evidence of our originality and witnessing the fruits of our ingenuity and enterprise.

The quantity of industry therefore not only increases in every country with the increase of the stock or capital which sets it in motion; but, in consequence of this increase, the division of labour becomes extended, new and more powerful implements and machines are invented, and the same quantity of labour is thus made to produce an infinitely greater quantity of commodities.

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 machine sucked out of men's muscles as much vigor as it needed

I was once a doubter whether the labor of the cultivator, aided by the creative powers of the earth itself, would not produce more than that of the manufacturer alone, and unassisted by the dead subject on which he acted ... But the invention of the latter times, by labor saving machines, do as much now for the manufacturer as the earth does for the cultivator...

The industrial revolution turned time into a commodity.

...industrialisation took centuries, rather than decades