Marquis de Condorcet Quotes

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.

The industrial revolution turned time into a commodity.

The First Industrial Revolution used water and steam power to mechanize production. The Second used electric power to create mass production. The Third used electronics and information technology to automate production.

Admiration of the proletariat, like that of dams, power stations, and aeroplanes, is part of the ideology of the machine age.

The industrial revolution that defined the first half of the 20 century marked the start of modern business, typified by high-volume, large-scale organizations. Mechanization created a culture of business derived from the capabilities and needs of the time.

Industrial forces set in motion by steam and electricity have materially changed the structure of our civilization.

...industrialisation took centuries, rather than decades

Industrial Revolution

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

The Machine is the new Messiah. Machinery is accomplishing in the world what man has failed to do by preaching, propaganda, or the written word.

When water power then steam power were harnessed to spin and weave cloth, a cottage craft turned into an industry overnight.

The industrial revolution allowed us, for the first time, to start replacing human labour with machines.

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.

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

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.

There are the manufacturing multitudes of England; they must have work, and find markets for their work; if machines and the Black Country are ugly, famine would be uglier still.

In the Machine Age, the company itself became a machine - a machine for making money.

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

Machines were, it may be said, the weapon employed by the capitalists to quell the revolt of specialized labor.

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

With production alone as the goal, industry in North America was dominated by the assembly line, standardization for mass consumption.

Machines are worshipped because they are beautiful and valued because they confer power; they are hated because they are hideous and loathed because they impose slavery.

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

Men have become the tools of their tools.