W. H. Auden Quotes

I hate this fast growing tendency to chain men to machines in big factories and deprive them of all joy in their efforts - the plan will lead to cheap men and cheap products.

It was exactly an assembly line. You could look into infinity down these rows of drawing tables.

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

The house is a factory.

I'm a Detroit kid who grew up with that assembly line mentality: You go to work to make money.

The industrial revolution turned time into a commodity.

In size and population Manchester is the second city in the United Kingdom, containing above four-score thousand inhabitants. Imagine this multitude crowded together in narrow streets, the houses all built of brick and blackened with smoke; frequent buildings among them as large as convents ... where you hear from within ... the everlasting din of machinery; and where, when the bell rings, it is to call wretches to their work instead of to their prayers…. if Dante had peopled one of his hells with children, here was a scene worthy to have supplied him with new images of torment

What was worked out at Ford was the practice of moving the work from one worker to another until it became a complete unit, then arranging the flow of these units at the right time and the right place to a moving final assembly line from which came a finished product.

Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth — the soil and the laborer.

The man who places a part does not fasten it. The man who puts in the bold does not out on the nut. The man who puts on the nut does not tighten it. Every piece of work in the shop moves. It may move on hooks, on overhead chains …. It may travel on a moving platform or go by gravity.

Highland Park swelled with Poles, Russians, Romanians, Hungarians, Maltese, Serbs—a total of 49 nations were represented [on the assembly line]. These men couldn’t communicate with each other, but they could communicate with the machine, working their piece of the assembly line.

It's easy to assume that just because you make something in small volumes, not using many tools, that there is integrity and care - that is a false assumption.

The factory is the machine that builds the machine.

We like to think of industrialization as being despicable. I don't really know what to make of it. There's something terribly brittle about it.

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.

Generations of human beings were transformed into machines in the relentless pursuit of material wealth: We lived to work.

The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

A great factory with the machinery all working and revolving with absolute and rhythmic regularity and with the men all driven by one impulse, and moving in unison as though a constituent part of the mighty machine, is one of the most inspiring examples of directed force that the world knows. I have rarely seen the face of a mechanic in the action of creation which was not fine, never one which was not earnest and impressive.

If I were to give a summary of the tendency of our times, I would say, Quantity. The multitude, the mass spirit, dominates everywhere, destroying quality. Our entire life--production, politics, and education--rests on quantity, on numbers. The worker who once took pride in the thoroughness and quality of his work, has been replaced by brainless, incompetent automatons, who turn out enormous quantities of things, valueless to themselves, and generally injurious to the rest of mankind. Thus quantity, instead of adding to life's comforts and peace, has merely increased man's burden.

If economic progress means that we become anonymous cogs in some great machine, then progress is an empty promise.

The world of design has been subjugated by the rigors of manufacturing and mass production.

At least since the Industrial Revolution, the world of design has been dominated by the rigors of manufacturing and mass production. Assembly lines have dictated a world made of parts, framing the imagination of designers and architects who have been trained to think about their objects as assemblies of discrete parts with distinct functions.

Factories are often at the heart of a community.

For a while, I have had this theory that we, as a society, are coming to the end of the mass production, industrial phase of the human race.

It is not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided; but the men: divided into mere segments of men - broken into small fragments and crumbs of life, so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin, or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin or the head of a nail.