Will Rogers Quotes

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

Without doubt, machinery has greatly increased the number of well-to-do idlers.

The introduction of machinery is turning into idleness thousands, faster than new industries are founded

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

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.

In Victorian England, laborers were pushed off the farms, replaced by steam power.

Think back to the time when Agriculture was not labor efficient. We have lost all these jobs. But I don't think anyone is too sad about it.

The aim of industrialization has always been to replace people with machines or other technology, to make the cost of production as low as possible, to sell the product as high as possible, and to move the wealth into fewer and fewer hands.

Besides black art, there is only automation and mechanization.

I'm afraid for all those who'll have the bread snatched from their mouths by these machines. What business has science and capitalism got, bringing all these new inventions into the works, before society has produced a generation educated up to using them!

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

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.

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

The Negro is trying to enter a social community and a tradition of work-and-income which are in the process of vanishing even for the hitherto privileged white worker Jobs are disappearing under the impact of highly efficient, progressively less costly machines.

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 root of the worker’s resistance to technological change is the conflict between labor as a commodity and labor as a resource. Increased productivity imposes upon the worker a risk of obsolescence.

Displacement by technology has probably occurred since the invention of the shovel.

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

The machines, which mark the triumph of science, become, by reason of the antithetic conditions of the social plexus, instruments which impoverish millions and millions of artisans and free peasants.

Only in a minority of cases will workmen be able to recognize the technological change responsible for their dismissal. For this it would be necessary that machines be introduced in an existent plant under the eyes of the workmen and that dismissal be effected immediately after.

Even before the [2008] recession, corporations were able to enhance profitability by taking advantage of using technology to perform or supplement the work of human beings. This was, on the whole, a manageable situation. Workers who were replaced by the technology were adapting by learning how to work with the technology; jobs in technology opened up to balance the jobs lost. The current situation is far different. During the recession, companies learned how to maintain production and profits with fewer employees. They assigned existing workers to take on tasks performed by those who were laid off, they converted full-time jobs to part-time jobs (which carried little or no expense to the company for employee benefits), and they outsourced.

… 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!

Massive increases in productivity due to the happy marriage if information technology and advanced manufacturing techniques are having a chilling, unprecedented effect on job creations.

In my village there was no chance to study machines.