Charles A. Reich Quotes

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.

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.

This would only come if you have a revolutionary change in technology like the jet brought about.

All the big revolutions, whether it's the Industrial Revolution, the Arab Spring, those changes happened by economic and social shifts brought about by the people's voices, and those things weren't voted for. Most of our changes today are brought about through technology, not by voting.

A new era of production has begun. It's principles of organization are as different from those of the industrial era as those of the industrial era were different from the agricultural. The cybernation revolution has been brought about by the combination of the computer and the self-regulating machine. This results in a system of almost unlimited capacity which requires progressively less human labor. Cybernation is already reorganizing the economic and social system to meet its own needs .... As machines take over production from men, they absorb an increasing proportion of resources while men who are displaced become dependent on minimal and unrelated [to their work] governmental measures—unemployment insurance, social security, welfare payments.

Mankind had the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, and now this third one, the information revolution.

While the digital transformation of industries will be profound, we must keep in mind that it will have wider economic and social impact, too, as with previous revolutions driven by steam and coal, electricity and computers.

A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery. It cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.

When you think of power, you think the state has power. When you look at it in terms of revolution, in terms of the state, you think of it in terms of Russia, the Soviet Union, and how those who struggled for power actually became victims of the state, prisoners of the state, and how that led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. We have to think of revolution much more in terms of transitions from one epoch to another.

The world is poised on the cusp of an economic and cultural shift as dramatic as that of the Industrial Revolution.

A lot of the critique of our growing mechanization was actually at its strongest, and arguably at its most perceptive, during the late '60s.

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

People always think they're in the middle of a revolution while they tend not to realize the enormity of a change that has happened in the past. The telegraph was a revolution, but who looks at it that way these days? The telegraph sped up the transportation of messages over long distances by a huge factor.

The vast material displacements the machine has made in our physical environment are perhaps in the long run less important than its spiritual contributions to our culture.

The brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over we realize this: that the human race has been roughly handled, but that it has advanced.

The worst of revolutions is a restoration.

Good intentions can often lead to unintended consequences. It is hard to imagine a law intended for the workforce known to Henry Ford can serve the needs of a workplace shaped by the innovations of Bill Gates.

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

We are in the midst of revolution, the most complete, unexpected, and remarkable of any in the history of the world.

Luddism is no longer with us, but today we seem to be overtaken by its opposite, the inevitability of technological change coupled with the blind belief in capitalism's ability to provide us with all we need.

The introduction of so powerful an agent as steam will make a great change in the situation of man.

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.

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

Without destruction of the State, there is no revolution.