Nick Harkaway Quotes

The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies.

Drill and uniforms impose an architecture on the crowd. An army's beautiful. But that's not all; it panders to lower instincts than the aesthetic. The spectacle of human beings reduced to automatism satisfies the lust for power. Looking at mechanized slaves, one fancies oneself a master.

It [culture] invites people to diminish themselves, and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines, meme processors of memes passed down from Madison Avenue, and Hollywood, and what have you.

A man who says that men are machines may be a great scientist. A man who says he is a machine is 'depersonalized' in psychiatric jargon.

The machine is impersonal, it takes the pride away from a piece of work, the individual merits and defects that go along with allwork that is not done by a machine--which is to say, its little bit of humanity.

Man and fascism cannot co-exist. If fascism conquers, man will cease to exist and there will remain only man-like creatures that have undergone an internal transformation. But if man, man who is endowed with reason and kindness, should conquer, then Fascism must perish, and those who have submitted to it will once again become people.

There are people who have lost every trace of human kindness.

A new type of superstition has got hold of people's minds, the worship of the state. People demand the exercise of the methods of coercion and compulsion, of violence and threat. Woe to anybody who does not bend his knee to the fashionable idols!

I can't say I know how to change the society, but I share the feeling that this society is full of technology which depersonalizes people, which seems to drain a sense of reality from our lives. It's full of a lot of other things too.

If I start giving people what they like I'll turn into one of them and I don't want to be one of them I want to be one of me.

It's the lack of humanity in the human psyche that haunts me. The hypocrisy. How people as a group can take something like tolerance and contort it into a new form of intolerance and conformity. The way humanity can justify any kind of evil.

Religion, politics, society are exploiting you, and you are being conditioned by them; you are being forced in a particular direction. You are not human beings; you are mere cogs in a machine.

Some people in D.C. talk about me like a dog.

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

This new war, like the previous one, would be a test of the power of machines against people and places; whatever its causes and justifications, it would make the world worse. This was true of that new war, and it has been true of every new war since... I knew too that this new war was not even new but was only the old one come again. And what caused it? It was caused, I thought, by people failing to love one another, failing to love their enemies.

The people I see from my window. In the huts, in the distance. They're all dressed the same.' 'Ah, those people,' said Father, nodding his head and smiling slightly. 'Those people...well, they're not people at all, Bruno.' Bruno frowned. 'They're not?' he asked, unsure what Father meant by that.

People said it because other people said it. They did not know why it was being said and heard everywhere. they did not give or ask for reasons.

I hope people see us not just as a football player, but also as human beings, we are not machines!

Selling your life to sit in a box and work for a machine. An uncaring machine that demands productivity that doesn't understand you and doesn't want to understand you... There's no natural behaviour. Everyone is wearing clothes they don't want to wear. Everybody is showing up and doing something they don't want to do. They have no connection to it. That's the problem with our society.

the car, by bisecting the human outline, diminishes it, producing a race of half-people in a motion not of their own making

The will to be totally rational is the will to be made out of glass and steel: and to use others as if they were glass and steel.

Humanity is OK, but 99% of people are boring idiots.

I don't even think people are even making an effort to understand Trump. I'm thinking primarily of Democrats and media here. I think they're so arrogant that they don't look at Trump as anything other than a badly molded piece of clay that has to be fixed and reshaped and reformed. And there isn't any interest whatsoever in actually finding out what the guy is or what makes him tick. The only objective is to shut him down as he ticks now.

The way that we make dumb decisions and discriminatory decisions is by employing stereotypes about groups of people. We don't see people as fully human when other people speak for them.