Elif Batuman Quotes

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

A premodern society, a preindustrial society, is one where people wake up whenever they want, there’s a lot of work but that isn’t set off from leisure…. A modern society is one where the bells ring at a certain time and we move from one place to another and people just become parts of a machine which has a very well thought out, pre-thought out way of working.

The industrial revolution turned time into a commodity.

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

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.

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

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

When steam first began to pump and wheels go round at so many revolutions per minute, what are called business habits were intended to make the life of man run in harmony with the steam engine, and his movement rival the train in punctuality.

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

It's the Industrial Revolution and the growth of urban concentrations that led to a sense of anonymity.

You all know how powerful and varied are the effects of which steam engines are capable; with them has really begun the great development of industry which has characterised our century before all others.

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.

Steam and the telegraph and other machinery have required capital greater than any individual can furnish.

The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots.

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.

Industrial Revolution

The capitalist system did not produce the machine age; the machine age produced the capitalist system. The material prosperity that the world has enjoyed for the last seventy-five years or one hundred years has been due to the introduction of power; steam power, then electric power and the internal combustion engine. The capitalist system or the free enterprise system - the terms are synonymous and interchangeable - was the product of the power age. The capitalist system did not produce the power age.

The democratic political institutions of Western countries arose and matured as industrial capitalism matured. It was a time of historically unprecedented economic growth and the concomitant development of new social groupings and relationships. They arose in elite political cultures that were in the main ethnically homogeneous, even if, notably in the American case, the society at large was considerably less so.

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.

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.

The Industrial Revolution has two phases: one material, the other social; one concerning the making of things, the other concerning the making of men.

In antiquity, agriculture and industry depended completely on human labor; but now, with the development of natural forces that human labor cannot match, agriculture and industry have fallen completely into the hands of the capitalists. The greater the amount of capital, the more abundant the resources that can be utilized.