Industrialisation Quotes

“I didn't want to be in the teeming mass of the working class.... I didn't want to live and die in the same place with only a week at the seaside in between. I dreamed of escape -- but what is terrible about industrialisation is that it makes escape necessary. In a system that generates masses, individualism is the only way out. But then what happens to community -- to society?”
― Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“In modern industrial society only minimal effort is necessary to satisfy one’s physical needs. It is enough to go through a training program to acquire some petty technical skill, then come to work on time and exert the very modest effort needed to hold a job. The only requirements are a moderate amount of intelligence and, most of all, simple OBEDIENCE.”
― Theodore J. Kaczynski, Industrial Society and Its Future

“In proportion as the machine is improved and performs man's work with an ever increasing rapidity and exactness, the labourer, instead of prolonging his former rest times, redoubles his ardour, as if he wished to rival the machine. O, absurd and murderous competition!”
― Paul Lafargue, The Right to Be Lazy

“When you took a man's job away from him, his ability to feed and clothe his family, that man was going to get angry.”
― Darrin Grimwood, Destroy All Robots

“How long before we devise a means of telling horoscopes with gas lamps?”
― K.J. Bishop, The Etched City

“I visited a manufactory in Manchester with my father. I saw that the wretched creatures enslaved to the machines were as repetitive in their movements as machines. They were distinguished only by their unhappiness. The great wealth of the manufactories is not for the workers but for the owners. Humans must live in misery to be the mind of the machines.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein: A Love Story

“Der feste Beruf auf Lebenszeit [...] ist ein Produkt der Industrialisierung.”
― Sascha Lobo, Wir nennen es Arbeit

“With an evermore increase of industrialisation machine stops being merely a tool, develops a life of its own and imposes its rhythm onto human. Operating it he moves mechanically, becomes part of the machine.”
― Heide Schönemann, Fritz Lang: Filmbilder Vorbilder

“I'm goin past factories. Boxes of metal with people inside. Souls bein ripped apart.”
― Ian Ayris

“Sai Machine Tools is the biggest Indian manufacturer of plastic processing machinery in central India with state of the art screw cutting thread milling less brander USA Equipment”
― Sai machine Tools

“Given a mechanical civilisation the process of invention and improvement will always continue, but the tendency of capitalism is to slow it down, because under capitalism any invention that does not promise fairly immediate profits are suppressed”
― George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier

“The lorries thunder through mile upon mile of farmland, indeed, but... it is obviously related to an urban economy... Dereliction is the word... The stigmata of neglect litter the highway {A80] almost all the way from Glasgow to Stirling... let the intelligent traveller consider as he passes through them the nature and provenance of Millerston, Mollinsburn, Cumbernauld and Dennyloanhead. It is impossible to traverse such communities without seeing that something rather horrible once happened to Scotland, something from which it has never recovered.”
― George Blake, The Heart of Scotland

“A society beset by terrifying social problems was threatened by realism... exacerbated by the deep-seated evils of poverty and overcrowding generated by Scotland's pell-mell industrialisation. To expose these would be revolutionary; it would also break the discipline of puritanism by mentioning the unmentionable... The Kirk enforced silence out of conviction, the middle class out of fear. The bogus community of the Kailyard was an alternative to the horror of the real thing.”
― Christopher Harvie, Scotland and Nationalism: Scottish Society and Politics 1707 to the Present

“Scotland's passage from a mainly pastoral and agrarian society to a commercial and industrial one was brutal, rapid and relentless. In that transition, an entire peasant class, the cottars - perhaps as much as half of the rural population - was lost forever. They and tens of thousands of even poorer people were forced off the land across the Lowlands, Highlands and islands. They ended up in towns, cities and planned villages, they worked in mills, mines, quarries and iron works, or they emigrated to other parts of the world, or became soldiers, sailors, engineers, administrators and merchants in the service of the British Empire or the companies that thrived under its bellicose protection. Many prospered, many did not.”
― James Robertson, Irish Pages, Vol. 12, No. 2: Scotland

“The obvious part is that the machine makes us its captive servants - by its rhythm, by its convenience, by the cost of stopping it or the drawbacks of not using it. As captives we come to resemble it in our pace, rigidity and uniform expectations. But there is in mechanism a subtler influence. The machine is an agent of abstraction. It is itself an abstraction in that it does one particular task (or at most two or three) and yields identical products. There is no fringe or fancy, no happy error or sudden innovation as in the handworker's performance. That is why machine-made things rarely draw our glance more than the few times when they are new and handy. They induce no subsequent reverie, no speculation, and no love, The robot is a repulsive caricature of Man. When the domestic or public landscape is filled with objects deprived of any aura, it is as if the world of living things had been reduced by abstraction to something emphatically not alive.”
― Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present