Men, Machines, and Modern Times Quotes

“First, since so much time is spent by people in bureaus working with paper, they may come to set too much store by it. They may become absorbed in receiving it, initialing it, routing it, filing it, keeping it; they may forget to read it in this process. Paper may in their eyes become more important than what is written on it. This is a natural tendency — paper is durable, tangible, easy to manipulate. It is something to see, feel, touch. Information and ideas are volatile, hard to handle, invisible, and they may not even be used. Men in bureaus are not different from men anywhere; they would rather risk their lives and reputations in keeping track of something solid and inert than of something impalpable and invisible. So they may tend to worry more over where a paper is than what has become of the things written on it.
There is something else about bureaucratic paper worth noticing. There are some things you cannot write on it, things any sensible man has to take into account. You can, for instance, write out orders for Lieutenant Brown to leave Fort Russell and report to Fort Ethan Allen, but you can't get on the paper how the lieutenant may feel about it. All kinds of qualifying, modifying, distorting considerations have to be left out of the information written on bureaucratic paper. It is difficult to introduce a sense of urgency, of uncertainty, of change, of growth, of all those strange feelings and attitudes that enter into and disturb any human situation. Concern for paper, in other words, may tend to drive out concern for the human being.”
― Elting E. Morison, Men, Machines, and Modern Times

“He discerned that one of the greatest dangers must come from this very source, when the number of half educated people is greatest, when the world is full of people who do not know enough to recognize their limitations but know too much to follow loyally the direction of better qualified leaders.”
― Elting E. Morison, Men, Machines, and Modern Times

“To live safely in our society, let alone manage it, will require a continuous education until a man dies.”
― Elting E. Morison, Men, Machines, and Modern Times, 50th Anniversary Edition