Signs of the Times Quotes

“No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offense.”
― Thomas Carlyle, Signs of the Times

“Not the external and physical alone is now managed by machinery, but the internal and spiritual also.... The same habit regulates not our modes of action alone, but our modes of thought and feeling. Men are grown mechanical in head and heart, as well as in hand. They have lost faith in individual endeavour, and in natural force, of any kind. Not for internal perfection, but for external combinations and arrangements, for institutions, constitutions – for Mechanism of one sort or another, do they hope and struggle. Their whole efforts, attachments, opinions, turn on mechanism, and are of a mechanical character.”
― Thomas Carlyle, Signs of the Times

“Our 'superior morality' is properly rather an 'inferior criminality' produced not by greater love of Virtue, but by greater perfection of Police; and of that far subtler and stronger Police, called Public Opinion.”
― Thomas Carlyle, Signs of the Times