Technics and Civilization Quotes

“Moment to moment, it turns out, is not God’s conception, or nature’s. It is man conversing with himself about and through a piece of machinery he created."

We effectively became “time-keepers, and then time-savers, and now time-servers” with the invention of the clock.”
― Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization

“Vacuum pumps driven by electric motors are forced into American households for the purpose of cleaning an obsolete form of floor covering, the carpet or the rug, whose appropriateness for use in interiors, if it did not disappear with the caravans where it originated, certainly passed out of existence with rubber heels and steam-heated houses. To count such pathetic examples of waste to the credit of the machine is like counting the rise in the number of constipation remedies a proof of the benefits of leisure.”
― Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization

“To understand the dominating role played by technics in modern civilization….one must explain the culture that was ready to use them and profit by them so extensively.

Technics and civilization as a whole are the result of human choices and aptitudes and strivings….The machine itself makes no demands and holds out no promises: it is the human spirit that makes demands and keeps promises. In order to reconquer the machine and subdue it to human purposes, one must first understand it and assimilate it. So far, we have embraced the machine without fully understanding it, or, like the weaker romantics, we have rejected the machine without first seeing how much of it we could intelligently assimilate.”
― Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization