It is impossible to mechanize production without mechanizing consumption, impossible to to make machines of soil, plants, and animals without making machines also of people.

--Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America

You must accept the truth from whatever source it comes.

--Moses ben Maimon, philosopher (1135-1204)

If human values are removed from production, how can they be preserved in consumption?  How can we value our lives if we devalue them in making a living?

--Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America

In our considerations of the future, we must expect a great deal of continuity with our past.

--Frank W. Elwell

My aim is to agitate and disturb people. I'm not selling bread, I'm selling yeast. 

--Miguel de Unamuno, (1864-1936)

Within the realm of social conduct one finds factual regularities, that is, courses of action which, with a typically identical meaning, are repeated by the actors or simultaneously occur among numerous actors.  It is with such types of conduct that sociology is concerned, in contrast to history, which is interested in the causal connections of important, i.e., fateful, single events.

--Max Weber, 1921

A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

-Antoine de Saint-Exupery, author and aviator (1900-1945)

There is no one, no matter how wise he is, who has not in his youth said things or done things that are so unpleasant to recall in later life that he would expunge them entirely from his memory if that were possible.

--Marcel Proust, novelist (1871-1922)

It is not too much to say that in the extreme development the chance to reason of most men is destroyed, as rationality increases and its locus, its control, is moved from the individual to the big-scale organization. There is then rationality without reason.  Such rationality is not commensurate with freedom but the destroyer of it.

--C. Wright Mills, 1959

It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness

--Karl Marx, 1859

This whole process of rationalization in the factory and elsewhere, and especially in the bureaucratic state machine, parallels the centralization of the material implements of organization in the hands of the master. Thus, discipline inexorably takes over ever larger areas as the satisfaction of political and economic needs is increasingly rationalized. This universal phenomenon more and more restricts the importance of charisma and of individually differentiated conduct.

--Max Weber, 1921

No machinery in the world functions so precisely as this apparatus of men and, moreover, so cheaply. . .. Rational calculation . . . reduces every worker to a cog in this bureaucratic machine and, seeing himself in this light, he will merely ask how to transform himself into a somewhat bigger cog. . . . The passion for bureaucratization drives us to despair.

--Max Weber, 1921

To this extent increasing bureaucratization is a function of the increasing possession of goods used for consumption, and of an increasingly sophisticated technique for fashioning external life--a technique which corresponds to the opportunities provided by such wealth.

--Max Weber

Silence will save me from being wrong (and foolish), but it will also deprive me of the possibility of being right. 

--Igor Stravinsky, (1882-1971)

One of the indictments of civilizations is that happiness and intelligence are so rarely found in the same person.

--William Feather,  (1889-1981)

The decisive reason for the advance of bureaucratic organization has always been its purely technical superiority over any other kind of organization. The fully developed bureaucratic mechanism compares with other organizations exactly as does the machine with the non-mechanical modes of organization.

--Max Weber

In a completely rational society, the best of us would be teachers and the rest of us would have to settle for something less, because passing civilization along from one generation to the next ought to be the highest honor and the highest responsibility anyone could have.

--Lee Iacocca, (1924- )

No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals or, if neither, mechanized petrification embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: 'Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has obtained a level of civilization never before achieved.

--Max Weber, 1904