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21 " The stage in which the human being was a mere slave of the mechanical tyrant has been passed. When man himself becomes a machine, he attains to the marvelous freedom of unconsciousness, the freedom of the machine itself. "
― Jacques Ellul , The Technological Society
22 " The individual can no longer live except in a climate of tension and overexcitement. He can no longer be a smiling skeptical spectator. He is indeed "engaged," but involuntarily so, since he has ceased to dominate his own thoughts and actions. "
23 " Only two possibilities are left to the individual: either he remains what he was, in which case he becomes more and more unadapted, neurotic, and inefficient, loses his possibilities of subsistence, and is at last tossed on the social rubbish heap, whatever his talents may be; or he adapts himself to the new sociological organism, which becomes his world, and he becomes unable to live except in a mass society. "
24 " Man has always had one unfailing subject of conversation, life's vexations. "
25 " We see first of all that leisure, instead of being a vacuum representing a break with society, is literally stuffed with technical mechanisms of compensation and integration. It is not a vacuous interval. It is not a human kind of emptiness in which decisions might be matured. Leisure time is a mechanized time and is exploited by techniques which, although different from those of man's ordinary work, are as invasive, exacting, and leave man no more free than labor itself. "
26 " The melancholy fact is that the human personality has been almost wholly disassociated and and dissolved through mechanization. "
27 " A major section of modern art and poetry unconsciously guides us in the direction of madness; and, indeed, for the modern man there is no other way. Only madness is inaccessible to the machine. "
28 " No technique is possible when men are free. "
29 " Humanism is antiquated and has given way to scientific and technological training because the environment in which the student will be immersed is, first of all, no longer a human, but a technological environment. "
30 " The first private clocks appeared in the sixteenth century. Thenceforward, time was an abstract measure separated from the traditional rhythms of life and nature. "
31 " Then there is the modern passion for nature. When it is not stockbrokers out after a moose, it is a crowd of brainless conformists camping out on order and as they are told. Nowhere is there any initiative or eccentricity. "
32 " Man is caught like a fly in a bottle. His attempts at culture, freedom, and creative endeavor have become mere entries in technique's filing cabinet. "
33 " That it is to be a dictatorship of test tubes rather than of hobnailed boots will not make it any less a dictatorship. "