“Zippers are primal and modern at the very same time. On the one hand, your zipper is primitive and reptilian, on the other, mechanical and slick. A zipper is where the Industrial Revolution meets the Cobra Cult.”

“The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a melancholy hour.”

Ray Bradbury book Fahrenheit 451

“Yeah, just recently Ted Lilly was pitching in the first inning against the Pittsburgh Pirates, and he slipped twice on two bunt plays. Anyways, Lou [Piniella] came out to check on him and asked him if he had his metal spikes on and he did. Lou then said well do you have any other cleats in the locker room and Ted said, "Skip, your zippers down." Lou was really embarrassed about that. He turns to do something about it, but then realized that he was on national TV and realized he couldn't do anything. That was a very awkward, but funny story.”

Michael Barrett (1976) baseball catcher and manager

“Industrial history shows that in modern competitive industry the motive of personal gain is most wastefully applied. On the one hand, the great mass of intelligent workers have no opportunity of securing an adequate reward for any special application of intelligence in mechanical invention or other improvement of industrial arts. Few great modern inventors have made money out of their inventions. On the other hand, the entrepreneur, with just enough business cunning to recognise the market value of an improvement, reaps a material reward which is often enormously in excess of what is economically required to induce him to apply his "business" qualities to the undertaking.”

J.A. Hobson (1858–1940) English economist, social scientist and critic of imperialism

“Literacy remains even now the base and model of all programs of industrial mechanization; but, at the same time, locks the minds and senses of its users in the mechanical and fragmentary matrix that is so necessary to the maintenance of mechanized society.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

“The “interface” of the Renaissance was the meeting of medieval pluralism and modern homogeneity and mechanism – a formula for blitz and metamorphosis.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

“The Settlement … is an experimental effort to aid in the solution of the social and industrial problems which are engendered by the modern conditions of life in a great city. It insists that these problems are not confined to any one portion of the city. It is an attempt to relieve, at the same time, the overaccumulation at one end of society and the destitution at the other …”

Jane Addams (1860–1935) pioneer settlement social worker

“We have had enough perpetually hearing MACHINE MACHINE MACHINE MACHINE. In the repetition of the word MACHINE, we read the modern artist's ambivalent relationship to mechanical reproduction: on the one hand, the rigorous linear order and uniform application of ink presented by the thrice-repeated type written line celebrates sterility; and on the other hand the content of the sentence itself bemoans the transformation of the industrial paradigm into an aesthetic cliché.”

El Lissitsky (1890–1941) Soviet artist, designer, photographer, teacher, typographer and architect

“The modern artist is living in a mechanical age and we have a mechanical means of representing objects in nature such as the camera and photograph. The modern artist, it seems to me, is working and expressing an inner world – in other words – expressing the energy, the motion and the other inner forces.... the modern artist is working with space and time, and expressing his feelings rather than illustrating.”

Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) American artist

“I will meet you on the nape of your neck one day, on the surface of intention, word becoming act.
We will breathe into each other the high mountain tales, where the snows come from, where the waters begin.”
-In the yellow time of pollen”

Luke Davies (1962) Australian writer