“The life of Man is a struggle with Nature and a struggle with the Machine; when Nature and the Machine link forces against him, Man hasn't a chance.”
The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks (1947)
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Robertson Davies 282
Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and nov… 1913–1995Related quotes
"The Commercial Motive" Christian Century 40 (Feb 22, 1923)
“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”
Source: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
[Introduction à l'histoire universelle, Michelet, Jules, Hachette, 1843, 9]
Introduction to Universal History , 1831, 1831
Speech at the National Sugar Plenary Meeting in Camagüey, February 9, 1963 Ernesto Che Guevera. Escritos y discursos. Op. cit., vol. 7.
On Automation (1963)
“Man such as we know him, is a machine.”
In Search of the Miraculous (1949)
Ch III : The Tool
Terre des Hommes (1939)
Context: !-- There was a time when a flyer sat at the centre of a complicated works. Flight set us factory problems. The indicators that oscillated on the instrument panel warned us of a thousand dangers. But in the machine of today we forget that motors are whirring: the motor, finally, has come to fulfil its function, which is to whirr as a heart beats—and we give no thought to the beating of our heart. Thus, --> Precisely because it is perfect the machine dissembles its own existence instead of forcing itself upon our notice.
And thus, also, the realities of nature resume their pride of place. It is not with metal that the pilot is in contact. Contrary to the vulgar illusion, it is thanks to the metal, and by virtue of it, that the pilot rediscovers nature. As I have already said, the machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.
Numerous, nevertheless, are the moralists who have attacked the machine as the source of all the ills we bear, who, creating a fictitious dichotomy, have denounced the mechanical civilization as the enemy of the spiritual civilization.
If what they think were really so, then indeed we should have to despair of man, for it would be futile to struggle against this new advancing chaos. The machine is certainly as irresistible in its advance as those virgin forests that encroach upon equatorial domains.
“Life is fragile, yet to obstinately struggle is natural.”
Source: Soul Mountain (1989), ch. 80, p. 503
“In man's struggle against the world, bet on the world.”
52, Im Kampf zwischen Dir und der Welt, sekundiere der Welt.
Aphorism 52 in Unpublished Works 1916-1918 http://www.kafka.org/index.php?unpub1916_1918
Variant translations:
In the struggle between yourself and the world, back the world.
In the struggle between yourself and the world, side with the world.
In the fight between you and the world, back the world.
The Zürau Aphorisms (1917 - 1918)
Variant: In the struggle between yourself and the world, second the world.