Gilbert Huph: [in Huph's office] You know, Bob... a company... Bob: Is like an enormous clock. Gilbert Huph: ...Is like an enormous cl... Yes, precisely. It only works if all the little cogs mesh together. A clock must be clean, well lubricated, and ...
Time and times are but cogwheels, unmatched, grinding on oblivious to one another. Occasionally - oh, very rarely! - the cogs fit; the pieces of the plot snap together momentarily and give men faint glimpses beyond the veil of this everyday blindness...
I’m dazzled by your facility. In ten days you’ll have written six stories! I don’t understand it… I’m like one of those old aqueducts: there’s so much rubbish cogging up the banks of my thought that it flows slowly, and only spills from t...
No, it's human, Curran said. That's the problem. People, especially unhappy people, want a cause. They want something to belong to, to be a part of something great and bigger, and to be led. It's easy to be a cog in a machine: you don't have to think...
I'm worried that students will take their obedient place in society and look to become successful cogs in the wheel - let the wheel spin them around as it wants without taking a look at what they're doing. I'm concerned that students not become passi...
A fact was the hard outer cover of meaning, and meaning was the soft living stuff inside a fact. Fact and meaning were the driving cogs of living. If the gear of fact drove the gear of meaning, then they revolved in opposite directions, but put the g...
While people will submit to suffering which may hit anyone, they will not so easily submit to suffering which is the result of the decision of authority. It may be bad to be just a cog in an impersonal machine; but it is infinitely worse if we can no...
The incommensurability between the modern economic system and the people who staff it explains why modern workers have so often been depicted as 'cogs' in the larger 'machinery' of industrial civilization; for while the practical rationalization of e...
I can't tell you why God made you the way you are any more than I can tell you why he's planted a carcinoma in my stomach to make me die painfully while other men die peacefully in their sleep. The cogs of creation seem to slip all the time. Babies a...
, civilization is an ever-changing tacit agreement, culturally inherited, not chosen at birth. Civilization is the invention of man, my big friend. It is a means of ensuring order and structure; it is man’s attempt to expunge all and every act of r...
She stopped shrieking after a moment. It wasn't the crazy looks she drew from the other pedestrians that made her stop. And her damaged sanity hadn't managed to repair itself. She'd left something behind in that apartment. Something she'd always take...
I have tried hard - but life is difficult, and I am a very useless person. I can hardly be said to have an independent existence. I was just a screw or a cog in the great machine called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was no use anywhere...
From Martin Eden on submitting manuscripts: "There was no human editor at the other end, but a mere cunning arrangement of cogs that changed the manuscript from one envelope to another and stuck on the stamps. It was like the slot machines wherein on...
Traditional corporations, particularly large-scale service and manufacturing businesses are organized for efficiency. Or consistency. But not joy. Joy comes from surprise and connection and humanity and transparency and new...If you fear special requ...
We are not consumers. For most of humanity’s existence, we were makers, not consumers: we made our clothes, shelter, and education, we hunted and gathered our food. We are not addicts. “I propose that most addictions come from our surrendering ou...
I'm starting to understand that attempting to be perfect has been the goal of my life. Our lives. Attempting to be this fault-free, smiling person in this loving, happy family that fits so perfectly in this pretty, inoffensive little town. What was s...
By now you must have guessed: I come from another planet. But I will never say to you, Take me to your leaders. Even I - unused to your ways though I am - would never make that mistake. We ourselves have such beings among us, made of cogs, pieces of ...
Each of us is aware he's a material being, subject to the laws of physiology and physics, and that the strength of all our emotions combined cannot counteract those laws. It can only hate them. The eternal belief of lovers and poets in the power of l...
The whole tendency of modern life is towards scientific planning and organisation, central control, standardisation, and specialisation. If this tendency was left to work itself out to its extreme conclusion, one might expect to see the state transfo...
Look at yourself! You're a priest. You know damn well that if I were setting out to make a girl at this moment instead of young Paolo, you'd take an entirely different view. You'd disapprove, sure! You'd read me a lecture on fornication and all the r...
And observe, you are put to stern choice in this matter. You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both. Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions. If ...
