A Quote by Henry David Thoreau

The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies.

Henry David Thoreau

Quote Topics

Bodies Machines Mainly Mass Men Serve State Thus

Quote Author

Henry David Thoreau
American - Author
July 12, 1817 - May 6, 1862

Automation does not need to be our enemy. I think machines can make life easier for men, if men do not let the machines dominate them.

John F. Kennedy

I think it's more important to write something that brings men back to reading than it is to write for people who already read. There's a reason men don't read, and it's because books don't serve men. It's time we produce books that serve men.

Chuck Palahniuk

Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.

Frank Herbert

What we want is not mainly to colonize Nebraska with free men, but to colonize Massachusetts with free men-to be free ourselves. As the enterprise of a few individuals, that is brave and practical; but as the enterprise of the State, it is cowardice and imbecility. What odds where we squat, or bow much ground we cover? It is not the soil that we would make free, but men.

Henry David Thoreau

The State, in choosing men to serve it, takes no notice of their opinions. If they be willing faithfully to serve it, that satisfies.

Oliver Cromwell

Others - as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders - serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as God. A very few - as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men - serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part.

Henry David Thoreau

The Bible must be the invention either of good men or angels, bad men or devils, or of God. However, it was not written by good men, because good men would not tell lies by saying 'Thus saith the Lord;' it was not written by bad men because they would not write about doing good duty, while condemning sin, and themselves to hell; thus, it must be written by divine inspiration

Charles Wesley

Men are noisy, narrow-band devices, but their nervous systems have very many parallel and simultaneously active channels. Relative to men, computing machines are very fast and very accurate, but they are constrained to perform only one or a few elementary operations at a time. Men are flexible, capable of "programming themselves contingently" on the basis of newly received information. Computing machines are single-minded, constrained by their "pre-programming."

J. C. R. Licklider

When you have a biblical idea of men's strength, you know that God only gives us anything good to be used for his purposes and mainly to serve others.

Eric Metaxas

I am often asked why men don't get as worked up as they might about women - particularly poor women - having to use their bodies as prostitutes. Because most men unconsciously experience themselves as prostitutes every day - the miner, the firefighter, the construction worker, the logger, the soldier, the meatpacker - these men are prostitutes in the direct sense: they sacrifice their bodies for money and for their families.

Warren Farrell

The ethical system of these men of the New Republic, the ethical system which will dominate the world state, will be shaped primarily to favour the procreation of what is fine and efficient and beautiful in humanity — beautiful and strong bodies, clear and powerful minds, and a growing body of knowledge — and to check the procreation of base and servile types, of fear-driven and cowardly souls, of all that is mean and ugly and bestial in the souls, bodies, or habits of men.

H. G. Wells

Education makes machines which act like men and produces men who act like machines.

Erich Fromm

If men are in a state in which they find it hard to be weaned from their own ways and choose rather to serve the pleasures of the flesh than to serve the Lord, and refuse to accept the Gospel life, there is no common ground between me and them.

Saint Basil

For men to focus on controlling women's reproduction to solve a society's problems seems nothing short of mad or, at best, superstitious. But men's superstition or insanity has real and dire consequences for the women who are its object. And states, too, home in on women's bodies, perhaps to create the illusion that men are in control of uncontrollable forces. Indeed, almost all governments try to control women's bodies and regulate their appearance in some way.

Marilyn French

I saw some women had written that the cloning of Dolly was wonderful since it showed that women could have children without men. They didn?t even understand that this was the ultimate ownership of women?of embryos, of eggs, of bodies?by a few men with capital and control techniques, that it wasn?t freedom from men but total control by men.