James Beck

A thousand images are impressed daily upon the screen of his consciousness, but they are as fleeting as moving pictures in a cinema theatre.

Athens in the days of Pericles had but thirty thousand people and few mechanical inventions; but she produced philosophers, poets and artists, whose work after more than twenty centuries still remain the despair of the would-be imitators.

Unquestionably, man of to-day has a thousand ideas suggested to him by the newspaper and the library where our ancestors had one; but have we the same spirit of calm inquiry and do we co-ordinate the facts we know as wisely as our…

Washington and Franklin could not travel sixty miles an hour in a railroad train, or twice that speed in an aeroplane, but does it follow that they did not travel to as good purpose as we, who scurry to and fro like the ants in a…

Our fathers could not talk over the telephone for three thousand miles, but have we surpassed them in thoughts of enduring value?

I gravely question whether it has the same clarity as the brain of the generation which fashioned the Constitution of the United States.

True it is that the printing-press has piled up great treasures of human knowledge which make this age the richest in accessible information.

But may it not be true that the thousandfold increase in such transmission by the rotary press has also tended to muddy the current thought of the time?

Take, for example, the printing-press: No one can question the immense advantages which have flowed from the increased facility for transmitting ideas.

More serious than this, however, has been the destructive effort of quantity, the great object of the mechanical age, at the expense of quality.

Thus, millions of men have lost both the opportunity for real physical exertion, the incentive to work in the joyous competition of skill, and finally the reward of work in the sense of achievement.

To spend one's life in opening a valve to make a part of a pin is, as Ruskin pointed out, demoralizing in its tendencies.

The worker does not see the fruit of his travail, and cannot therefore be truly satisfied.

The result has been a minute subdivision of labour that has denied to many workers the true significance and physical benefit of labour.

While they have employment, many of them do not themselves work, but spend their lives in watching machines work.

As he feverishly multiplied the things he desired, even more feverishly he multiplied his wants.

Man consumes the treasures of the earth faster than he produces them, deforesting its surface and disembowelling its hidden wealth.

The lust has obsessed him, without regard to whether it be constructive or destructive.

This incalculable multiplication of power has intoxicated man.

What a sordid Vanity Fair is our modern Civilization!

We have now made the serene spaces of the upper Heavens our media to transmit market reports and sporting news, second-rate music and worse oratory and in the meantime the great masters of thought, Homer and Shakespeare, Bach and Beethoven…

We glory in the fact that we can talk a thousand miles, but we ignore the greater question, whether when we thus out-do Stentor, we have anything worth saying.

It overrates speed, it underrates sureness; it overrates the new, it underrates the old; it overrates automatic efficiency, it underrates individual craftsmanship; it overrates rights, it underrates duties; it overrates political…

The evil of our age is that its values are all false.

His practical religion became that of acceleration and facilitation--to do things more quickly and easily--and thus to minimize exertion became his great objective.