sibyloftherhine
Member
All quotes are taken from Saint-Exupéry's Wartime Writings. What I found interesting (though not entirely surprising) was that a description of humanity nearly a century old holds just as true today.
If all this has been true for nearly a century, when do you foresee things ever changing? And how? Or perhaps was mankind was always like this from the start?
Where is the United States heading...in this age of universal bureaucracy? Robot-man alternating between work on the conveyor belt and gin rummy--stripped of all creative power, incapable of creating, from the depths of the village, a new dance or a new song, spoon-fed with a ready-made, standardized culture as one feeds hay to cattle. That is what man is today.
Nowadays, men are kept quite by gin rummy or bridge, according to their social position. We are astonishingly emasculated. And so, we are finally free. Our arms and legs having been cut off, we're left free to walk. I hate this age, where, under a universal totalitarianism, people become as docile as cattle--polite and quiet. And that's supposed to represent moral progress!
Nothing remains but the robot-voice of the propaganda machine (forgive me). Two billion human beings hear only the robot, understand only the robot--become robots.
Two comrades have gone to sleep next to me in my room...Looking at them sleeping, I feel a sort of impotent pity; because although they are unaware of their unease, I feel it.
If all this has been true for nearly a century, when do you foresee things ever changing? And how? Or perhaps was mankind was always like this from the start?