"Cannot you see, cannot all your lecturers see, that it is we who are dying, and that down here the only thing that really lives is the Machine? We created the Machine, to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will now. It has robbed us of the sense of space and of the sense of touch, it has blurred every human relation and narrowed down love to a carnal act, it has paralyzed our bodies and our wills, and now it compels us to worship it. The Machine develops--but not on our lines. The Machine proceeds--but not to our goal. We only exist as the blood corpuscles that course through its arteries, and if it could work without us, it would let us die. Oh, I have no remedy--or, at least, only one--to tell men again and again that I have seen the hills of Wessex as Ælfrid saw them when he overthrew the Danes."
--E. M. Forster, "The Machine Stops"
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