"Not of railway communications, my young but passionate adolescent, but of that whole tendency, of which railways may serve as an image, so to speak, an artistic expression. Hurrying, clanging, banging, and speeding, they say, for the happiness of mankind! 'It's getting much too noisy and industrial in mankind, there is too little spiritual peace,' complains a secluded thinker. 'Yes, but the banging of carts delivering bread for hungry mankind may be better than spiritual peace,' triumphantly replies another, a widely traveled thinker, and walks off vaingloriously. I the vile Lebedev, do not believe in the carts that deliver bread to mankind! For carts that deliver bread to all mankind, without any moral foundations for their action, may quite cold-bloodedly exclude a considerable part of mankind from enjoying what they deliver, as has already happened."

—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot

Zwingli had considered the word of God to be the privileged medium precisely because it made no appeal (in his view) to the sensuous domain of the body as constructed by sight. "Why," he asked rhetorically, "do we not send images to unbelievers so that they can learn belief from them?" Why indeed, Sallman's publishers may well have asked, for they supplied a global market with images of Jesus, which church groups and religious organizations sent around the world during World War II and after. Yet, to take Zwingli's point, which was, in effect, substantially expanded and explored by Roland Barthes: the message of the photographic image is imbricated with the textual codes of discourse, which connote something other than what we see. But we naturalize the codes by taking the image to signify them. This operation of connotation or imbrication is not limited to the photograph, however. Sallman's imagery naturalizes what his viewers think or have been told to think, and it is able to do so in no small way because of the massive dissemination of his work. People often see it and have continually seen it since childhood in so many places that it acquires a kind of de facto normative stature. As many people say, it's what Jesus looks like.

—David Morgan, Icons of American Protestantism: The Art of Warner Sallman

The expansion of the machine during the past two centuries was accomplished by the dogma of increasing wants. Industry was directed toward the multiplication of the desire for goods. We passed from an economy of need to an economy of acquisition. The desire for more material satisfactions of the nature furnished by mechanized production kept up with and partly cancelled out the gains in productivity. Needs became nebulous and indirect: to satisfy them appropriately under the capitalist criterion one must gratify them with profitable indirectness through the channels of sale. The symbol of price made direct seizure and gratification vulgar: so that finally the farmer who produced enough fruit and meat  and vegetables to satisfy his hunger felt a little inferior to the man who, producing those goods for a market, could buy back the inferior products of the packing house and the cannery.

—Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization

Mannheim is a very placid, cold, horizontal, rectangular town. I doubt whether the inhabitants are ever kept awake by their passion for music.

—Hector Berlioz, Memoirs

 Let those who believe that man's good lies in the flesh and his evil in whatever turns him away from sensual pleasures take their fill and die of it.

—Blaise Pascal, Thoughts

It is too readily assumed that a thinker who dwells on the dangers of increasing mechanization is himself advocating a movement back to Nature. But of course the Christian's concern over mechanization does not derive from any dreamy illusions about natural man's innocence. The familiar antithesis between mechanization and Nature largely misses the point. We do not lament the increasing dependence upon mechanical contrivances because it removes man from the natural, but because it removes man from the supernatural.

—Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind

Much of the charm that invests the patent-leather shoe, the stainless linen, the lustrous cylindrical hat, and the walking stick, which so greatly enhance the native dignity of a gentleman, comes of their pointedly suggesting that the wearer cannot so attired bear a hand in any employment that is directly and immediately of any human use.

---Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class

Instead of loathing the Latin language they became eager to speak it effectively. In the same way, our national dress came into favor and the toga was everywhere to be seen. And so the population was gradually led into the demoralizing temptations of arcades, baths, and sumptuous banquets. The unsuspecting Britons spoke of such novelties as "civilization", when in fact they were only a feature of their enslavement.

---Cornelius Tacitus, Agricola