
"You talk as if a god had made the Machine," cried the other. Men made it, do not forget that. Great men, but men. The machine is much, but it is not everything.
Cannot you see, cannot all you lecturers see, that it is we that 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 time and of the sense of touch, it has blurred every human relation and narrowed down love to a carnal act, it has paralysed 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 goals. We only exist as the blood corpuscles that course through its arteries, and if it could work without us it would let us die.
E.M. Foster's A Machine Stops. (Twentieth-century Short Stories)
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