George Orwell’s ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’

Today’s Green Thought comes from George Orwell’s ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’ (1937).

The tendency of mechanical progress is to frustrate the human need for effort and creation….(and) the logical end of mechanical progress is to reduce the human being to something resembling a brain in a bottle. The implied objective of ‘progress’ is – not exactly, perhaps, the brain in the bottle, but at any rate some frightful subhuman depth of softness and helplessness.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell