Science & Tech Quote by Martin H. Fischer

A machine is a cold metaphor to drag a warm, squishy subject - human worth - into the hard light of accounting. Fischer’s line works because it borrows the authority of industry and engineering to make a moral point feel objective: output matters, waste matters, and sentiment doesn’t change the balance sheet. In the early 20th century, when machines were the era’s dominant symbol of progress, this kind of comparison carried real cultural force. It flatters the reader with modernity: be efficient, be useful, be measurable.

The intent is plainly exhortative. “Check your value” reads like advice, but it’s also a warning: if you’re not producing “more than you consume,” you’re a net loss. The subtext is a Protestant work ethic dressed up as technocracy, turning citizenship into a ledger. “Community” softens the edge just enough to keep it from sounding like pure capitalism; you’re not serving a boss, you’re serving a collective. Still, the moral logic is utilitarian: contribution validates existence.

That’s what makes it both rhetorically potent and ethically slippery. Machines don’t get sick, age, grieve, or raise children; people do. Whole categories of essential human labor - care work, learning, healing, art that doesn’t monetize neatly - can look like “consumption” before they register as “production.” The quote’s sting is that it dares you to quantify yourself, then implies the world is entitled to the result. In a century that increasingly measured everything, Fischer gives measurement the last word.