Parenting & Family Quote by Karel Capek

Capek weaponizes the language of efficiency to make it sound like a kind of moral revelation: any acceleration is progress, and anything that can’t be optimized is an insult to reason. The line’s comic sting comes from its smug certainty. “Any acceleration” is a deliberately absurd absolute, a caricature of technocratic faith that treats speed as self-justifying. By personifying Nature as clueless about “the modern rate of work,” Capek flips the usual hierarchy: the natural world isn’t a grounding standard anymore; it’s an out-of-date employee who failed to keep up with management.

The sharpest cruelty lands on childhood. Calling it “pure nonsense” and “wasted time” isn’t just provocation; it exposes what happens when industrial logic colonizes human development. Childhood, in this frame, is only valuable insofar as it produces adult output. Play, idleness, learning by error - the very processes that make a person - become “untenable” because they don’t pay dividends fast enough. The repeated “waste of time” reads like a memo from a factory floor, not an observation about life.

Context matters: Capek wrote in an interwar Europe intoxicated by machines and assembly lines, but also increasingly anxious about what mechanization does to labor and democracy. (R.U.R. coined “robot” for a reason.) Addressing “Miss Glory” adds a social bite: the ideology is being pitched as modern sophistication, a glamorous identity, not merely an economic theory. The subtext is bleakly funny: once speed becomes virtue, humanity becomes the inefficiency to be corrected.