Art & Creativity Quote by Rube Goldberg

Goldberg’s genius here is that he smuggles a whole cultural pecking order into a throwaway wisecrack. He’s not really confessing a lack of talent; he’s performing the old American split between “practical” training and “literary” legitimacy, then mocking the terms of that split with a cartoonist’s scalpel. “Mining engineering of all things” lands like a wink: the phrase carries a faint whiff of soot and brute materiality, a discipline imagined as the opposite of refined language. The stuttered “they, they” reads less like uncertainty than comic timing, a drumroll before the insult.

Calling a mining engineer “a sort of an illiterate” isn’t just class snobbery; it’s self-defense and self-mythmaking. Goldberg frames his early path as an institutionally sanctioned detour away from writing, so his later career in drawing and invention looks less like a deviation and more like an escape from a system designed to produce useful, obedient technicians. The subtext: America loves engineering until it needs someone to tell a story about what engineering is doing to us.

Context matters. Goldberg came up as industrial modernity was selling itself as progress, and his cartoons built an entire language out of overcomplicated machines that parody that promise. In that light, the joke doubles as autobiography: the “illiterate” engineer becomes the perfect observer of a world enthralled by apparatus and efficiency, and the cartoonist becomes the translator who turns that obsession into satire.