Life & Wisdom Quote by Andre Norton

Norton’s complaint isn’t nostalgia for candlelight; it’s a writerly jab at a culture that confused leverage with liberation. The “big mistake” she names is less the factory itself than the bargain it normalized: trade tactile agency for frictionless output. “We leaped” does a lot of work here. It implies a collective, almost childish eagerness to grab the shiny mechanical future without asking what gets left behind on the floor: skill, patience, the small satisfactions of making.

Her second clause turns from diagnosis to human need. “People need the use of their hands” isn’t just about crafts; it’s about cognition and identity. Hands are where intention meets resistance. They teach you that the world pushes back, that creation is negotiated, not summoned. When Norton says hands make us “feel creative,” she’s pointing to a psychological feedback loop: manual effort produces visible change, which produces competence, which produces the courage to imagine more. A button press can be efficient, but it’s emotionally thin.

Context matters: Norton wrote science fiction in the long shadow of mass production, Cold War automation, and a 20th century that promised leisure while steadily deskilling everyday life. Coming from a genre obsessed with machines, her line reads like a quiet corrective: technology can expand the possible, but it can also narrow the felt experience of authorship. The subtext is political without waving a banner: societies that outsource making to machines risk outsourcing meaning, too, and then wonder why so many people feel restless, passive, and strangely unneeded.