Daily Inspiration Quote by Bertrand Russell

Russell pins our relationship with technology to a brutal, almost religious ambivalence: we don’t merely use machines, we project onto them. “Worshipped” is the tell. He’s describing modernity’s new altar, where elegance of design and the promise of control convert engineering into a moral aesthetic. Beauty becomes an argument. Power becomes a virtue. If the machine can do what flesh can’t, we treat it as proof of progress and, by extension, proof that we are progressing.

Then he flips the mirror. The same machine is “hideous” not because of gears and grime, but because it exposes what industrial society does to humans: reduces bodies to inputs, time to units, attention to a resource that can be scheduled, measured, extracted. The ugliness is social. It’s the factory whistle, the punched clock, the managed life. Russell’s “slavery” isn’t just a metaphor for exploited labor; it’s an indictment of dependence. Tools that “confer power” also rewire the terms of living, until opting out looks like weakness, poverty, or irrelevance.

The line lands in a 20th-century landscape where machines were no longer quaint marvels but systems: mass production, mechanized war, bureaucratic administration. Russell, a humanist with a hard-edged view of politics, is warning that technology’s blessings are never neutral. The subtext is a challenge to the era’s easy faith in “innovation”: if we’re worshipping, we’ve stopped scrutinizing. If we’re enslaved, it’s partly because we mistook convenience for freedom.