Daily Inspiration Quote by Clare Boothe Luce

“Technological man” is Luce’s neat piece of stagecraft: a character type, not a neutral demographic. By turning a whole modern posture into a single figure, she borrows the dramatist’s trick of caricature to expose a cultural habit. The line isn’t really about computers; it’s about the shrinking of the human imagination under the rule of proof.

The verbs do the work. “Measured, taped, or put into a computer” is a rising stack of instruments, moving from the old-school (tape measure) to the sleek authority of computation. It’s funny in its bluntness, but the humor has teeth: if your only doorway to belief is quantification, you’ll lock yourself out of ethics, art, faith, love, grief, even political judgment - all the domains where humans operate on inference, trust, and story. Luce isn’t praising mystery for mystery’s sake; she’s warning that a culture trained to demand data will start treating everything else as childish or suspect.

The subtext is also gendered and institutional. Mid-century “technological man” reads like the engineer, the planner, the Cold War technocrat - the kind of authority figure who can justify anything if the charts cooperate. Luce, a sharp observer of power and performance, suggests that this mindset doesn’t just describe reality; it polices it, dismissing what can’t be “put into a computer” as irrelevant.

Context matters: she’s writing in an America enthralled by postwar science and management, when “objective” became a moral alibi. The quote works because it indicts a seduction, not a machine.