Life & Wisdom Quote by J.B. Priestley

Priestley’s line lands like a polite Victorian tap that turns out to be a slap: progress, he suggests, isn’t the same thing as contact. The sentence is built on a clean inverse symmetry - “more” and “less” yoked together - which makes it feel like an almost scientific law. That rhetorical neatness is part of the sting. He isn’t merely complaining about gadgets; he’s diagnosing a cultural habit of mistaking infrastructure for intimacy.

The intent is skeptical, even slightly mournful: when communication becomes a system to be optimized, it starts to privilege speed, reach, and volume over meaning. “Elaborate” is the tell. It implies ornament, complication, bureaucracy - a world where the channel becomes its own performance. Priestley is warning that as we add intermediaries (devices, platforms, formalities, public relations), we also add incentives to curate, posture, and dilute. What travels efficiently is often what is easiest to package, not what is hardest to say.

Context matters: Priestley wrote through the era that industrialized the public sphere - mass newspapers, radio, advertising, wartime propaganda, expanding managerial language. His broader work often defended ordinary lived experience against technocratic modernity. Read that way, the quote is less a Luddite sigh than a moral critique: modern communication can create constant connection while quietly reducing actual communion. It anticipates the contemporary paradox where everyone can broadcast, yet fewer people feel heard, because the “means” have become the message’s boss.