The goal of all inanimate objects is to resist man and ultimately defeat him.
Interpretation
Inanimate objects are seen as inherently challenging to human dominance.
This quote by Russell Baker suggests that everything non-living has an intrinsic quality of opposition to human intention and control. It reflects a philosophical view that inanimate objects often frustrate our attempts to dominate or utilize them, leading to a metaphorical battle between man and the material world, indicating a deeper relationship between humanity and their environment, where resistance is an inevitable outcome.
In practice
In a speech about innovation and technology, you could use this quote to emphasize the challenges faced when designing user-friendly products.
So there he is at last. Man on the moon. The poor magnificent bungler! He can't even get to the office without undergoing the agonies of the damned, but give him a little metal, a few chemicals, some wire and twenty or thirty billion dollars and vroom! there he is, up on a rock a quarter of a million miles up in the sky.
The worst thing about the miracle of modern communications is the Pavlovian pressure it places upon everyone to communicate whenever a bell rings.
Voters inclined to loathe and fear elite Ivy League schools rarely make fine distinctions between Yale and Harvard. All they know is that both are full of rich, fancy, stuck-up and possibly dangerous intellectuals who never sit down to supper in their undershirt no matter how hot the weather gets.
When it comes to cars, only two varieties of people are possible - cowards and fools.
Rereading A.J. Liebling carries me happily back to an age when all good journalists knew they had plenty to be modest about, and were.
Television was the most revolutionary event of the century. Its importance was in a class with the discovery of gunpowder and the invention of the printing press, which changed the human condition for centuries afterward.
But only in their dreams can men be truly free. It was always thus and always thus will be.
It offended his sense of himself, because he was an individual from an age of individuals, and a string of lights was, like him, an individual thing. No matter how little the thing had cost, to throw it away was to deny its value.
Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself And falls on the other side
In republican governments, men are all equal; equal they are also in despotic governments: in the former, because they are everything; in the latter, because they are nothing.
Memory can glean, but can never renew. It brings us joys faint as is the perfume of the flowers, faded and dried, of the summer that is gone.
Constitutions should consist only of general provisions; the reason is that they must necessarily be permanent, and that they cannot calculate for the possible change of things.
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