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.
All of us have not been to a natural prison, but everybody in here has had a spiritual prison.
The most familiar precepts are not always the truest.
America is the noisiest country that ever existed. One is waked up in the morning, not by the singing of the nightingale, but by the steam whistle.
Man is not on the earth solely for his own happiness. He is there to realize great things for humanity.
Legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property... Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise. Whenever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right.
The bad fortune of the good turns their faces up to heaven; the good fortune of the bad bows their heads down to the earth.
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