Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert M Pirsig

This quote was added by weesin
People arrive at a factory and perform a totally meaningless task from eight to five without question because the structure demands that it be that way. There's no villain, no "mean guy" who wants them to live meaningless lives, it's just that the structure, the system demands it and no one is willing to take on the formidable task of changing the structure just because it is meaningless.

Train on this quote


Rate this quote:
3.0 out of 5 based on 28 ratings.

Edit Text

Edit author and title

(Changes are manually reviewed)

or just leave a comment:


bvw 4 months, 4 weeks ago
A great book published in 1974, 34 years later the age of the factory in the US was pretty much over. Only the meat packing plants and a few others. In the Pacific Rim, however the factories are strong and use slave labor, or at least much harsher lock ins to the "structure" -- today it might be called the "hegemony". But this particular quote by the author Pirsig is wrong even then. The jobs were not meaningless. And there is no "structure". That's magical fantasy. It's always men, us. We humans, men and women.

Test your skills, take the Typing Test.

Score (WPM) distribution for this quote. More.

Best scores for this typing test

Name WPM Accuracy
treemeister 142.57 97.3%
alliekarakosta 134.68 97.5%
bruins4777 132.96 99.5%
phraznikov 124.52 99.2%
doesho 122.02 95.8%
bruins4777 120.97 99.2%
user582062 120.23 99.2%
zhengfeilong 120.14 96.8%

Recently for

Name WPM Accuracy
kvxome 88.45 89.3%
algo 97.88 93.1%
hummer350 83.08 98.5%
iomalagaris 71.71 98.5%
lechu_ 89.23 94.9%
kvxome 84.66 90.3%
sufelfay 43.49 95.8%
jhaggart5643 89.42 95.4%