labor-saving machinery

You call your thousand material devices "labor-saving machinery," yet you are forever "busy." With the multiplying of your machinery you grow increasingly fatigued, anxious, nervous, dissatisfied. Whatever you have, you want more; and wherever you are you want to go somewhere else. You have a machine to dig the raw material for you..., a machine to manufacture [it]..., a machine to transport ]it]..., a machine to sweep and dust, one to carry messages, one to write, one to talk, one to sing, one to play at the theater, one to vote, one to sew... and a hundred others to do a hundred other things for you, and still you are the most nervously busy man in the world... your devices are so many sharp spurs which urge you on to invent more machinery and to do more business.

"An Oriental Writer", as quoted in Wise Men from the East and from the West by Abraham Mitrie Rihbany. Houghton Mifflin. 1922. As found in Strength to Love by Martin Luther King, Jr. Harper & Row. 1963. Fortress Press Gift Edition 2010. p. 72, 73