Machines Quotes

So this talk, or touch if I were there,Should work its effortless gadgetry of love,Like Dante’s heaven, and melt into the air.If it doesn’t, of course, I’ve fallen. So much is chance,So much agility, desire, and feverish care,As bicyclists and harpsicordists proveWho only by moving can balance,Only by balancing move.

Michael Donaghy

Machines were the ideal metaphor for the central pornographic fantasy of the nineteenth century, rape followed by gratitude.

Robert Hughes

Many of the younger generation know my name in a vague way and connect it with grotesque inventions, but don't believe that I ever existed as a person. They think I am a nonperson, just a name that signifies a tangled web of pipes or wires or strings that suggest machinery. My name to them is like a spiral staircase, veal cutlets, barber's itch—terms that give you an immediate picture of what they mean.

Rube Goldberg

It was machines that scanned the heavens, machines that probed the space between atoms, machines that asked the questions and designed to experiments to answer them. All that was left for mere meat, apparently, was navel-gazing.

Peter Watts

A machine! I have become a machine! It has taken over my life. How ironic! In a world of freedom and independence, my entire life now depends on a machine!

Leigh Hershkovich

The machines men are so intent on making have carried them very far from the old sweet things.

Sherwood Anderson

To let the brain work without sufficient material is like racing an engine. It racks itself to pieces.

Arthur Conan Doyle

I'm like a machine being run over its RPM limit. The bearings are overheating: a minute longer and the metal will melt and start dripping and that will be the end of everything. I need a splash of cold water, logic; I pour it on in buckets but the logic hisses on the hot bearings and dissipates in the air as a fleeting white mist

Yevgeny Zamyatin

In proportion as the machine is improved and performs man's work with an ever increasing rapidity and exactness, the labourer, instead of prolonging his former rest times, redoubles his ardour, as if he wished to rival the machine. O, absurd and murderous competition!

Paul Lafargue

The machines are too dull when weare lion-poems that move & breathe.

Michael McClure

We have too many cellphones. We've got too many internets. We have got to get rid of those machines. We have too many machines now.

Ray Bradbury

Joshua Joseph has no real hatred of modern technology - he just mistrusts the effortless, textureless surfaces, and the ease with which it trains you to do things in the way most convenient to the machine. Above all, he mistrusts duplication. A rare thing becomes a commonplace thing. A skill becomes a feature. The end is more important than the means. The child of the soul gives place to a product of the system....For anything really important, Joe prefers something with a history, an item which can name the hand which assembled it and will warm to the one that deploys it. A thing of life, rather than one of the many consumer items which humans use to make more clutter; strange parasitic devices with their own little ecosystems.

Nick Harkaway

The World's Fair audience tended to think of the machine as unqualifiedly good, strong, stupid and obedient. They thought of it as a giant slave, an untiring steel Negro, controlled by Reason in a world of infinite resources.

Robert Hughes

Youth is only being in a way like it might be an animal. No, it is not just like being an animal so much as being like one of these malenky toys you viddy being sold in the streets, like little chellovecks made out of tin and with a spring inside and then a winding handle on the outside and you wind it up grrr grrr grrr and off it itties, like walking, O my brothers. But it itties in a straight line and bangs straight into things bang bang and it cannot help what it is doing. Being young is like being like one of these malenky machines.

Anthony Burgess

A machine is more blameless, more sinless even than any animal. It has no intentions whatsoever but our own.

Ursula K Le Guin

The study of thinking machines teaches us more about the brain than we can learn by introspective methods. Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets.

William S Burroughs

There's a sameness to streetlife. On every world I've ever been, the same underlying patterns play out, flaunt and vaunt, buy and sell, like some distilled essence of human behavior seeping out from whatever clanking political machine has been dropped on it from above.

Richard K. Morgan

We don't value craftsmanship anymore! All we value is ruthless efficiency, and I say we deny our own humanity that way! Without appreciation for grace and beauty, there's no pleasure in creating things and no pleasure in having them! Our lives are made drearier, rather than richer! How can a person take pride in his work when skill and care are considered luxuries! We're not machines! We have a human need for craftsmanship!

Bill Watterson

Sometimes I come up here at night, even when I'm not fixing the clocks, just to look at the city. I like to imagine that the world is one big machine. You know, machines never have any extra parts. They have the exact number and type of parts they need. So I figure if the entire world is one big machine, I have to be here for some reason. And that means you have to be here for some reason, too.

Brian Selznick

Positive attitude enables you to go with passion and see possibility in every challenging circumstance. It was by that, that great achievers picked up metal scraps on the floor and saw machines built from it.

Israelmore Ayivor

A funny thing about women and machines: the combination made men curious. They seemed to think it had something to do with them.

Rachel Kushner

The palimpsests of molecules need not be overwritten, for machines make once-ephemeral words persist: they collect in gutters; they pile up and require sweeping; they hang in air like morning fog.

Dexter Palmer

In the short run, technology many be more efficient than man, but it will never be perfect. Every piece of equipment will eventually reveal an error code. In the long run, man will never be perfect, but prove to be more reliable than technology.

Suzy Kassem

In another thirty to fifty years, the demand for cheap labor will have produced even more machines over the employment of actual humans. And in that time frame, humans will have lost their voice, their power, all freedoms, and all worth. It is inevitable that machines will one day become the ultimate enemies of mankind. We are not evolving or progressing with our technology, only regressing. Technology is our friend today, but will be our enemy in the future.

Suzy Kassem

As we begin to internalize the technological kingdoms we have built, as we progressively become more superhuman, what will differentiate us from machinery?

Natasha Tsakos

Electronic consciousness and the transhuman revolution renders infinite possibilities for the future as man merges with machines. This is an exhilarating time to be alive!

James Scott

I’d imagine the whole world was one big machine. Machines never come with any extra parts, you know. They always come with the exact amount they need. So I figured, if the entire world was one big machine, I couldn’t be an extra part. I had to be here for some reason. And that means you have to be here for some reason, too.

Hugo Cabret

With an evermore increase of industrialisation machine stops being merely a tool, develops a life of its own and imposes its rhythm onto human. Operating it he moves mechanically, becomes part of the machine.

Heide Schönemann

At home I am a man, at work I am a machine.

Amit Kalantri

Man kept control over the machines he created, I wish God would have done the same with the man he created.

Amit Kalantri

It is inevitable that machines will one day become the ultimate enemies of mankind. We are not evolving or progressing with our technology, only regressing. Technology is our friend today, but will be our enemy in the future.

Suzy Kassem

What had he said about machines?”Block was not entirely sure about that. Something about their eventually being able to think, something which the woman said was at odds with the Christian view of things, just like his sexual inclinations.

David Lagercrantz

Among all the machines, motorcar is my favorite machine.

Amit Kalantri

If achieving world peace and ending poverty were really genuine concerns to the majority, then they would have happened already by now. So, either people are not aware of their collective power, or their fears overpower their desires. The amount of money spent on the military-industrial complex in one year is more than enough to end hunger in Africa. Every problem on earth today has more than one solution. However, priorities are determined by values.

Suzy Kassem

I've heard my teacher say, where there are machines, there are bound to be machine worries; where there are machine worries, there are bound to be machine hearts. With a machine heart in your breast, you've spoiled what was pure and simple; and without the pure and simple, the life of the spirit knows no rest.

Zhuangzi

I did not fear that I might tread upon a live rail and be killed. I feared something far more intangible-doing what was not contemplated by the Machine. Then I said to myself, “Man is the measure”, and I went, and after many visits I found an opening.

E.M. Forster

It is up to us to decide what human means, and exactly how it is different from machine, and what tasks ought and ought not to be trusted to either species of symbol-processing system. But some decisions must be made soon, while the technology is still young. And the deciding must be shared by as many citizens as possible, not just the experts. In that sense, the most important factor in whether we will all see the dawn of a humane, sustainable world in the twenty-first century will be how we deal with these machines a few of us thought up and a lot of us will be using.

Howard Rheingold

These robots are literally inhuman, and yet I react no differently to their stumblings and topplings than I would to the pratfalls of a fellow human. I don’t imagine I would laugh at the spectacle of a toaster falling out of an SUV, or a semiautomatic rifle pitching over sideways from an upright position, but there is something about these machines, their human form, with which it is possible to identify sufficiently to make their falling deeply, horribly funny.

Mark O'Connell

Our inventions have long been ahead of us in terms of efficiency and sanity, productivity and predictability. Oh, how we’ve wished we could be manmade, too. What has been keeping us back, keeping us messy? The animal impediment, within and without. Eliminating these impediments, we will surely be catching up with our machines, resembling them more and more impeccably.

Amy Leach

For God’s sake, let us be mennot monkeys minding machinesor sitting with our tails curledwhile the machine amuses us, the radio or film or gramophone.Monkeys with a bland grin on our faces.

D.H. Lawrence

It is this perfect accuracy, this lack of play, of variety, that makes the machine-made article so lifeless. Wherever there is life there is variety, and the substitution of the machine-made for the hand-made article has impoverished the world to a greater extent than we are probably yet aware of. Whereas formerly, before the advent of machinery, the commonest article you could pick up had a life and warmth which gave it individual interest, now everything is turned out to such a perfection of deadness that one is driven to pick up and collect, in sheer desperation, the commonest rubbish still surviving from the earlier period.

Harold Speed

So, in the interests of survival, they trained themselves to be agreeing machines instead of thinking machines. All their minds had to do was to discover what other people were thinking, and then they thought that, too.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

As nature has uncovered from under this hard shell the seed for which she most tenderly cares - the propensity and vocation to free thinking - this gradually works back upon the character of the people, who thereby gradually become capable of managing freedom; finally, it affects the principles of government, which finds it to its advantage to treat men, who are now more than machines, in accordance with their dignity.

Immanuel Kant

Machine men, with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines, you are not cattle, you are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts. You don’t hate: only the unloved hate, the unloved and the unnatural. Soldiers, don’t fight for slavery, fight for liberty! You the people have the power, the power to create machines, the power to create happiness! You the people have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure! Then, in the name of democracy, let us use that power. Let us all unite! Let us fight for a new world, a decent world . . .

Charlie Chaplin

Progress is made by the improvement of people, not the improvement of machines.

Adrian Tchaikovsky

People are more difficult to work with than machines. And when you break a person, he can't be fixed.

Rick Riordan

Did you ever notice that all machines are made for some reason?" he asked Isabelle. "They are built to make you laugh, like the mouse here, or to tell the time, like clocks, or to fill you with wonder like the automaton. Maybe that's why a broken machine always makes me a little sad, because it isn't able to do what it was made to do." Isabelle picked up the mouse, wound it again, and set it down. "Maybe it's the same with people," Hugo continued. "If you lose your purpose...it's like you're broken.

Brian Selznick

The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do. The mystery which surrounds a thinking machine already surrounds a thinking man.

B.F. Skinner

... there was one new metallic monstrosity stacked in one corner that she hadn’t seen the last time she was a visitor to his strange chamber, it appeared to be a mass of hard drives all fused together, but they looked too sophisticated to be merely hard drives.“What on earth is that?” “That’s my Kung Fu,” he said proudly, patting the top of the futuristic-looking stack.“Is that what you wanted to show me?”“No, but it’s impressive, isn’t it?”“If you say so.”Steves sighed and shook his head, so few people could appreciate the intellectual complexity of an almost untraceable hacking device.

E.A. Bucchianeri

The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do. The mystery which surrounds a thinking machine already surrounds a thinking man.

B.F. Skinner

E.A. Bucchianeri

In a properly automated and educated world, then, machines may prove to be the true humanizing influence. It may be that machines will do the work that makes life possible and that human beings will do all the other things that make life pleasant and worthwhile

Isaac Asimov

But neither money nor machines can create. They shuttle tokens of energy, but they do not transform. A civilization based on them puts people out of touch with their creative powers.

Lewis Hyde

Before we complicated life with money, machines and missiles we did well with morals, manpower and meetings.

Amit Kalantri

Hands can cook, hands can create, hands can kill. There is no better tool than our hands.

Amit Kalantri

As for myself: I had come to the conclusion that there was nothing sacred about myself or any human being, that we were all machines, doomed to collide and collide and collide. For want of anything better to do, we became fans of collisions. Sometimes I wrote well about collisions, which meant I was a writing machine in good repair. Sometimes I wrote badly, which meant I was a writing machine in bad repair. I no more harbored sacredness than did a Pontiac, a mousetrap, or a South Bend Lathe.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Machines Quotes

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