Machine Quotes

“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 a big machine, I have to be here for some reason. And that means you have to be here for some reason, too.”
― Brian Selznick, The Invention of Hugo Cabret

“To find out if she really loved me, I hooked her up to a lie detector. And just as I suspected, my machine was broken.
”
― Dark Jar Tin Zoo, Love Quotes for the Ages. Specifically Ages 19-91.

“Historical fact: People stopped being people in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers rebelled. They quit in droves, unable to accustom their bodies to the new pace of the age. Since then, however, the adaptation has been passed down: we've all inherited it to some degree, so that we plug right into joy-sticks and remotes, to repetitive motions of a hundred kinds.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man! Who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment and death itself in vindication of his own liberty, and the next moment... inflict on his fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose.”
― Thomas Jefferson, Letters of Thomas Jefferson

“We've become a nation of wolves, ruled by sheep.
Owned by swine, overfed, and put to sleep.
While the media elite declare what to think,
I'll be wide awake, on the edge, and on the brink.”
― Otep Shamaya

“You talk as if a god had made the Machine," cried the other. "I believe that you pray to it when you are unhappy. Men made it, do not forget that. Great men, but men. The Machine is much, but not everything.”
― E.M. Forster, The Machine Stops

“Few travelled in these days, for, thanks to the advance of science, the earth was exactly alike all over. Rapid intercourse, from which the previous civilization had hoped so much, had ended by defeating itself. What was the good of going to Peking when it was just like Shrewsbury? Why return to Shrewsbury when it would all be like Peking? Men seldom moved their bodies; all unrest was concentrated in the soul.”
― E.M. Forster, The Machine Stops

“It is unworthy of excellent men to lose hours like slaves in the labour of calculation which could safely be relegated to anyone else if machines were used.

(Describing, in 1685, the value to astronomers of the hand-cranked calculating machine he had invented in 1673.)”
― Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

“How inferior the human machine is, compared to man-made machines. They can be decoked, unscrewed, oiled and parts replaced. Decidedly, nature is not a very wonderful thing.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans

“The buzzing was like the eager purr of a muscle car that had just been started, but left in neutral. That was another of Cody’s metaphors for it; I’d said the sensation felt like an unbalanced washing machine filled with a hundred epileptic chimpanzees. Pretty proud of that one.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Steelheart

“Vashti was seized with the terrors of direct experience. She shrank back into the room, and the wall closed up again.”
― E.M. Forster, The Machine Stops

“To see a man slip on a banana skin is to see a rationally structured system suddenly translated into a whirling machine.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“Sometimes I sit down to dinner with people and I realize there is a massive military machine surrounding us, trying to kill the people I'm having dinner with.”
― Rachel Corrie

“For the machine meant the conquest of horizontal space. It also meant a sense of that space which few people had experienced before – the succession and superimposition of views, the unfolding of landscape in flickering surfaces as one was carried swiftly past it, and an exaggerated feeling of relative motion (the poplars nearby seeming to move faster than the church spire across the field) due to parallax. The view from the train was not the view from the horse. It compressed more motifs into the same time. Conversely, it left less time in which to dwell on any one thing.”
― Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New

“The moment a person loses the capacity to think, to question, Tanya considers them no longer human but a machine. And that is why the individual Tanya Degurechaff reveres thought, loves debate, and sneers at dogmatism from the bottom of her heart.”
― Carlo Zen, Ấu nữ chiến ký (1) Deus lo vult

“Indeed, woman can be a machine run wild, or a machine can be a better, more subjugated, and efficient woman.”
― Francoise Meltzer

“For best use, turn ON the Revenge Machine before attempting to use. It also doesn’t have an OFF switch, because you have to destroy it—or it will destroy you.”
― Jarod Kintz, There are Two Typos of People in This World: Those Who Can Edit and Those Who Can't

“Mees kirjutab masinasse armastuskirja ja masin vastab mehele adressaadi asemel ja tasemel
Nii täiuslik on see masin see tshekkide ja armastuskirjade väljastamismasin
Ja mees kes on mugavasti aset võtnud oma elamismasinas loeb oma lugemismasinaga oma kirjutusmasina vastust
Ja ise koos oma kalkuleerimismasinaga oma unistamismasinas ostab ta ühe armatsemismasina
Ja oma unistusterealiseerimismasinas armatseb ta oma kirjutusmasinaga oma armatsemismasina abil
Kuid masin petab teda ühe generaatoriga
Ühe surnuksnaerutamisegeneraatoriga.”
― Jacques Prévert

“Without passion we are only machines.”
― Joanna Quinn, The Whalebone Theatre

“Two wars on opposite sides of the world will stretch the USA war machine thin!”
― Steven Magee

“During war, the news turns into a blatant war propaganda machine.”
― Steven Magee

“A machine can be built to do any accurately described job better than any man. The superiority of a man is that he can do an unexpected, undescribed, and emergency job... provided he hasn't been especially trained to be a machine.”
― MURRAY F. YACO, Unspecialist

“Below the display, where you would expect to find number buttons on a calculator, is a large transparent square of plastic. An astonishing array of circuitry and electronics sit behind it - a smorgasbord of transistors, capacitors and other components.”
― Lucy Lyons, The Finding Machine

“Man creates. the machine duplicates. In each case a different principle is appealed to, a different characteristic, called into being. To create is to cause to exist a thing that is unique. To duplicate is to cause to exist a thing that is uniform.”
― Brian Keeble, Art For Whom and For What?

“The tool produces according to human needs, the machine regardless of human needs.”
― Brian Keeble, Art For Whom and For What?

“Social intelligence is hard to reproduce with machine-executable logic. Therefore, it is concluded, human beings must become more like machines, in order to make the world more hospitable to robots.”
― Matthew B. Crawford, Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road

“To err is machine, to correct is mind.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Either Right or Human: 300 Limericks of Inclusion

“Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man's mind.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“I think what a joy it is to be alive, and I wonder if I'll ever leap inward to the root of this flesh and know myself as once I was. The root is there. Whether any act of mine can find it, that remains tangled in the future. But all things a man can do are mine. Any act of mine may do it.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah

“Most employees are like interchangeable machine parts. When they show up to work, there is no trace of the person they replaced, and then they leave, they make no lasting impression and it's as if they were never there.”
― Jarod Kintz, A Memoir of Memories and Memes