Machines Quotes

“To let the brain work without sufficient material is like racing an engine. It racks itself to pieces.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, Die Teufelskralle

“The clothes you're wearing, the room, the house, the city that you're in. Everything in it started out in the human imagination. Your lives, your personalities, your whole world. All invented. All made up. All the wars, the romances. The masterpieces and the machines. And there's nothing here but a funny little twist of amino acids, playing a marvelous game of pretend.”
― Alan Moore, Promethea, Vol. 5

“The problem isn't who is in charge. It's what is in charge. The problem is that people are encouraged to function as machines. Or, actually, as mechanisms. Human emotion and sympathy are unprofessional. They are inappropriate to the exercise of reason. Everything which makes people good - makes them human - is ruled out. The system doesn't care about people, but we treat it as if it were one of us, as if it were the sum of our goods and not the product of our least admirable compromises.”
― Nick Harkaway, The Gone-Away World

“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

“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, Altered Carbon

“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, Angelmaker

“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, The Invention of Hugo Cabret

“Why do you assume I'm human?

I wasn't born; I was created just like this.

First I was an idea.

Then I came into being, charged with a very important task.

I've come to find the monster.”
― Eliza Granville, Gretel and the Dark

“At home I am a man, at work I am a machine.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“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 Right to Be Lazy

“Man kept control over the machines he created, I wish God would have done the same with the man he created.”
― Amit Kalantri

“A funny thing about women and machines: the combination made made curious. They seemed to think it had something to do with them.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

“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 Flamethrowers

“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, Michelangelo | Beethoven | Shakespeare: 15 Things Common to Great Achievers

“They were all machines, he thought, just like La Mettrie had said in L'Homme Machine all those years ago. So he, Orphan, was a machine of flesh and blood, and Lucy, now, was made of something else, more complex perhaps- but they were the same and...

They were in love.

Sometimes that was enough.”
― Lavie Tidhar, The Bookman

“The machines are too dull when we
are lion-poems that move & breathe.”
― Michael McClure, Ghost Tantras

“It’s hard to guess how smart the machines are, but a good rule of thumb is that they’re always smarter than you think.”
― Daniel H. Wilson, Robogenesis

“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, Shattered Illusions

“As I rode back to Detroit, a vision of Henry Ford's industrial empire kept passing before my eyes. In my ears, I heard the wonderful symphony which came from his factories where metals were shaped into tools for men's service. It was a new music, waiting for the composer with genius enough to give it communicable form.

I thought of the millions of different men by whose combined labor and thought automobiles were produced, from the miners who dug the iron ore out of the earth to the railroad men and teamsters who brought the finished machines to the consumer, so that man, space, and time might be conquered, and ever-expanding victories be won against death.”
― Diego Rivera, My Art, My Life

“There are some old machines like antique sewing machine or pasta machine; seeing them is seeing our great grandmothers, touching them is touching our grandmothers!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“... the cylinder itself has only just begun its revolutions ... as it gathers speed the objects grouped around its fulcrum assume, collectively ... no ... as it gathers speed the whole intricate system of cords, weights, metal spikes and rods, brass plates engraved with labyrinthine patterns, bricks, scraps of fabric, paper, canvas, unmarked sheets ... the entire elaborate network of components begins to shudder into wild spasmodic motion, rattling almost farcically within the framework of the machine.”
― Martin Vaughn-James, The Cage