Machines quotes
1.1K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside machines — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Easy money, sudden fortunes, increasingly powerful political machines and blatant corruption transformed much of the nation; and the Senate, as befits a democratic legislative body, accurately represented the nation."
"Wherever there is smoke there is a good smoke machine."
"The soul paints itself in our machines."
"Money is a machine for doing quickly and commodiously what would be done, though less quickly and commodiously, without it."
"Imagining isn't perfect. You can't get all the way inside someone else...But imagining being someone else, or the world being something else, is the only way in. It is the machine that kills fascists."
"I started getting back into buying old analog gear while we were recording. Lots of old drum machines and synths. It wasn't a conscious thing. I didn't consider myself a collector, but boxes of vintage gear would turn up virtually every day."
"For a long time now, every meeting with another human being has been the reverberations after even the simplest conversation. But the deep collision is and has been with my unregenerate, tormenting and tormented self...I am unable to become what I see. I feel like an inadequate machine, a machine that breaks down at crucial moments, grinds to a dreadful halt, "won't go"."
"I feel like an inadequate machine, a machine that breaks down at crucial moments, grinds to a dreadful hault, 'won't go,' or, even worse, explodes in some innocent person's face."
"It's like swimmin' without warmin' up, yuo know what I mean? So [cackles] we use the drum machine, and we take it out."
"The only way a drum machine will get out of beat is for you not to pay your electric bill."
"Like any large organisation, public or private, the UN is a complex machine."
"In fact UN is more of a galaxy of organisations and agencies than one machine."
"To know the machine one must know where each part belongs, and what its office is."
"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."
"Some persons seem to like you, and others seem to hate you, and you must wonder why. They are simply liking machines and hating machines."
"All the new technology seems redundant to me. I was quite happy with the United States mail service. And, I don't even have an answering machine, for God's sake."
"As for myself: I had come to the conclusion that there was nothing sacred about myself or about any human being, that we were all machines, doomed to collide and collide and collide."
"Never send a human to do a machine's job."
"No one is calling me. I can’t check the answering machine because I have been here all this time. If I go out, someone may call while I’m out. Then I can check the answering machine when I come back in."
