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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"In reality, moral rules are directions for running the human machine. Every moral rule is there to prevent a breakdown, or a strain, or a friction, in the running of that machine. That is why these rules at first seem to be constantly interfering with our natural inclinations."
"Life's not some slot machine in an arcade with a sign that flashes up saying 'I'm sorry, you have been killed. Would you like another go?' But we might get put through the same test each time, get faced with the same situations until we've learned how to cope."
"Instruction tables will have to be made up by mathematicians with computing experience and perhaps a certain puzzle-solving ability. There need be no real danger of it ever becoming a drudge, for any processes that are quite mechanical may be turned over to the machine itself."
"The ‘machine-gun’ approach to photography – by which many negatives are made with the hope that one will be good – is fatal to serious results."
"Nerves are normal. You can't be cured from them unless you're a machine."
"The highest art form of all is a human being in control of himself and his airplane in flight, urging the spirit of a machine to match his own."
"I am a machine, condemned to devour them and then, throw them, in a changed form, on the dunghill of history."
"The fact is, that civilization requires slaves. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends."
"Considerable sacrifices were demanded of the inhabitants of the machine in order that purely abstract formal development... might be carried as far as possible."
"I was in the machine. My whole life. Then the machine coughed and spat me out. So I thought, OK, if I'm out, I'm out. All the way out. I was a little angry and it was probably an immature reaction. But I got used to it."
"The machine has got to be accepted, but it is probably better to accept it rather as one accepts a drug - that is, grudgingly and suspiciously. Like a drug, the machine is useful, dangerous, and habit-forming. The oftener one surrenders to it the tighter its grip becomes."
"Congress no longer declares war or makes budgets. So that's the end of the constitution as a working machine."
"Given the prevailing lack of discipline, it would have been impossible to use Congolese machine-gunners to defend the base from air attack: they did not know how to handle their weapons and did not want to learn."
"Security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally."
"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."
"Congress, 535 commoditized temple monkeys pawing through the ruins of America in search of bribes. The bicameral whorehouse on Capitol Hill works like a vending machine. You put coins in the slot, select your law, and the desired legislation slides out."
"The machine has several virtues... One may lean back in his chair and work it. It piles an awful stack of words on one page. It don't muss things or scatter ink blots around."
"Ninth graders with machine guns: its hard to make that a happy story."
"Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other."
"Machines are worshipped because they are beautiful and valued because they confer power; they are hated because they are hideous and loathed because they impose slavery."
