Machines quotes
1.1K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Browse quotes that often appear alongside machines — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"Screening telephone calls with a receptionist or the humbler answering machine is not a dishonorable thing to do. The warmest people in the world still need uninterrupted time to attend to their lives and should not be outwitted if they have made it obvious that they are not always available upon summons."
"But there's so much kludge, so much terrible stuff, we are at the 1908 Hurley washing machine stage with the Internet. That's where we are. We don't get our hair caught in it, but that's the level of primitiveness of where we are. We're in 1908."
"I've used [drum machine] because I have to have the perfect tempo."
"Bread has been made (indifferent) from potatoes; And galvanism has set some corpses grinning, But has not answer'd like the apparatus Of the Humane Society's beginning, By which men are unsuffocated gratis: What wondrous new machines have late been spinning."
"An infernal machine that produces every minute an impressive amount of poor, 26 million poor in 10 years are 2.6 million per year of new poor, this is the road, well, the road to hell."
"One simply turns to the ideological vending machine, and out comes the prepared formulae."
"I write about times and places I would visit in a time machine, like ancient Rome or the Wild West."
"Industrialism is the religion with 'the machine' as the god going to answer all the prayers. Communism and capitalism were just competing sects."
"Now, a living organism is nothing but a wonderful machine endowed with the most marvellous properties and set going by means of the most complex and delicate mechanism."
"The mind is a strange machine which can combine the materials offered to it in the most astonishing ways."
"The machines need to get faster. They need to get cheaper."
"Sing your praise of progress and the doom machine, the naked truth is still taboo whenever it can be seen."
"There is a thrill of vulnerability at all airshows. There is no way of making everything completely safe. When the machines are being thrashed to capacity and the pilots are flying at their limits to dazzle, things are bound to go wrong sometimes. There have been some historic disasters, but the danger is a part of the attraction."
"The purpose creates the machine."
"If the soft machine works, don't fix it. If it works, don't fix it."
"Nothing is less instructive than a machine."
"Coincidences happen, but I've come to believe they are actually quite rare. Something is at work, okay? Somewhere in the universe (or behind it), a great machine is ticking and turning its fabulous gears."
"My whole life I've played music for my own personal enjoyment and the idea of it becoming a machine or a business is just horrible."
"Machinery is the chief symbol of modern civilization; it represents a great sin."
"What if you take a human mind, and upload it into one of these machines?"
