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, 幼女戦記 (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

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

“I play golf like a machine. That machine is a tractor.”
― Jarod Kintz, To be good at golf you must go full koala bear

“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

“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

“We created the Machine, to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will now. It was robbed us of the sense of space and of the sense of touch, it has blurred every human relation and narrowed down love to a carnal act, it has paralysed our bodies and our wills, and now it compels us to worship it.”
― E. M. Foster, The Machine Stops

“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

“Je m'effraie à l'idée qu'il existe des générations spontanées de machines. Des machines inventant des machines à manger du papier pour des machines inventant des machines à produire du papier pour des machines qui... Je frémis.”
― Fabien Marechal, Protection rapprochée

“Ambica Enterprises, a top lathe machine manufacturer and supplier in India, offers a wide range of CNC, mini, tool room, and high-speed lathe machines.”
― Vikram Kumar Sharma

“Human bones are no different than a machine socketed together. We're stronger than we think.”
― Hafsah Faizal, A Steeping of Blood

“In a world of Fast & Furious, AI cars won’t need NOS—they’ll race with pure intelligence. – AIinCars”
― AIinCars

“Both for society as well as for the individual there is a gulf between merely living and living worthily. In order that one may live worthily one must first live. How then can a life of culture be made possible? It is not possible unless there is sufficient leisure. For it is only when there is leisure that a person is free to devote himself to a life of culture. The problem of all problems which human society has to face is how to provide leisure to every individual. What does leisure mean? Leisure means the lessening of the toil and effort necessary for satisfying the physical wants of life. How can leisure be made possible? Leisure is quite impossible unless some means are found whereby the toil required for producing goods necessary to satisfy human needs is lessened. What can lessen such toil? Only when machine takes the place of man. There's no other means of producing leisure. Machinery and modern civilization are thus indispensable for emancipating man from leading the life of a brute, and providing him with leisure and making a life of culture possible. The man who condemns machinery and modern civilization simply does not understand their purpose and the ultimate aim which human society must strive to achieve.”
― B.R. Ambedkar, What Congress And Gandhi Have Done To Untouchables

“Yet we still have countless people who regard men and machinery as separable. They think of the machine as a mere adjunct to life, something which gives faster communication, more production, more entertainment, still failing to see it as one of the great factors in our real lives, and not realizing that our people are as they are because of it. One hears of the Industrial Revolution as though it were a mere phase, finished and done with. It is not, and it shows no sign of ever being completed. And "Industrial Revolution!" — just as though it were like any little turnover of government. the machine came, and life could never be the same again: nor can it be static. But to what further changes is it leading us?”
― John Wyndham, Stowaway to Mars

“You are determined to assume an antagonism between machines and men. You don't understand them. It's your persistent mishandling of them that makes you afraid of them. Why should there be an antagonism? There was a time when we could not exist without them nor they without us, and now, thought that no longer holds, the collaboration continues. Doubtless if they wished they could make an end of us today, but why should they? We are doomed inevitably; they will go on.”
― John Wyndham, Stowaway to Mars