Machines Quotes

A machine is more blameless, more sinless even than any animal. It has no intentions whatsoever but our own.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Youth is only being in a way like it might be an animal. No, it is not just like being an animal so much as being like one of these malenky toys you viddy being sold in the streets, like little chellovecks made out of tin and with a spring inside and then a winding handle on the outside and you wind it up grrr grrr grrr and off it itties, like walking, O my brothers. But it itties in a straight line and bangs straight into things bang bang and it cannot help what it is doing. Being young is like being like one of these malenky machines.

~ Anthony Burgess

The World's Fair audience tended to think of the machine as unqualifiedly good, strong, stupid and obedient. They thought of it as a giant slave, an untiring steel Negro, controlled by Reason in a world of infinite resources.

~ Robert Hughes

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

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

The machines are too dull when weare lion-poems that move & breathe.

~ Michael Mcclure

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

I'm like a machine being run over its RPM limit. The bearings are overheating: a minute longer and the metal will melt and start dripping and that will be the end of everything. I need a splash of cold water, logic; I pour it on in buckets but the logic hisses on the hot bearings and dissipates in the air as a fleeting white mist

~ Yevgeny Zamyatin

To let the brain work without sufficient material is like racing an engine. It racks itself to pieces.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

The machines men are so intent on making have carried them very far from the old sweet things.

~ Sherwood Anderson

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

It was machines that scanned the heavens, machines that probed the space between atoms, machines that asked the questions and designed to experiments to answer them. All that was left for mere meat, apparently, was navel-gazing.

~ Peter Watts

Many of the younger generation know my name in a vague way and connect it with grotesque inventions, but don't believe that I ever existed as a person. They think I am a nonperson, just a name that signifies a tangled web of pipes or wires or strings that suggest machinery. My name to them is like a spiral staircase, veal cutlets, barber's itch—terms that give you an immediate picture of what they mean.

~ Rube Goldberg

Machines were the ideal metaphor for the central pornographic fantasy of the nineteenth century, rape followed by gratitude.

~ Robert Hughes

So this talk, or touch if I were there,Should work its effortless gadgetry of love,Like Dante’s heaven, and melt into the air.If it doesn’t, of course, I’ve fallen. So much is chance,So much agility, desire, and feverish care,As bicyclists and harpsicordists proveWho only by moving can balance,Only by balancing move.

~ Michael Donaghy

Women are nothing but machines for producing children.

~ Napoléon Bonaparte

The thing that we possess, that machines don't, is the ability to exhibit wisdom.

~ Herbie Hancock

In consequence of inventing machines, men will be devoured by them.

~ Jules Verne