Cog Quotes & Sayings

I surrendered my moral conscience to the fact that I was a soldier, and therefore a cog in a relatively low position of a great machine. — Otto Ohlendorf

I'm not that bothered about press nights as an actor or, particularly, by what people say about me, because I see myself as a reasonably small cog. — Rory Kinnear

Time is the cog that turns the wheel
Winter leaves scars that do not heal
Summer is a fire that burns inside
Knowledge is a terrible burden to hide
Strength and death go hand in hand
One answer lies within the sand
But seek the answer all alone
Lest the sand claim you as its own. — Julie Kagawa

Peope, especially unhappy people, want a cause. They want something to belong to, to be a part of something great and bigger, and to be led. It's easy to be a cog in a machine: you don't have to think, you have no responsibility. You're just following orders, doing as you're told. — Ilona Andrews

Raindrops misted the Ridderzal's immense rosette window. Water dripped from the architectural tracery that turned the window into a stained glass cog. It streaked the colored panes of oculi and quatrefoils depicting the empire's arms: a rosy cross surrounded by the arms of the great families all girded by the teeth of the universal cog. — Ian Tregillis

Soothsayers are like that. They see many futures but never their own. — Jasper Fforde

And then he looks at me in that way of his, that way that suggests you aren't exactly a human being, but rather a possible cog, a potential working part of one of his mysterious ideas. — Brock Clarke

There's a huge difference between being a replaceable cog on the assembly line and being the one who is missed, the one with a unique contribution, the one who made a difference. — Seth Godin

a samurai is a total human being, whereas a man who is completely absorbed in his technical skill has degenerated into a 'function', one cog in a machine. — Yukio Mishima

I know them, yea,
And what they weigh, even to the utmost scruple;
Scambling, out-facing, fashion-mong'ring boys,
That lie, and cog, and flout, deprave, and slander,
Go antickly, and show outward hideousness,
And speak off half a dozen dangerous words,
How they might hurt their enemies, if they durst;
And this is all. — William Shakespeare

He turned away from me, the better to hide the exclamation of annoyance which he muttered under his breath; I caught only what seemed to be the syllable cog (perhaps a reference to my mechanical trade) and the word succour (a prayer for divine assistance?). — K.W. Jeter

While people will submit to suffering which may hit anyone, they will not so easily submit to suffering which is the result of the decision of authority. It may be bad to be just a cog in an impersonal machine; but it is infinitely worse if we can no longer leave it, if we are tied to our place and to the superiors who have been chosen for us. Dissatisfaction of everybody with his lot will inevitably grow with the consciousness that it is the result of deliberate human decision. — Friedrich Hayek

We need adventure, we need meaning, we need identity. We need love. Someone who has seen us through loving eyes has awakened us from the ranks of the formerly dead. Most people bear the terminal stress of walking the world unseen, a mere number or cog in a lifeless machine. — Marianne Williamson

I only wanted to be a good employee who generated as much profit as possible for his employer. I was merely a small cog in the machine - and now I'm suddenly supposedly the main person responsible for the financial crisis. — Jerome Kerviel

That's the problem. People, especially unhappy people, want a cause. They want something to belong to, to be a part of something great and bigger, and to be led. It's easy to be a cog in a machine: you don't have to think, you have no responsibility. You're just following orders. Doing as you're told." "I — Ilona Andrews

I have five flashlights and each performs its own trick. I have a raincoat with zippers and net material so I never get too hot in a downpour. I have a shelf crammed with books and a shortwave that speaks Arabic, Japanese, Dutch and Russian. They have mud huts with maybe a few chairs and faded pages of old magazines fastened to the wall. I ride my twenty-one speed Peace Corps-issue bike to Ferke not to save a dollar on transport but for the luxury of exercise. They ride in from their settlements on cranky old mopeds or bikes with a single cog because it's the only option. And they give me charity. I just stare at it - near tears. To refuse their offer would be pure insult. So I do the rounds again shaking hands with all the men in boubous saying over and over "An y che " Thank you. — Sarah Erdman

The trouble is the field of science, medicine, universities, biotech companies - you name it - have been so splintered, layers, sub-divided, hacked that people can spend their entire career studying one tiny little cog of life. — Craig Venter

You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both. Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions. If you will have that precision out of them, and make their fingers measure degrees like cog-wheels, and their arms strike curves like compasses, you must unhumanize them. All the energy of their spirits must be given to make cogs and compasses of themselves ... .On the other hand, if you will make a man of the working creature, you cannot make him a tool. Let him but begin to imagine, to think, to try to do anything worth doing; and the engine-turned precision is lost at once. Out come all his roughness, all his dulness, all his incapability; shame upon shame, failure upon failure, pause after pause: but out comes the whole majesty of him also; and we know the height of it only when we see the clouds settling upon him. — John Ruskin

We're just cogs in a machine really, aren't we?" Miss Fawcett said to her and Ursula said, "But remember, without the cog there is no machine. — Kate Atkinson

Because I cannot flatter and look fair,
Smile in men's faces, smooth, deceive, and cog,
Duck with French nods and apish courtesy,
I must be held a rancorous enemy. — William Shakespeare

Then again, what Cosimo had said was right: he was nothing but an overworked drone in a cube farm, a minor cog in the dreary machinery of a third-rate mortgage mill, overlooked, unloved, a sidelined player in the big game, — Stephen R. Lawhead

The only thing of value on this earth is that each of us is an individual and not a cog in a machine. No man is better than another because of circumstance or fortune, but each important to his own. — Harold Robbins

The whole tendency of modern life is towards scientific planning and organisation, central control, standardisation, and specialisation. If this tendency was left to work itself out to its extreme conclusion, one might expect to see the state transformed into an immense social machine, all the individual components of which are strictly limited to the performance of a definite and specialised function, where there could be no freedom because the machine could only work smoothly as long as every wheel and cog performed its task with unvarying regularity. Now the nearer modern society comes to the state of total organisation, the more difficult it is to find any place for spiritual freedom and personal responsibility. Education itself becomes an essential part of the machine, for the mind has to be as completely measured and controlled by the techniques of the scientific expert as the task which it is being trained to perform. — Christopher Henry Dawson

Look at yourself! You're a priest. You know damn well that if I were setting out to make a girl at this moment instead of young Paolo, you'd take an entirely different view. You'd disapprove, sure! You'd read me a lecture on fornication and all the rest. But you wouldn't be too unhappy. I'd be normal ... according to nature! But I am not made like that. God didn't make me like that. But do I need love the less? Do I need satisfaction less? Have I less right to live in contentment because somewhere along the line the Almighty slipped a cog in creation? ... What's your answer to that Meredith? What's your answer for me? Tie a knot in myself and take up badminton and wait till they make me an angel in heaven, where they don't need this sort of thing any more? I'm lonely! I need love like the next man! My sort of love! — Morris L. West

The factory might have given us the millionfold productivity increases that yielded the Industrial Revolution, but it achieved those gains by chaining us to machines, deskilling the artisan and turning him into a cog in the factory, stripped of judgment and dignity and disconnected from the rhythms of his spirit and the world around him. — William Gibson

I deny the resurrection every time I turn my back on the poor or become a cog in a system of injustice — Peter Rollins

You have to live a little." Grandma fitted the track bar into the cog on the track. "Go out with a bad boy. Run headfirst into a fight. Get roaring drunk. Something! — Ilona Andrews

You pretend to be more eccentric than you actually are because you worry you are an interchangeable cog. — Douglas Coupland

One kind of person is engaged in society without realizing it; another kind engages in society by controlling it. The one is a gear, a cog, and the other an engineer, a driver. But a person who has opted out has only his ability to express his disengagement between his existence and nothingness. — John Fowles

I don't want to be disrespectful to people who are incredible at their craft, but the truth is, if I didn't get paid for it, I wouldn't act. The best-paying jobs are usually the worst films. You're a very small cog in a big machine. — Paddy Considine

I want to prevent as many men as possible from pretending that they have to do this or that because they must earn a living. It is not true. One can starve to death - it is much better. Every man who voluntarily starves to death jams another cog in the automatic process. I would rather see a man take a gun and kill his neighbor, in order to get the food he needs, than keep up the automatic process by pretending that he has to earn a living. — Henry Miller

In picture-making the writer is the most important cog in the wheel. — Samuel Goldwyn

It stems from my Australianisms and belief that everyone is a fundamental cog in the wheel. — Janet Holmes A Court

Our children should learn the general framework of their government and then they should know where they come in contact with the government, where it touches their daily lives and where their influence is exerted on the government. It must not be a distant thing, someone else's business, but they must see how every cog in the wheel of a democracy is important and bears its share of responsibility for the smooth running of the entire machine. — Eleanor Roosevelt

I like being a cog in a wheel. I like being a small aspect of a much bigger thing, and I think my interest in that takes the pressure of myself. — Charlize Theron

someone exceedingly loyal, a true yes-man, a cog who knew when to turn, when to stay still. — Ben Mezrich

She supposed she was a little cog in the big wheel of Empire. "Nothing wrong with being a cog," Maurice said, himself now a big wheel in the Home Office. "The world needs cogs. — Kate Atkinson

You're one microscopic cog in his catastrophic plan. — Nick Cave

The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant, "What good is it?" If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering. — Aldo Leopold

And I thought, I am in love. For the first time I am in love. And loved. Someone loves me. And I love them. And within me things clicked and whirled like the insides of some gigantic clock, cog against wheel, spring against spiral, tick against tock, and I knew that nothing would ever be the same again. I had shown someone what I really was. I had shown someone my truth, my secret. Out there, beyond the walls of the Castle, there was a boy who had seen inside my chrysalis. And I would never be safe again. — Philip Ridley

An introspective person seeks to attain a pure state of consciousness by merging finitude in infinity and by expressing the rapture of the soul through the contemplation and adoration of beauty. In this brief interlude of time, I surrender to becoming a cog in the roadway, an insentient time traveler, a ward of eternity, a day-tripper, a nighttime dream weaver, a blip in the cosmos, a freebase glob of energy, an imaginable disk of bundled vitality that wants for nothing. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Sometimes, when you do the music for a play, there are very clear boundaries as to what needs to be achieved. You're very much a little cog in a much bigger machine. — Richard Dawson

Patents have long served as a fundamental cog in the American machine, cherished in our national soul. — James Gleick

, civilization is an ever-changing tacit agreement, culturally inherited, not chosen at birth. Civilization is the invention of man, my big friend. It is a means of ensuring order and structure; it is man's attempt to expunge all and every act of randomness from daily life. The ultimate goal of civilization is determinism, the complete absence of freewill. If everyone adhered to every rule, every demand, every decree of civilization, there would be no accidents, no arguments, no crime! Man would move through his life smoothly, like a well-oiled cog in a grandfather clock. — Peter Jelen

In our age where the average person is a cog wheel who gets pushed in the subways, elevators, department stores, cafeterias, lives in the same house as the next fellow, has the same style of furniture, [and] wears the same clothing, . . . the ownership of a different car provides the means to ascertain his individuality to himself and everybody around," he added.16 In his own awkward way, Duntov had expressed the potential of the Corvette. — Paul Ingrassia

No, it's human, Curran said. That's the problem. People, especially unhappy people, want a cause. They want something to belong to, to be a part of something great and bigger, and to be led. It's easy to be a cog in a machine: you don't have to think, you have no responsibility. You're just following orders. Doing as your told. — Ilona Andrews

Everything Ticketmaster stands for is what we're fighting against. They're just a small cog in a machine where the artist is at the bottom. — Jeff Ament

Try to find your individuality, your integrity, and make the effort of not compromising. Because the more you compromise, the less you are an individual. You are only a cog in the wheel, just a part in the vast mechanism, just a small part of the mob - not an individual in your own beauty, in your own right. I am absolutely against compromise. Death is far more beautiful than a life of compromise. — Rajneesh

Without writing, what would I have become? Nothing. In China the individual used to be treated as a screw or a small cog in the revolutionary machine. I wanted to be a human being with a voice. — Ha Jin

Tosh throws up her hands. 'Tell me what you want!'
What I want...
To smell the desert after rain? To awake each morning beneath a soft Cheyenne blanket, skin still heavy with his scent? To rip out the flawed cog inside of me that brought it all to a screeching halt, then wind back through the years and do everything all over again. Perhaps that is what I want. A different ending. — Allyson Stack

If we have a purpose in life beyond being a cog in the human machine, mine is to help inspire people and that's pretty cool. I would like to motivate the world. — Steve Gleason

Man does not suffer so much from poverty today as he suffers from the fact that he has become a cog in a large machine, an automaton, that his life has become empty and lost its meaning. — Erich Fromm

they had become almost used to these coincidences that could not possibly be coincidences, to the feeling that each one was the click of some great turning cog. — Stephen King

I don't just want to be another cog in the gears of Hollywood. — Scott Porter

A good idea turns every cog in your mind, making you scared of bed in case the whole machine grinds to a halt. — Trevor Baylis

At the end of the day, an actor is only a cog in the wheel. — Randeep Hooda

I do not want to be a robot, a cog in society who answers 'yes' because 'yes' is considered the appropriate answer. Neither do I want to be a protestor. I just want to seek out what lies underneath the veils of politeness and programming that I've been given as a person in this society. — Damien Rice

But at the same time who would ever think, "I'm an unimportant little person, and if I end up just a cog in society's system, gradually worn down until I die, hey - that's okay"? — Haruki Murakami

A company is people ... employees want to know ... am I being listened to or am I a cog in the wheel? People really need to feel wanted. — Richard Branson

When I was cognizant of the war, I was very angry at the street-corner liberals who were trying to defame the footsoldier. Because there was a man who had no choice. He was a cog in the wheel, just trying to survive. I was always aware of that. — Sylvester Stallone

Escape from Freedom attempts to show, modern man still is anxious and tempted to surrender his freedom to dictators of all kinds, or to lose it by transforming himself into a small cog in the machine, well fed, and well clothed, yet not a free man but an automaton. — Erich Fromm

A pawn in a very complicated game, a little cog in a huge gear, so little that it should not even be seen: in fact, it was established that I would go through here without leaving any traces; and instead, every minute I spend here I am leaving more traces. I leave traces if I do not speak with anyone, since I stick out as a man who won't open his mouth; I leave traces if I speak with someone because every word spoken is a word that remains and can crop up again later, with quotation marks or without. Perhaps this is why the author piles supposition on supposition in long paragraphs without dialogue, a thick, opaque layer of lead where I may pass unnoticed, disappear.
I am not at all the sort of person who attracts attention, I am an anonymous presence against an even more anonymous background. — Italo Calvino

The individual has become a mere cog in an enormous organization of things and powers which tear from his hands all progress, spirituality, and value in order to transform them from their subjective form into the form of a purely objective life. — Georg Simmel

Wherever you see a man who gives someone else's corruption, someone else's prejudice as a reason for not taking action himself, you see a cog in The Machine that governs us. — John Jay Chapman

We talked through Gillie's life from start to finish, including all her accomplishments and major life events. The woman fell asleep with a dreamy half smile still on her lips.
I remained by her bedside. Cog would be amused by my efforts to comfort an upper. No. Not amused. Proud. I liked Ella. She was a good sort, much nicer than Trella, and I hoped she managed to survive the next thirty hours. — Maria V. Snyder

The cable commentariat is a cog in the corpulent D.C. fleshpot. — Ilana Mercer

Sex and love represent one of the numerous absurdities and hopeless incongruences demarking human nature. A person whom only seeks out sex and eschews love will live a barren existence. Sex without love is a brute display of physical reproductive capacity. Sex is not a worthless or stupid activity when it forms a cog in a loving and affectionate relationship. Sex and love might not make the world go round, but when joined they make it a better place to live in. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Freedom to creat and construct, to wonder and to venture. Such freedom requires that the individual be active and responsible, not a slave or a well-fed cog in the machine ... It is not enough that men are not slaves; if social conditions further the existence of automatons, the result will not be love of life, but love of death. — Erich Fromm

Okay - the world needs its cogs, all of them; and even a cog may say how it gets used. In fact, only a cog may determine its eventual meaning in the system. That's what I wanted to tell you. — Keigo Higashino

I was just a screw or cog in the great machine I called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was of no use anywhere else. — Edith Wharton

But the fact is, Mr. Chairman, for all the challenges the Postal Service of the 21st century faces, it still retains its traditional place as a key cog in how American businesses conduct their affairs and how Americans all across this land communicate. — John M. McHugh

Inflation is the fiscal complement of statism and arbitrary government. It is a cog in the complex of policies and institutions which gradually lead toward totalitarianism . — Ludwig Von Mises

She stopped shrieking after a moment. It wasn't the crazy looks she drew from the other pedestrians that made her stop. And her damaged sanity hadn't managed to repair itself. She'd left something behind in that apartment. Something she'd always taken for granted. Faith in a rational world. It was like a tiny cog had been removed from her brain, and all the gears were still working, but a slight wobble was slowly and inevitably stripping the teeth until one day, without warning the Rube Goldberg device that was her mind would fall apart with a loud SPROING. — A. Lee Martinez

It seems to have been meeting Methodist missionaries from India that inspired Margaret with her ambition, curious in someone little more than a child, to join the Indian Civil Service After listening to them, she remembered, 'I wanted to be an Indian civil servant, because I thought that India was a remarkable place and I would love to be a part, a cog in the wheel, of this great empire. (page 6) — Charles Moore

The question is, does the educated citizen know he is only a cog in an ecological mechanism? That if he will work with that mechanism his mental wealth and his material wealth can expand indefinitely? But that if he refuses to work with it, it will ultimately grind him to dust? If education does not teach us these things, then what is education for? — Aldo Leopold

It is beneath human dignity to lose one's individuality and become a mere cog in the machine. — Mahatma Gandhi

I will starve till prophets find me,
I will bleed till angels bind me,
Still I sing till churches blind me,
Still I love till cog-wheels wind me. — Leonard Cohen

I think of my own life, how it embraces a great quest to know every cog of nature
the names of oaks and ferns, the secret lives of birds, the taste of venison and Ogeechee lime, wax myrtle's smell and rattlesnake's, the contour of bobcat tracks, the number of barred owl cackles, the feel of Okefenokee Swamp water on my skin under a blistering sun.
I search for a vital knowledge of the land that my father could not teach me, as he was not taught, and guidance to know and honor it, as he was not guided, as if this will shield me from the errancies of the mind, or bring me back from that dark territory should I happen to wander there. I search as if there were peace to be found. — Janisse Ray

What makes Disney movies and Pixar movies always so good, hey take time and they're constantly honing, and tweaking, and rejiggering things, and taking influences from every cog, including myself, that can help. Any place where there can be inspiration. They make every moment very layered and very rich. — Sarah Silverman

It's the same in the office, the lab, the factory. Employees and coworkers are more productive, more loyal - satisfied and happy - when they are treated fairly, decently, and with dignity than when they are used and taken for granted, when they feel like no more than a tiny cog in a giant corporate wheel. — Wayne D. Dosick

The individual is not a cog in a monstrous machine; it is within his power to modify the very laws which imprison him and the very relationship maintained by the Judge with the accused and witnesses. If it is true, as the Baal Shem says, that it is possible for man to hide the light of dawn emanating from the forest simply by shielding his eyes with his hands, still it is no less true that he can rediscover it by merely moving his hands. — Elie Wiesel

In spite of its glowing talk about the welfare of the masses, Communism's methods and philosophy strip man of his dignity and worth, leaving him as little more than a depersonalized cog in the ever-turning wheel of the state. — Martin Luther King Jr.

I have tried hard - but life is difficult, and I am a very useless person. I can hardly be said to have an independent existence. I was just a screw or a cog in the great machine called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was no use anywhere else. What can one do when one finds out that one only fits into one hole? One must go back to it or be thrown out into the rubbish heap - and you don't know what it's like in the rubbish heap! — Edith Wharton