Man As A Machine Quotes & Sayings

As a young man, every bone in my body wanted to pick up a machine gun and kill Germans. And yet I had absolutely no reason to do so. Certainly nobody invited me to do the job. But that's what I felt that I was trained to do. Now no part of my upbringing was militaristic. — Pete Townshend

For seven centuries the existence of Grand Unification Theories and hyperstring post-quantum physics and Core-given understanding of the universe as self-contained and boundless, without Big Bang singularities or corresponding endpoints, had pretty much eliminated any role of God - primitively anthropomorphic or sophisticatedly post-Einsteinian - even as a caretaker or pre-Creation former of rules. The modern universe, as machine and man had come to understand it, needed no Creator; in fact, allowed no Creator. Its rules allowed very little tinkering and no major revisions. It had not begun and would not end, beyond cycles of expansion and contraction as regular and self-regulated as the seasons on Old Earth — Dan Simmons

'American Idol,' for me, is fizzling out. They can't package me, man ... I'm an artist that's created this concept but used the 'American Idol' machine as a marketing tool. — Taylor Hicks

A man is a beggar who only lives to the useful, and, however he may serve as a pin or rivet in the social machine, cannot be saidto have arrived at self-possession. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

How can I know for sure if it's my son speaking and not you?"
"You never can, my lord. Just as no man can ever be sure that he alone is a thinking and feeling creature and everyone else a machine that only pretends to feel and think. — Paul Hoffman

Tools arm the man. One can well say that man is capable of bringing forth a world; he lacks only the necessary apparatus, the corresponding armature of his sensory tools. The beginning is there. Thus the principle of a warship lies in the idea of the shipbuilder, who is able to incorporate this thought by making himself into a gigantic machine, as it were, through a mass of men and appropriate tools and materials. Thus the idea of a moment often required monstrous organs, monstrous masses of materials, and man is therefore a potential, if not an actual creator. — Novalis

The military mind has one aim, and that is to make soldiers react as mechanically as possible. They want the same predictability in a man as they do in a telephone or a machine gun, and they train their soldiers to act as a unit, not as individuals. — Marlon Brando

Our age of mechanization leads along a road ending with man himself as a machine. Only the spirit of singing can save us from this fate. — Zoltan Kodaly

The more I think of it, the more our ideas, our idols and our so-called holy practices, and those of our visions which supposedly are ineffable, all seem to me to be engendered merely by the stirrings of the human machine, exactly as is the wind from our nostrils or from our netherparts, and as is our sweat and salty water from tears, or the white blood passed in love, or the muddy excrement of the body. It enraged me to think that man should so waste his own substance in construction of theories that were almost always pernicious, and should speak of chastity before having examined the whole machinery of sex; that he should debate the question of free will instead of pondering the thousand obscure reasons which, for example, cause you to blink if I suddenly point a stick at your eyes; or that he should talk of Hell before having looked more closely into the question of death. — Marguerite Yourcenar

His eyes kindled and a slight flush sprang into his thin cheeks. For an instant the veil had lifted upon his keen, intense nature, but for an instant only. When I glanced again his face had resumed that red-Indian composure which had made so many regard him as a machine rather than a man. — Arthur Conan Doyle

Yes. I was just telling Elyse here ... frankly, kids, I'm not sure it's even legal to have a female first mate. We'd have to consult the rule book, but as far as I know, regatta's a man's race."
Christian's jaw ticked, just like it had with his father the night of the party. "Damn. Must have hit my head on the way out of that time machine. 1850, are we? I might need some new clothes. Elyse, you sew right? Don't all girls sew? — Sarah Ockler

We who have seen him now, light on his feet, smooth moving as a leopard, a young man with an old man's science, the most beautiful fighting machine I have ever seen, may live to see him fat, slow, old, and bald taking a beating from a younger man. But I would like to hazard a prediction that whoever beats Joe Louis in an honest fight in the next fifteen years will have to get up the floor to do it. — Ernest Hemingway,

would react with violent seizures. Because of the rudimentary working conditions, and the difficulty of correctly reproducing body parts in miniature, this body had been built using only parts from the biggest and fittest of cadavers. The straps were not sufficient to hold me. I tore free. Lightning was cascading through copper rods buried in my chest. I ripped them out. Elixir and blood were being pumped into my body by a machine. I smashed it. I roared like an animal as I began destroying the very tools that had brought me to life. The bellows were manned by one of Dippel's assistants. I remember him looking at me with an expression of terror as I picked him up by the neck. I killed my first man only ten seconds after I had been born. With blood and Elixir pouring from my self-inflicted wounds, I — Larry Correia

Those who think of their house as only a 'machine to live in' should judge their point of view by that Neolithic man, who also lived in a house, but a house that embodied a cosmology. — Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

In truth, one cannot, it seems, oppose mechanism and finalism, one cannot oppose mechanism and anthropomorphism, for if the functioning of a machine is explained by relations of pure causality, the construction of a machine can be understood neither without purpose nor without man. A machine is made by man and for man, with a view toward certain ends to be obtained, in the form of effects to be produced ... a mechanical model of any phenomena is explanatory only so long as we take machines as already granted. — Georges Canguilhem

Regard this body as a machine which, having been made by the hand of God, is incomparably better ordered than any machine that can be devised by man, and contains in itself movements more wonderful than those in any machine ... it is for all practical purposes impossible for a machine to have enough organs to make it act in all the contingencies of life in the way in which our reason makes us act. — Rene Descartes

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an "intelligence explosion," and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make. - IRVING JOHN GOOD, "SPECULATIONS CONCERNING THE FIRST ULTRAINTELLIGENT MACHINE," 1965 — Ray Kurzweil

Since the introduction of inanimate mechanism into British manufactories, man, with few exceptions, has been treated as a secondary and inferior machine; and far more attention has been given to perfect the raw materials of wood and metals than those of body and mind. — Robert Owen

Only man as an individual human being lives; the state is just a system, a mere machine for sorting and tabulating the masses. Anyone, therefore, who thinks in terms of men minus the individual, in huge numbers, atomizes himself and becomes a thief and a robber to himself. He is infected with the leprosy of collective thinking and has become an inmate of that insalubrious stud-farm called the totalitarian State. Our — C. G. Jung

Speed is the form of ecstasy the technical revolution has bestowed on man. As opposed to a motorcyclist, the runner is always present in his body, forever required to think about his blisters, his exhaustion; when he runs he feels his weight, his age, more conscious than ever of himself and of his time of life. This all changes when man delegates the faculty of speed to a machine: from then on, his own body is outside the process, and he gives over to a speed that is noncorporeal, nonmaterial, pure speed, speed itself, ecstasy speed. — Milan Kundera

Finally, if you're as exasperated as I am by the parts problem and have some money to invest, you can take up the really fascinating hobby of machining your own parts. [ ... ] With the welding equipment you can build up worn surfaces with better than original metal and then machine it back to tolerance with carbide tools. [ ... ] If you can't do the job directly you can always make something that will do it. The work of machining a part is very slow, and some parts, such as ball bearings, you're never going to machine, but you'd be amazed at how you can modify parts designs so that you can make them with your equipment, and the work isn't nearly a slow or frustrating as a wait for some smirking parts man to send away to the factory. And the work is gumption building, not gumption destroying. To run a cycle with parts in it you've made yourself gives you a special feeling you can't possibly get from strictly store-bought parts. — Robert M. Pirsig

Where this age differs from those immediately preceding it is that a liberal intelligentsia is lacking. Bully-worship, under various disguises, has become a universal religion, and such truisms as that a machine-gun is still a machine-gun even when a "good" man is squeezing the trigger have turned into heresies which it is actually becoming dangerous to utter. — George Orwell

After a while you'll think no thought the others do not think. You'll know no word the others can't say. And you'll do things because the others do them. You'll feel the danger in any difference whatever-a danger to the crowd of like-thinking, like-acting men ... Once in a while there is a man who won't do what is demanded of him, and do you know what happens? The whole machine devotes itself coldly to the destruction of his difference. They'll beat your spirit and your nerves, your body and your mind, with iron rods until the dangerous difference goes out of you. And if you can't finally give in, they'll vomit you up and leave you stinking outside
neither part of themselves, nor yet free ... They only do it to protect themselves. A thing so triumphantly illogical, so beautifully senseless as an army can't allow a question to weaken it. — John Steinbeck

A man like you is a god, not just a machine covered with skin, but a theater where fine feelings sprout and grow-and feelings are all that matters, as far as I'm concerned. Is a feeling anything but an entire world poured into a thought? — Honore De Balzac

Man seems to be a rickety poor sort of thing, any way you take him; a kind of British Museum of infirmities and inferiorities. He is always undergoing repairs. A machine that was as unreliable as he is would have no market. — Mark Twain

Hatred as an element of the struggle; a relentless hatred of the enemy, impelling us over and beyond the natural limitations that man is heir to and transforming him into an effective, violent, selective and cold killing machine. Our soldiers must be thus; a people without hatred cannot vanquish a brutal enemy. — Che Guevara

Man is willing to accept woman as an equal, as a man in skirts, as an angel, a devil, a baby-face, a machine, an instrument, a bosom, a womb, a pair of legs, a servant, an encyclopaedia, an ideal or an obscenity; the one thing he won't accept her as is a human being, a real human being of the feminine sex. — D.H. Lawrence

When every one is to cultivate himself into man, condemning a man to machine-like labor amounts to the same thing as slavery. If a factory-worker must tire himself to death twelve hours and more, he is cut off from becoming man. Every labor is to have the intent that the man be satisfied ... His labor is nothing taken by itself, has no object in itself, is nothing complete in itself; he labors only into another's hands, and is used (exploited) by this other. — Max Stirner

Technique has penetrated the deepest recesses of the human being. The machine tends not only to create a new human environment, but also to modify man's very essence. The milieu in which he lives is no longer his. He must adapt himself, as though the world were new, to a universe for which he was not created. He was made to go six kilometers an hour, and he goes a thousand. He was made to eat when he was hungry and to sleep when he was sleepy; instead, he obeys a clock. He was made to have contact with living things, and he lives in a world of stone. He was created with a certain essential unity, and he is fragmented by all the forces of the modern world. — Jacques Ellul

The smell of the earth, so astoundingly fresh: it strikes Brown like a thing he might eat. His ears throb. His body feels as if it is still moving through the air. He is, he thinks, the first man ever to fly and stand at the exact same time. The war out of the machine. He holds the small bag of letters up in salute. On they come, soldiers, people, the light drizzle of gray.
Ireland.
A beautiful country. A bit savage on a man all the same.
Ireland. — Colum McCann

To picture Roosevelt as a man at this time in his life - he felt he was old. He was 53 years old, feeling lonely and irrelevant. And all of a sudden, he takes on this campaign, and it becomes a crusade for popular government. And he ultimately goes on fire in the campaign, but he discovers he's up against all the old machine tactics that he used to use himself, and he has to let the public get involved. And he energizes the public through the most extreme kind of rhetoric, which truly brings him into the streets and onto his side. — Geoffrey Cowan

Man should not be in the service of society, society should be in the service of man. When man is in the service of society, you have a monster state, and that's what is threatening the world at this minute ... Certainly Star Wars has a valid mythological perspective. It shows the state as a machine and asks, "Is the machine going to crush humanity or serve humanity?" Humanity comes not from the machine but from the heart. What I see in Star Wars is the same problem that Faust gives us: Mephistopheles, the machine man, can provide us with all the means, and is thus likely to determine the aims of life as well. But of course the characteristic of Faust, which makes him eligible to be saved, is that he seeks aims that are not those of the machine. Now, when Luke Skywalker unmasks his father, he is taking off the machine role that the father has played. The father was the uniform. That is power, the state role. — Joseph Campbell

Man is not a machine that can be remodelled for quite other purposes as occasion demands, in the hope that it will go on functioning as regularly as before but in a quite different way. He carries his whole history with him; in his very structure is written the history of mankind. — Carl Jung

Epic sex?" I sputtered. "By what standards, precisely, is sex judged to be epic?"
"And tons and tons of mortal simps like you used as pawns." Bob sighed happily, ignoring my question. "There are no words. It was like the Lord of the Rings and All My Children made a baby with the Macho Man Randy Savage and a Whac-A-Mole machine. — Jim Butcher

If science could comprehend all phenomena so that eventually in a thoroughly rational society human beings became as predictable as cogs in a machine, then man, driven by this need to know and assert his freedom, would rise up and smash the machine.
What the reformers of the Enlightenment, dreaming of a perfect organization of society, had overlooked, Dostoevski saw all too plainly with the novelist's eye: namely, that as modern society becomes more organized and hence more bureaucratized it piles up at its joints petty figures like that of the Underground Man, who beneath their nondescript surface are monsters of frustration and resentment. — William Barrett

The common experience is, that the man fits himself as well as he can to the customary details of that work or trade he falls into, and tends it as a dog turns a spit. Then he is part of the machine he moves; the man is lost. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is not a struggle merely of economic theories, or forms of government or of military power. At issue is the true nature of man. Either man is the creature whom the psalmist described as a little lower than the angels ... or man is a soulless, animated machine to be enslaved, used and consumed by the state for its own glorification. It is, therefore, a struggle which goes to the roots of the human spirit, and its shadow falls across the long sweep of man's destiny. — Dwight D. Eisenhower

One of man's important mistakes, one which must be remembered, is his illusion in regard to his I. Man such as we know him, the 'man-machine,' the man who cannot 'do,' and with whom and through whom everything 'happens,' cannot have a permanent and single I. His I changes as quickly as his thoughts, feelings and moods, and he makes a profound mistake in considering himself always one and the same person; in reality he is always a different person, not the one he was a moment ago. — G.I. Gurdjieff

These sculptors consituteted a new movement, he claimed. Not for them the bald abstraction of their predecessors. Their creations were rooted in a postwar world of broken buildings and broken people. Their language was one of terror and trepidation. They tore into the human form, flaying it, tearing it limb from limb, discarding what they didn't want. And when they were done, they found themselves presenting to the world an army of creatures - part man, part beast, and sometimes part machine. As one of Harry's teachers at Corsham had said to him: 'When you've seen the inside of a Sherman tank after a direct hit, it all becomes the same thing. — Mark Mills

This is very simple in the world of chicks: some are hoochies, some are not, and some should never try to be. It's no different from the idea of sports. Now, I can go on my little rowing machine for four times a week, twenty-two minutes a time, and I can feel as if I flirt with the sporting world. Similar to the idea that a woman can put on something cuter for her man, for those moments, and flirt with garments that a hoochie woman might be pushing. But never for one moment should you get confused. My little rowing machine and I cannot consider ourselves athletes. Wearing the same garment does not a hoochie woman make. So if you are a true hoochie woman, may garments below the navel always be in your future. If you are not, then please don't throw away your cotton zippy jacket. — Tori Amos

I've always been curious as to why one man jumps out of a fox-hole with a grenade and charges a machine gun nest and his buddy, who sits right there next to him, sits there cowering. My feeling is that the different is tiny between the two. — Stephen Lang

Our civilisation being what it is, you've got to spent eight hours out of every twenty-four as a mixture between an imbecile and a sewing machine. It's very disagreeable, I know. It's humiliating and disgusting. But there you are. You've got to do it, otherwise the whole fabric of our world will fall to bits and we'll starve. Do the job then, idiotically and mechanically; and spend your leisure hours in being a real complete man or woman. — Aldous Huxley

Entering the casino one is beset at every side by invitation - invitations such that it would take a man of stone, heartless, mindless, and curiously devoid of avarice, to decline them. Listen: a machine gun rattle of silver coins as they tumble and spurt down into a slot machine tray and overflow onto monogrammed carpets is replaced by the siren clangor of the slots, the jangling, blippeting chorus swallowed by the huge room, muted to a comforting background chatter by the time one reaches the card tables, the distant sounds only loud enough to keep the adrenaline flowing through the gamblers' veins. — Neil Gaiman

MAN IS FUNDAMENTALLY AN ANIMAL. Animals, as distinct from man, are not machine-like, not sadistic; their societies, within the same species, are incomparably more peaceful than those of man. The basic question, then is: What has made the animal, man, degenerate into a machine? — Wilhelm Reich

I cannot conceive that the man who dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a machine. He also had a heart, just like you. He also had his wife and children, his old mother and father. He was as much a human being as you are - with a difference. He was trained to follow orders without questioning, and when the order was given, he simply followed it. — Osho

You realize you are turning me into some kind of machine?" he noted, nodding down at his HiThere poking through the towel. Simon took the time to place his zucchini bread safely on the coffee table."How cute is that? It's like he's poking his head out from behind a curtain!" I clapped my hands."You may not be aware, but as a general rule, no man likes the word cute in the same sentence as his junk. — Alice Clayton

The life of the body, reduced to its
essentials, paradoxically produces an abstract and gratuitous universe, continuously denied, in its turn, by
reality. This type of novel, purged of interior life, in which men seem to be observed behind a pane of
glass, logically ends, with its emphasis on the pathological, by giving itself as its unique subject the
supposedly average man. In this way it is possible to explain the extraordinary number of "innocents"
who appear in this universe. The simpleton is the ideal subject for such an enterprise since he can only be
defined - and completely defined - by his behavior. He is the symbol of the despairing world in which
wretched automatons live in a machine-ridden universe, which American novelists have presented as a
heart-rending but sterile protest. — Albert Camus

It is not a good thing when man overstrains his reason and tries to reduce to rational
order matters that are not susceptible of rational treatment. Then there arise ideals such as those
of the Americans or of the Bolsheviks. Both are extraordinarily rational, and both lead to a
frightful oppression and impoverishment of life, because they simplify it so crudely. The likeness
of man, once a high ideal, is in process of becoming a machine-made article. It is for madmen
like us, perhaps, to ennoble it again. — Hermann Hesse

We must have a religion - it goes without saying - but my idea is, to have it cut up into forty free sects, so that they will police each other, as had been the case in the United States in my time. Concentration of power in a political machine is bad; and and an Established Church is only a political machine; it was invented for that; it is nursed, cradled, preserved for that; it is an enemy to human liberty, and does no good which it could not better do in a split-up and scattered condition. That wasn't law; it wasn't gospel: it was only an opinion - my opinion, and I was only a man, one man: so it wasn't worth any more than the pope's - or any less, for that matter. — Mark Twain

The educated man pictures a horde of submen, wanting only a day's liberty to loot his house, burn his books, and set him to work minding a machine or sweeping out a lavatory. 'Anything,' he thinks, 'any injustice, sooner than let that mob loose.' He does not see that since there is no difference between the mass of rich and poor, there is no question of setting the mob loose. The mob is in fact loose now, and
in the shape of rich men
is using its power to set up enormous treadmills of boredom, such as 'smart' hotels. — George Orwell

Max had often heard Laundromats were a good place to meet women. He wasn't sure why, since he wasn't one to speak to strangers while folding his underwear, so he didn't imagine women would be any more comfortable doing so. But he'd tried it anyway, using a comforter that didn't fit in his washing machine as an excuse to spend time in the town's only Laundromat.
After spending ninety minutes listening to the life story of a man who was newly divorced, Max had decided the rumor of Laundromats being a good place to meet women was probably started by a Laundromat owner. — Shannon Stacey

The need is not really for more brains, the need is now for a gentler, a more tolerant people than those who won for us against the ice, the tiger and the bear. The hand that hefted the ax, out of some old blind allegiance to the past fondles the machine gun as lovingly. It is a habit man will have to break to survive, but the roots go very deep. — Loren Eiseley

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

Something went greatly wrong in our collective history and the starting point of it was the industrial revolution. Our school systems are focussed on a single objective: to produce model citizens for society in order to feed this machine and prevent its breakdown. That's why our school systems have no interest in developing models that actually require and stimulate useful values in people, such as courage or imagination or inventiveness.
None of these are taught in our schools, on the contrary the system focuses on memorizing. Memorizing is a way of overloading the mind with mental baggage it doesn't really need. Besides being horribly dull and stiffening the effect of 20 years of abundant memorization training is modern man: an unimaginative creature stuffed with useless knowledge and unable to clean his mind of this information dirt: our school systems are purposely constructed to deliver mental automatons that are unable to think creatively. — Martijn Benders

But a man with a machine and inadequate culture - such as I was when I made my pond - is a pestilence. He shakes more than he can hold. — Wendell Berry

Herbert George Wells, better known as H. G. Wells, was an English writer best known for such science fiction novels as The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man and The Island of Doctor Moreau. He was a prolific writer of both fiction and non-fiction, and produced works in many different genres, including contemporary novels, history, and social commentary. He was also an outspoken socialist. His later works become increasingly political and didactic, and only his early science fiction novels are widely read today. Wells, along with Hugo Gernsback and Jules Verne, is sometimes referred to as "The Father of Science Fiction". Source: Wikipedia — H.G.Wells

The cry for freedom is a sign of suppression. It will not cease to ring as long as man feels himself captive. As diverse as the cries for freedom may be, basically they all express one and the same thing: The intolerability of the rigidity of the organism and of the machine-like institutions which create a sharp conflict with the natural feelings for life. Not until there is a social order in which all cries for freedom subside will man have overcome his biological and social crippling, will he have attained genuine freedom. — Wilhelm Reich

She froze when she thought she heard movement in a nearby copse of trees, then scanned the area. Probably just an animal. They tended to be in jungles. She turned back to the stream -
"Put your hands on your head."
Not an animal. As she slowly stood and turned, she recognized that these weren't locals. These were bad guys, three of them with machine guns aimed at her face.
In her present mood that equaled: Why, I believe I'll turn them into frogs! Just as she reached for the mirror in her pocket, they cocked their weapons.
The oldest man was clearly the leader, and his tone was deadly as he said, "Your hands on your head - or I'll put a bullet into it." He didn't have a thick accent. These must be the international narco-terrorists, the ones who made the cartel look mild. So much for the mirror's judgment.
Unless this was still better than Bowen. — Kresley Cole

Alienation as we find it in modern society is almost total ... Man has created a world of man-made things as it never existed before. He has constructed a complicated social machine to administer the technical machine he built. The more powerful and gigantic the forces are which he unleashes, the more powerless he feels himself as a human being. He is owned by his creations, and has lost ownership of himself. — Erich Fromm

Tell her I'm sorry I sold the diamond, eh?" Sammy said. "I broke my promise. When she disappeared in Alaska ... ah, so long ago, I finally used that diamond, moved to Texas as I always dreamed. I started my machine shop. Started my family! It was a good life, but Haze; was right. The diamond came with a curse. I never saw her again."
"Oh, Sammy," Hazel said. "No, a curse didn't keep me away. I wanted to come back. I died!"
The old man didn't seem to hear. He smiled down at the baby, and kissed him on the head. "I give you my blessing, Leo. First male great-grandchild! I have a feeling you are special, like Hazel was. You are more than a regular baby, eh? You will carry on for me. You will see her someday. Tell her hello for me. — Rick Riordan

Still adore me?" he said into that kiss, his tone husky. A tone between lovers, between mates, between a man and the only woman he had ever wanted.

"Too much," was her response. "I only feel whole when I'm with you. Does that make me weak?"

The cat stretched out inside him as she pressed kisses along his jawline, down his neck. "If you're weak, then so am I." He could function without her but in the way a machine functions. His heart, his soul, he had given to her a long time ago. — Nalini Singh

To the average man, life presents itself, not as material malleable to his hand, but as a series of problems ... which he has to solve ... And he is distressed to find that the more means he can dispose of - such as machine-power, rapid transport, and general civilized amenities, the more his problems grow in hardness and complexity ... .Perhaps the first thing he can learn form the artists is that the only way of 'mastering' one's material is to abandon the whole conception of mastery and to co-operate with it in love: whosoever will be a lord of life, let him be its servant. — Dorothy L. Sayers

chain kept moving, and Ball led the file down through Virginia into North Carolina at a steady pace. As the days wore on, the men, who were never out of the chains, grew dirtier and dirtier. Lice hopped from scalp to scalp at night. Black-and-red lines of scabs bordered the manacles. No matter: The Georgia-man would let the people clean themselves before they got to market. In the meantime, the men were the propellant for the coffle-chain, which was more than a tool, more than mere metal. It was a machine. Its iron links and bands forced the black people inside them to do exactly what entrepreneurial enslavers, and investors far distant from slavery's frontier, needed them to do in order to turn a $300 Maryland or Virginia purchase into a $600 Georgia sale. — Edward E. Baptist

Which brings us to a little book that may provide a clue to the cure. My wife got it as a gift from a friend. It is titled Porn for Women. It's a picture book of hunks, photographed in all their chiseled, muscle-bound, testosterone-marinated, PG-rated glory. Lots of naked chests and low-cut jeans, complete with tousled hair and beckoning eyes. And they are ALL doing housework. There's a picture of a well-cut Adonis, and he's loading the washing machine. The caption reads: "As soon as I finish the laundry, I'll do the grocery shopping. And I'll take the kids with me so you can relax." There's another hunk, the cover guy, vacuuming the floor. A particularly athletic-looking man peers up from the sports section and declares, "Ooh, look, the NFL playoffs are today. I bet we'll have no trouble parking at the crafts fair". Porn for Women. Available at a marriage near you. — Anonymous

The hippies of the 1960s did understand something. They were right in fighting the plastic culture, and the church should have been fighting it too ... More than this, they were right in the fact that the plastic culture - modern man, the mechanistic worldview in university textbooks and in practice, the total threat of the machine, the establishment technology, the bourgeois upper middle class - is poor in its sensitivity to nature ... As a utopian group, the counterculture understands something very real, both as to the culture as a culture, but also as to the poverty of modern man's concept of nature and the way the machine is eating up nature on every side. — Francis A. Schaeffer

We can set no limit to human potentialities; all that is best in man can be bettered; it is not a question of producing a highly efficient machine, ... but of quickening all the distinctly human features, all that is best in man, all the different qualities, some obvious, some infinitely subtle, which we recognize as humanly excellent. — Ronald Fisher

If we present a man with a concept of man which is not true, we may well corrupt him. When we present man as an automaton of reflexes, as a mind-machine, as a bundle of instincts, as a pawn of drives and reactions, as a mere product of instinct, heredity and environment, we feed the nihilism to which modern man is, in any case, prone.
I became acquainted with the last stage of that corruption in my second concentration camp, Auschwitz. The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity and environment; or as the Nazi liked to say, 'of Blood and Soil.' I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some Ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers. — Viktor E. Frankl

It occurred to me that if I could invent a machine - a gun - which could by its rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that it would, to a large extent supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently, exposure to battle and disease [would] be greatly diminished. — Richard Jordan Gatling

I've seen pretty clear, ever since I was a young un, as religion's something else besides notions. It isn't notions sets people doing the right things
it's feelings. It's the same with the notions in religion as it is with math'matics
a man may be able to work problems straight off in's head as he sits by the fire and smokes his pipe; but if he has to make a machine or a building, he must have a will and a resolution, and love something else better than his own ease. — George Eliot

Suddenly I realize that this is what I've been waiting for - a man who depends entirely on me ... I dreamed for years of a man who couldn't live without me, a man who pictured my face when he closed his eyes, who loved me when I was a mess in the morning and when dinner was late and even when I overloaded the washing machine and burned out the motor. [My son] stares up at me as if I can do no wrong. I have always wanted someone who treats me the way he does; I just didn't know that I'd have to give birth to him. — Jodi Picoult

In the tired hand of a dying man, Theodore Senior had written: The 'Machine politicians' have shown their colors ... I feel sorry for the country however as it shows the power of partisan politicians who think of nothing higher than their own interests, and I feel for your future. We cannot stand so corrupt a government for any great length of time. — Edmund Morris

I stopped thinking and watched in horror as Tex banged the portafilter on top of the espresso machine. Monty hit a button and was drowned out by Tex's voice shouting, "Fucking steam! Give me some more fucking steam, you monster!" Which was followed by Duke shouting, "It only gives as much steam as it gives, man!"
Wonderful. — Kristen Ashely

No man dares to condemn the Christian faith today, because the Christian faith has not been tried. Not until men get rid of the thought that it is a poor machine, an expedient for saving them from suffering and pain; not until they get the grand idea of it as the great power of God present in and through the lives of men; not until then does Christianity enter upon its true trial and become ready to show what it can do. — Phillips Brooks

How can we dare to predict the behavior of man? We may predict the movements of a machine, of an automaton; more than this, we many even try to predict the mechanisms or "dynamisms" of the human psyche as well. But man is more than psyche. — Viktor E. Frankl

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

Understand this clearly: you can teach a man to draw a straight line, and to carve it; and to copy and carve any number of given lines or forms, with admirable speed and perfect precision; and you find his work perfect of its kind: but if you ask him to think about any of those forms, to consider if he cannot find any better in his own head, he stops; his execution becomes hesitating; he thinks, and ten to one he thinks wrong; ten to one he makes a mistake in the first touch he gives to his work as a thinking being. But you have made a man of him for all that. He was only a machine before, an animated tool. — John Ruskin

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

Especially he walked the hospitals with much attention and interest, ever warned by Cupples to beware lest he should come to regard a man as a physical machine, and so grow a mere doctoring machine himself. — Anonymous

What had transpired that day in 1903, in the stiff winds and cold of the Outer Banks in less than two hours time, was one of the turning points in history, the beginning of change for the world far greater than any of those present could possibly have imagined. With their homemade machine, Wilbur and Orville Wright had shown without a doubt that man could fly and if the world did not yet know it, they did. Their flights that morning were the first ever in which a piloted machine took off under its own power into the air in full flight, sailed forward with no loss of speed, and landed at a point as high as that from which it started. — David McCullough

God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on petrol, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself. — C.S. Lewis

Sometimes parties of men went spud-gathering in no-man's-land. About a mile to the right of us, where the lines were closer together, there was a patch of potatoes that was frequented both by the Fascists and ourselves. We went there in the daytime, they only at night, as it was commanded by our machine-guns. One night to our annoyance they turned out en masse and cleared up the whole patch. We discovered another patch further on, where there was practically no cover and you had to lift the potatoes lying on your belly - a fatiguing job. If their machine-gunners spotted you, you had to flatten yourself out like a rat when it squirms under a door, with the bullets cutting up the clods a few yards behind you. It seemed worth it at the time. Potatoes were getting very scarce. If you got a sackful you could take them down to the cook-house and swap them for a water-bottleful of coffee. And — George Orwell

For the first time since she met him, she asked herself whether mr Dodgson was really the sunny personality she had at first imagined. Did she honestly want to spend the rest of her life with him, setting up home in a bathing machine, and living on what she could catch in a shrimp net? She pulled a face, stood up, brushed her frock. She was only eight, she told herself. As Jessie Fowler had pointed out this afternoon, a girl of eight needn't say yes to the first man who says he loves his love with a D. 'Panic about spinsterhood when you are ten and a half', said the worldly Jessie. 'But really, not before'. — Lynne Truss

The man who will follow precedent, but never create one, is merely an obvious example of the routineer. You find him desperately numerous in the civil service, in the official bureaus. To him government is something given as unconditionally, as absolutely as ocean or hill. He goes on winding the tape that he finds. His imagination has rarely extricated itself from under the administrative machine to gain any sense of what a human, temporary contraption the whole affair is. What he thinks is the heavens above him is nothing but the roof. — Walter Lippmann

Turning off the electric light he continued the conversation with himself. It is the light of course but it is necessary that the place be clean and pleasant. You do not want music. Certainly you do not want music. Nor can you stand before a bar with dignity although that is all that is provided for these hours. What did he fear? It was not fear or dread. It was a nothing that he knew too well. It was all a nothing and a man was nothing too. It was only that and light was all it needed and a certain cleanness and order. Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it all was nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada. Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee. He smiled and stood before a bar with a shining steam pressure coffee machine. — Ernest Hemingway,

So I make one phone call, and just like that, we're eating pizza at 6:30. What is this world? You tap seven abstract figures onto a piece of plastic thin as a billfold, hold that plastic device to your head, use your lungs and vocal cords to indicate more abstractions, and in thirty minutes, a guy pulls up in a 2,000-pound machine made on an island on the other side of the world, fueled by viscous liquid made from the rotting corpses of dead organisms pulled from the desert on yet another side of the world and you give this man a few sheets of green paper representing the abstract wealth of your home nation, and he gives you a perfectly reasonable facsimile of one of the staples of the diet of a people from yet another faraway nation.
And the mushrooms are fresh. — Jess Walter