Thinking Machine Quotes & Sayings

I am not fighting machinery as such, but the madness of thinking that machinery saves labor. Men save labor until thousands of them are without work and die of hunger on the streets. I want to secure employment and livelihood not only to part of the human race, but for all. I will not have the enrichment of a few at the expense of the community. At present the machine is helping a small minority to live on the exploitation of the masses. The motive force of this minority is not humanity or love of their kind, but greed and avarice. — Mahatma Gandhi

When we think that the machine will harm man, then it is perhaps because we are not yet capable of judging the rapid changes it has brought about. We hardly feel at home in this landscape of mines and power stations. We have just moved into this new home that we have not even finished yet. Everything around us has changed so fast - personal relations, working conditions, habits. Even our state of mind is in turmoil. — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

By mastering both aspects of our being we remember not only how to think, but what to think. What I'm clear about now is that the mind is a tool, a mechanism, and the soul provides the fuel for that machine. The less fuel you use, the more inefficiently the engine will operate. On the other hand, if your soul fills your mind with spiritual energy, you will be Mind-Full - and the workings of this engine can produce miracles. — Neale Donald Walsch

Whatever the advantages of the machine may be - and they are many - the very ease of its use is bound to make away with intimacy - the intercourse of human beings, of animals, or of that which we still think of as the natural world. — Freya Stark

What's amazing about Sarah [Brightman] is that she's sustained such a career. She just keeps going - she's like a machine. She tours and records and loves what she does. I think she's a really good example to anybody in the industry that there is life beyond the shows. — Kerry Ellis

Her dissertation on Dutch women painters of the Golden Age sits unfinished in her apartment, a half-typed sheet of paper mildewing in the mouth of a Remington. It's been months since she worked on it and she sometimes finds herself staring at the machine's bullnose profile or the chrome-plated carriage return, thinking: Remington also makes rifles. — Dominic Smith

When, in an 1892 lecture before a group of teachers, William James declared that "the art of remembering is the art of thinking," he was stating the obvious.14 Now, his words seem old-fashioned. Not only has memory lost its divinity; it's well on its way to losing its humanness. Mnemosyne has become a machine. — Nicholas Carr

A living system continually re-creates itself. But how this occurs in social systems such as global institutions depends on our level of awareness, both individually and collectively ... As long as our thinking is governed by industrial, "machine age" metaphors such as control, predicatbility, and "faster is better", we will continue to re-create institutions as we have, despite their increasing disharmony with the larger world. — Betty Sue Flowers

I think the Grammys are nothing more than some gigantic promotional machine for the music industry. They cater to a low intellect and they feed the masses. They don't honor the arts or the artist for what he created. It's the music business celebrating itself. — Maynard James Keenan

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

Man is improvable. Some people think he is only a machine, and that the only difference between a man and a mill is, that one is carried by blood and the other by water. — Horace Mann

The ethical rule is from Samuel Johnson who believed that maintenance of easily removable ignorance by a responsible office holder was treacherous malfeasance in meeting moral obligation. The prudential rule is that underlying the old Warner & Swasey advertisement for machine tools: "The man who needs a new machine tool, and hasn't bought it, is already paying for it". The Warner & Swasey rule also applies, I believe, to thinking tools. If you don't have the right thinking tools, you, and the people you seek to help, are already suffering from your easily removable ignorance. — Charlie Munger

Have you ever tried thinking of God as a person instead of an all-powerful vending machine that never gives you the right amount of change? He has feelings too, you know. — Angela N. Blount

The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do. The mystery which surrounds a thinking machine already surrounds a thinking man. — B.F. Skinner

I see things in the middle of the night. I draw them on paper and I don't even think about it. I'm like a machine in a way - just made of some electronic stuff. Vaguely digital. — Karl Lagerfeld

I came to a point where I needed solitude and just stop the machine of 'thinking' and 'enjoying' what they call 'living', I just wanted to lie in the grass and look at the clouds. — Jack Kerouac

I think there's a fundamental moral issue about whether it's right for a machine to decide to kill a person. It's bad enough that people are deciding to kill people, but at least they have perhaps some moral argument that they're doing it to ultimately defend their families or prevent some greater evil. — Judy Woodruff

I am not a dictator, and I do not think I will become one. I will not maintain power with a machine gun. — Fidel Castro

Since there is no one else to praise me, I will praise myself
will say that I have never tampered with a single tooth in my thought machine, such as it is. There are teeth missing, God knows
some I was born without, teeth that will never grow. And other teeth have been stripped by the clutchless shifts of history
But never have I willfully destroyed a tooth on a gear of my thinking machine. Never have I said to myself, 'This fact I can do without. — Kurt Vonnegut

With the camera, it's all or nothing. You either get what you're after at once, or what you do has to be worthless. I don't think the essence of photography has the hand in it so much. The essence is done very quietly with a flash of the mind, and with a machine. I think too that photography is editing, editing after the taking. After knowing what to take, you have to do the editing. — Walker Evans

The "experts" mostly never get it right. They assume we are some autistic, retarded stim-machine, not a trapped, thinking person who has a shitty neurological illness. They need to limit our behaviors and stop the impulsive acts, I know. Still, it would be so nice if they realized how intact our minds were. — Ido Kedar

Never think of your car as a cold machine, but as a hot-blooded horse. — Juan Manuel Fangio

You know, when I came home after our day in the city, I just crashed, thinking about Remi and how much I missed him. And then the next day was worse, And when you walked up to me at that ice cream machine, I just felt myself crumble inside. Around Remi, I felt like I was always trying to act like I was good enough. But around you, I don't want to pretend or hide. That's why I didn't say anything in the cafeteria that day, I knew that in five seconds, I'd be crying on your shoulder."
"That's what it's there for, Ethan."
Alek leaned in, took Ethan's face in his hands, and kissed him. — Michael Barakiva

Ken appeared, was taller than she, wanted her, was acceptable and accepted on all sides; similarly, nagging mathematical problems abruptly crack open. Foxy could find no fault with him, and this challenged her, touched off her stubborn defiant streak. She felt between his handsomeness and intelligence a contradiction that might develop into the convoluted humour of her Jew. Ken looked lika a rich boy and worked like a poor one. From Farmington, he was the only son of a Hartford laywer who never lost a case. Foxy came to imagine his birth as cool and painless, without a tear or outcry. Nothing puzzled him. There were unknowns, but no mysteries. ( ... ) He was better-looking, better-thinking, a better machine. — John Updike

Unless you're fond of hollering you don't make great conversations on a running cycle. Instead you spend your time being aware of things and meditating on them. On sights and sounds, on the mood of the weather and things remembered, on the machine and the countryside you're in, thinking about things at great leisure and length without being hurried and without feeling you're losing time. — Robert M. Pirsig

My brain is so anxiety-prone, like a pinball machine. If I don't get up in the morning and focus my thinking, my breathing, and my being for about 12 minutes, I'm just a screwball all day long. — Rainn Wilson

Happiness is native to the human mind and its physical machine. We think better, perform better, feel better, and are healthier when we are happy. — Maxwell Maltz

I think the camera is a wonderful machine, don't you? And not to take photographs in this century is crazy. — Peter Beard

The Internet is global and seemingly omniscient, while iPods and phones are all microscopic workings encased in plastic blobjects. Compare that to a steam engine, where you can watch the pistons move and feel the heat of its boilers. I think we miss that visceral appeal of the machine. — Scott Westerfeld

Why are so many of their faces disfigured, if you don't mind me asking? Is it the explosive shells they're using over there?" "I'm told it's the machine guns. Curious soldiers will often lift their heads out of the trenches, thinking they can dodge bullets in time, but there's no way they can possibly avoid the hail of machine-gun fire." She glanced over her shoulder. "We tend to also see several missing left arms because of the way they position themselves for shooting in the trenches. Their bones shatter into tiny fragments and their wristwatches become embedded in their wounds. There's no way to save the limbs. — Cat Winters

I think business needs to have a heart and to have a heart a company must be more than just a moneymaking machine. — Richard Branson

I think that in the immediate aftermath of a superhuman machine intelligence revealing itself, most people would feel very threatened but take solace in the thought that we can always pull the plug. — John L. Casti

For thirty years most interface design, and most comptuer design, has been headed down the path of the "dramatic" machine. Its highest idea is to make a computer so exciting, so wonderful, so interesting, that we never want to be without it. A less-traveled path I call the "invisible"; its highest idea is to make a computer so imbedded, so fitting, so natural, that we use it without even thinking about it. — Mark Weiser

The designer shouldn't think of a simple dichotomy between errors and correct behavior; rather, the entire interaction should be treated as a cooperative endeavor between person and machine, one in which misconceptions can arise on either side. — Donald A. Norman

Tommy Hearns seemed like an indestructible machine, so to beat him, I think that was my defining moment, the pinnacle. — Sugar Ray Leonard

Im doing pretty good as far as geniuses go ... Im like a machine. Im a robot. You cannot offend a robot ... Im going down as a legend, whether or not you like me or not. I am the new Jim Morrison. I am the new Kurt Cobain ... The Bible had 20, 30, 40, 50 characters in it. You dont think that I would be one of the characters of todays modern Bible? — Kanye West

What is the point of being educated, of learning to read and write, if you are just going to carry on like a machine? But that is what your parents want, and it is what the world wants. The world does not want you to think, it does not want you to be free to find out, because then you would be a dangerous citizen, you would not fit into the established pattern. A free human being can never feel that he belongs to any particular country, class, or type of thinking. Freedom means freedom at every level, right through, and to think only along a particular line is not freedom. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

You are always in the process of creating. Every moment, every minute, every day. You are a big creation machine and you are turning out a new manifestation literally as fast as you can think. — Neale Donald Walsch

The novel had a framework made by thinking. The thought was that to divide off and compartmentalize living was dangerous and led to nothing but trouble. Old, young; black, white; men, women; capitalism, socialism; these dichotomies undo us, force us into unreal categorisation, make us look for what separates us rather than what we have in common. That was the thought, which made the shape or pattern of 'The Golden Notebook'. But the emotions were stronger than the thought. This is why I have always seen TGN as a failure: a failure in my terms, of what I had meant. For has this book changed by an iota our tendency to think like computers set to sort everything - people, ideas, history - into boxes? No, it has not. Yet why should I have such a hubristic thought? But I was in the grip of discovery, of revelation. I had only just seen this Truth: I was watching my own mind working like a sorting machine, and I was appalled. — Doris Lessing

I think the truth is the Marvel fiefdom exists very independently inside the Disney world, inside the Disney universe. They're not resistant to that kind of thing but they have their, you know there is a whole sort of machine energy and momentum that is the sort of creative drive behind the whole universe that has a big impact on the individual films. I'm glad those scenes got out there. And we've got a few interesting deleted scenes on this. — Kenneth Branagh

Scratching off a postcard to Charlie Taylor, Orville expressed the same spirit in a lighter vein. Flying machine market has been very unsteady the past two days. Opened yesterday morning at about 208 (100% means even chance of success) but by noon had dropped to 110. These fluctuations would have produced a panic, I think, in Wall Street, but in this quiet place it only put us to thinking and figuring a little. — David McCullough

Imagine the time, a dozen generations from now, when wave mechanics powers every machine and everyone takes it for granted. Do you really want them thinking that it feel from the sky, fully formed, when the truth is that they or their good fortune to the most powerful engine of change in history: people arguing about science. — Greg Egan

As a librarian, saving lives and worlds isn't in my purview, although if I could put those on my resume with a straight face, I would. Saving minds, however ... perhaps it's not as farfetched. A mind can be lost without its owner's death. A mind that no longer questions only fulfills the rudimentary aspects of its function. A mind without wonder is a mere engine, a walking parasympathetic nervous system, seeing without observing, reacting without thinking, a forgotten ghost in a passive machine. — Josh Hanagarne

I know this is going to sound crazy, but I really love working out. I know that sounds sick to some people, but I didn't love it at first. It's become a healthy addiction for me. And like, now, if I'm watching TV on the couch I'm like, "Ugh, I could be on a cardio machine watching the same thing." That's just now how my mind thinks. — Khloe Kardashian

Tim Olyphant is a machine. He never stops thinking and being creative. — Mykelti Williamson

I think horror should have occult elements, not as its subject but as its ambition. It is a machine that destroys illusion. I, of course, never achieve this, but I always act as if I can. — Tony Burgess

There is no magic milkshake or workout machine. I think the real machine is your body. I do love treadmills, ellipticals, stationary bikes, free weights. — Richard Simmons

When our thoughts revolve we are so often deceived into supposing that their violent movement is an indication of their vigorous originality, the upheaval of prejudice and fixed ideas, when all the time it is more likely that the machine which contains them is only an elaborate cement-mixer, and when the thinking is finished, those whirling thoughts are smoothed into the unchanged conventional mould and seeing them set solid enough to dance, to build, to travel upon, we would never dream of their first deceit, of the hope once roused by their apparently violent reorganisation ... — Janet Frame

Machine thinking is the opposite of mindfulness. If we're really engaged in mindfulness when walking along the path to the village, then we will consider the act of each step we take as an infinite wonder, and a joy will open our hearts like a flower, enabling us to enter the world of reality. — Nhat Hanh

The story is a machine for empathy. In contrast to logic or reason, a story is about emotion that gets staged over a sequence of dramatic moments, so you empathize with the characters without really thinking about it too much. It is a really powerful tool for imagining yourself in other people's situations. — Ira Glass

The big guys who ran things didn't want you thinking or feeling. It slowed down production. They wanted you scared and working so you wouldn't bump up against the truth
life could be fun. Yup, they wanted you scared. They wanted you grim. They wanted you madly cranking out Barbie dolls or Post Toasties or Xerox, or they wanted you overworked and underpaid at teaching so you could at least feel smart, and they wanted you to keep having kids so you'd have to keep working at whatever job you were stuck in and not have time to think or feel or, if you did, you certainly wouldn't have time to do anything about it, or even get close to the big fun, the fun that belonged only to them. And then they wanted your kids to hop on the same treadmill. — Bill Ripley

When I finally did sit down in front of the machine - a familiar object, I had seen it daily when we were living together - I was reminded of how abrupt and unnatural death always is, at least as we experience it: always an interruption, always things that are left unfinished. This was manifested in Christopher's laptop, the desktop was covered in an intricate mosaic of files and document, there were at least a hundred different and sometimes oddly named folders - other people's work, internet. You name a folder without thinking, there are obvious names for some - accounts, articles - but others have the quality of junk drawers, you hardly remember their contents, you never imagine that one day someone else would be rummaging through them. — Katie Kitamura

A vast engine of wonderful delicacy and intricacy, a machine that is like the tools of the Titans put in your hands. This machinery, in its external fabric so massive and so exquisitely adjusted, and in its internal fabric making new categories of thought, new ways of thinking about life. — Charles Ferguson

These days, checks are direct-deposited, money comes out of a machine in the wall, and we swipe a plastic card to make a purchase. In other words, your kids can grow up thinking money comes in an endless supply if you don't show them otherwise. — Jean Chatzky

People think they have taken quite an extraordinarily bold step forward when they have rid themselves of belief in hereditary monarchy and swear by the democratic republic. In reality, however, the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy. — Friedrich Engels

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

It's still the classic thing to get nice lines, but knowing that your computer model, on your little machine, is on the screen, is priceless. And that doesn't happen too often I don't think. — Daniel Simon

I want everybody to think alike. I think everybody should be a machine. — Andy Warhol

Intelligence and rationalism are not in themselves revolutionary. But technical thinking is foreign to all social traditions: the machine has no tradition. One of Karl Marx's seminal sociological discoveries is that technology is the true revolutionary principle, beside which all revolutions based on natural law are antiquated forms of recreation. A society built exclusively on progressive technology would thus be nothing but revolutionary; but it would soon destroy itself and its technology. — Carl Schmitt

You are not a human being, but you are a thinking and dreaming machine. — Debasish Mridha

Just say it, she thought. Say what everyone in this bunker is thinking. Say what we all know to be true. The truth that we are all going to die down here, and death is the end. Nobody wakes up to a heaven or paradise. Your life will be gone. You will be gone. Forever. Uncover the truth. Tear off the bandages of delusion. Open your hearts and minds to the real world. We were doomed the day we were born. We lived and we will die and the only immortals are the people who did something worth remembering while they lived. My genetics are prime. I am pleasing to the eyes of man and machine. A dripping fountain of pleasure. Their organic sanctuary. And in time? Aging. Fading. Graying. What am I? Who am I? What makes me human? Emotions? My conscience? The soul is an old testament myth. No one shall ascend anywhere except into annihilation. The dust of earth and stars are the only eternals, she said. — C.J. Anderson

How hard is it to build an intelligent machine? I don't think it's so hard, but that's my opinion, and I've written two books on how I think one should do it. The basic idea I promote is that you mustn't look for a magic bullet. You mustn't look for one wonderful way to solve all problems. Instead you want to look for 20 or 30 ways to solve different kinds of problems. And to build some kind of higher administrative device that figures out what kind of problem you have and what method to use. — Marvin Minsky

Dilbert: I'm obsessed with inventing a perpetual motion machine. Most scientists think it's impossible, but I have something they don't. Dogbert: A lot of spare time? Dilbert: Exactly. — Scott Adams

I remember still how full of bad magic all those spearpoints to be put on the ends of rifles seemed to be. One was like a sharpened curtain rod. Another was triangular in cross-section, so that the wound it made wouldn't close up again and keep the blood and guts from falling out. Another one had sawteeth - so it could work its way through bone, I guess. I can remember thinking that war was so horrible that, at last, thank goodness, nobody could ever be fooled by romantic pictures and fiction and history into marching to war again.
Nowadays, of course, you can buy a machine gun with a plastic bayonet for your little kid at the nearest toy boutique. — Kurt Vonnegut

When I was working on the book "The Life Of One Kid 7", I just felt the pain of the wound, I asked myself why it hurts.... one moment when my mother has went outside I just realise that she has turn on the fucking machine for making the weather inside hot. For god sake, this stop's thinking and makes depression! — Deyth Banger

That we are rational agents - that a great many of our actions are not merely the results of serial physiological urges but are instead dictated by coherent conceptual connections and private deliberations - is one of those primordial data I mentioned above that cannot be reduced to some set of purely mechanical functions without producing nonsense. That a number of cognitive scientists should be exerting themselves to tear down the Cartesian partition between body and soul, hoping to demonstrate that there is no Wonderful Wizard on the other side pulling the levers, is poignant proof that our mechanistic paradigms trap much of our thinking about mind and body within an absurd dilemma: we must believe either in a ghost mysteriously animating a machine or in a machine miraculously generating a ghost. Premodern thought allowed for a far less restricted range of conceptual possibilities. — David Bentley Hart

But I must hope that books possess a life of a more varied kind than their authors' myopia concedes to them. A book is a kind of of machine which the reader can freely use as a generator of intellectual stimulation. It is enough that the book should be truly a machine for thinking, that it should generate a variety of possible conclusions without its author's ordaining and limiting them in advance. — Umberto Eco

The man behind the divan stood up, the machine pistol quivering in his grasp. There was a flash, Abigail thinking he'd pulled the trigger, the walls of the sitting area lighting up, the snow glinting. It went dark again. Muffled thunder rolled through the basin, shook the chandelier, the weakened floor trembling beneath her feet. — Blake Crouch

I became, in other words, more like Holmes than the man himself: brilliant, driven to a point of obsession, careless of myself, mindless of others, but without the passion and the deep-down, inbred love for the good in humanity that was the basis of his entire career. He loved the humanity that could not understand or fully accept him; I, in the midst of the same human race, became a thinking machine. — Laurie R. King

I do wish I believed in the life eternal, for it makes me quite miserable to think man is merely a kind of machine endowed, unhappily for himself, with consciousness. — Bertrand Russell

The need for a quick, satisfactory copying machine that could be used right in the office seemed very apparent to me-there seemed such a crying need for it-such a desirable thing if it could be obtained. So I set out to think of how one could be made. — Chester Carlson

Each practitioner thinks there's one magic way to get a machine to be smart, and so they're all wasting their time in a sense. On the other hand, each of them is improving some particular method, so maybe someday in the near future, or maybe it's two generations away, someone else will come around and say, "Let's put all these together," and then it will be smart. — Marvin Minsky

I think that there are certain guns that, of course, I don't know who needs a machine gun, personally. But I think rifles and things like that are fine. I think that in the wrong hand is when a gun becomes a problem. — Morgan Spurlock

I think of myself as a kind of pulverizing machine into which everything I look at and feel is fed. I believe that I am different from the mixed-media jackdaws who use photographs etc. more or less literally. — Francis Bacon

It turns out that information leaks between universes at the quantum level. We think it accounts for all kinds of phenomena, from what drives evolution to strange insights and mystical experiences through the ages. The machine was built as an attempt to investigate and amplify them. — James P. Hogan

In the central cases of physical pain, then, it appears that at least part of what is bad about our condition is the way it makes us feel. Here there seem to be no problems with a purely mental state account, no counterpart to the experience machine that could bring us to think that we are being deceived by mere appearances. [ ... ] If I am suffering physical pain then I can be quite wrong about the organic cause of my affliction, or even about whether it has one, without that error diminishing in the slightest either the reality of my pain or its impact on the quality of my life. — L. W. Sumner

Instead of gambling on the eternal impossibility of the revolution and on the fascist return of a war-machine in general, why not think that a new type of revolution is in the course of becoming possible, and that all kinds of mutating, living machines conduct wars, are combined and trace out a plane of consistance which undermines the plane of organization of the World and the States? — Gilles Deleuze

What is man, when you come to think upon him, but a minutely set, ingenious machine for turning with infinite artfulness, the red wine of Shiraz into urine? — Isak Dinesen

We need to abandon the economist's notion of the economy as a machine, with its attendant concept of equilibrium. A more helpful way of thinking about the economy is to imagine it as a living organism. — Paul Ormerod

We offer them mediocrity while calling it magic. We offer them the illusion of intelligent software, seducing them into surrendering the task of thinking to the machine. Of course, the machine isn't thinking, which means that nobody is. — Larry Constantine

We are all plagued by failures - by missed subtleties, overlooked knowledge, and outright errors. For the most part, we have imagined that little can be done beyond working harder and harder to catch the problems clean up after them. We are not in the habit of thinking the way the army pilots did as they looked upon their shiny new Model 299 bomber - a machine so complex no one was sure human beings could try it. — Atul Gawande

The great packing machine ground on remorselessly, without thinking of green fields; and the men and women and children who were part of it never saw any green thing, not even a flower. Four or five miles to the east of them lay the blue waters of Lake Michigan; but for all the good it did them it might have been as far away as the Pacific Ocean. They had only Sundays, and then they were too tired to walk. They were tied to the great packing machine, and tied to it for life. — Upton Sinclair

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

Sometimes, writing songs is like waiting in for deliveries. They give you a window, and your washing machine is going to show up, whether the window is the album or something you're thinking, like, 'This thing is going to come to me.' — Alex Turner

Evanelle went to sleep that afternoon, lulled by the hum of her oxygen machine, thinking of how we always remember those we love when they're the happiest. She hoped that when her family thought of her, they would think of her at this moment, warm in her bed, clear air in her lungs, happy that she'd had this life, this strange, beautiful life full of strange gifts, given and received. — Sarah Addison Allen

The Cubists' belief in progress was by no means complacent. They saw the new products, the new inventions, the new forms of energy, as weapons with which to demolish the old order. Yet at the same time their interest was profound and not simply declamatory. In this they differed fundamentally from the Futurists. The Futurists saw the machine as a savage god with which they identified themselves. Ideologically they were precursors of fascism: artistically they produced a vulgar form of animated naturalism, which was itself only a gloss on what had already been done in films. 35 Carlo Carra. The Funeral of the Anarchist Galli. 1911 The Cubists felt their way, picture by picture, towards a new synthesis which, in terms of painting, was the philosophical equivalent of the revolution that was taking place in scientific thinking: a revolution which was also dependent on the new materials and the new means of production. — John Berger

From the moment when the machine first made its appearance it was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine were used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated within a few generations. And — George Orwell

I think you have to find how the machine can work for you. That's what I mean by "attaching yourself to the machine," 'cause the machine is going to be there, and you can rage against the machine, which is cool, but there's ways that you can benefit off the machine if you're savvy enough and you're sharp enough, smart enough. We all got to live and eat. — Ice Cube

So, think about how you use a disc that you own of an Xbox 360 game. If I buy the disc from a store, I use that disc in my machine, I can give that disc to my son and he can play it on his 360 in his room. We both can't play at the same time, but the disc is the key to playing. I can go round to your house and give you that disc and you can play on that game as well. — Larry Hryb

Everything that I see must become personal; otherwise, it is dead and mechanical. Our only chance to escape the blight of mechanization, of acting and thinking alike, of the huge machine which society is becoming, is to restore life to all things through the saving and beneficent power of the human imagination. — Clarence John Laughlin

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

I guess I'm just stuck on the idea that there's this monumental machine, and we're all part of it. Most of the time, we don't even stop to think about how it works. We just go about our business, doing our part, trusting that everyone else will do their part, and the machine will keep functioning. But all it takes is for someone to come along who isn't thinking straight, some who's not paying attention, or worse, hell-bent on self-destruction and everything turns to shit. — Michelle Richmond

Langmuir is a regular thinking machine. Put in facts, and you get out a theory. — Saul Dushman

I think anyone who comes upon a Nautilus machine suddenly will agree with me that its prototype was clearly invented at some time in history when torture was considered a reasonable alternative to diplomacy. — Anna Quindlen

'You might think of combinatorics as a machine too', the major says. 'A different sort of machine, though. Have you heard of Babbage's analytic engine? He never built it ... I have an analytic machine of my own-right here.' He taps his own skull. — David Leavitt

It is one of the unexpected disasters of the modern age that our new unparalleled access to information has come at the price of our capacity to concentrate on anything much. The deep, immersive thinking which produced many of civilization's most important achievements has come under unprecedented assault. We are almost never far from a machine that guarantees us a mesmerizing and libidinous escape from reality. The feelings and thoughts which we have omitted to experience while looking at our screens are left to find their revenge in involuntary twitches and our ever-decreasing ability to fall asleep when we should. — Alain De Botton

Leaning against my car after changing the oil,
I hold my black hands out and stare into them
as if they were the faces of my children looking
at the winter moon and thinking of the snow
that will erase everything before they wake.
In the garage, my wife comes behind me
and slides her hands beneath my soiled shirt.
Pressing her face between my shoulder blades,
she mumbles something, and soon we are laughing,
wrestling like children among piles of old rags,
towels that unravel endlessly, torn sheets,
work shirts from twenty years ago when I stood
in the door of a machine shop, grease blackened,
and Kansas lay before me blazing with new snow,
a future of flat land, white skies, and sunlight.
After making love, we lie on the abandoned
mattress and stare at our pale winter bodies
sprawling in the half-light. She touches her belly,
the scar of our last child, and the black prints
of my hand along her hips and thighs. — B.H. Fairchild

You're thinking about the continuum of life as you load the washing machine or scoop out the litter box.blue-girl-larger Or maybe that's just me. That seems to be an endlessly challenging and interesting way to live. — Laurie Foos

When the machine of a human being is turned on, it seems to produce a protagonist, just as a television produces an image. I think this protagonist, this self, often recognizes that it is a fictional construct, but it also recognizes that thinking of itself as such might cause it to disintegrate. — Mohsin Hamid

You see, I get so much fun out of thinking that I don't want to destroy this pleasant machine that makes life such a big kick. — Richard Feynman