Quotes About Machines

#1. Our pictures are fleeting and elusive. In the far future, bits of hard drives may be fossilized in limestone, and discarded iPhones may find themselves encased in amber, hardened like nail polish, but the bits of humanity that these exquisitely crafted machines hold will be lost to time.

Trevor Paglen

#2. Visit a typical science classroom and you will discover far more than empirical facts being taught. The dominant worldview among scientific intellectuals is evolutionary naturalism, which holds that humans are essentially biochemical machines.

Nancy Pearcey

#3. I'm as fond of my body as anyone, but if I can be 200 with a body of silicon, I'll take it. - DANIEL HILL, COFOUNDER OF THINKING MACHINES CORP.

Michio Kaku

#4. As rain began to fall, Aldric worried the old machines would not be able to survive the weather. "Hand me that oil can!" he shouted to Siomon.
Magic machines need oil?" asked Simon.
Of course they need oil. They're not perfect.

Jason Hightman

#5. Somewhere, in a distant land he barely knew the name of, people had stopped buying washing machines, and so his city had died.

Cory Doctorow

#6. He said, "Could be anyone. The Kin. I mean . . . it's like calling yourselves the People. It's what pretty much every race-name means. Except for Dalek. That means Metal-Cased Hatey Death Machines in Skaronian." And

Neil Gaiman

#7. [I] grew up as a disciple of science. I know its fascination. I have felt the godlike power man derives from his machines.

Charles Lindbergh

#8. Our intellect has created a new world that dominates nature, and has populated it with monstrous machines.

Carl Jung

#9. Space-ships and time machines are no escape from the human condition. Let Othello subject Desdemona to a lie-detector test; his jealousy will still blind him to the evidence. Let Oedipus triumph over gravity; he won't triumph over his fate.

Arthur Koestler

#10. Most men are of naught more use in their lives but as machines for turning food into sh*t.

Leonardo Da Vinci

#11. Adapting old programs to fit new machines usually means adapting new machines to behave like old ones.

Alan Perlis

#12. We are machines built by DNA whose purpose is to make more copies of the same DNA ... This is exactly what we are for. We are machines for propagating DNA, and the propagation of DNA is a self-sustaining process. It is every living object's sole reason for living.

Richard Dawkins

#13. The vast majority of people are unthinking prejudice machines.

Stefan Molyneux

#14. Bread has been made (indifferent) from potatoes;
And galvanism has set some corpses grinning,
But has not answer'd like the apparatus
Of the Humane Society's beginning,
By which men are unsuffocated gratis:
What wondrous new machines have late been spinning.

Lord Byron

#15. The original question, 'Can machines think?' I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion.

Alan Turing

#16. As a science fiction fan, I had always assumed that when computers supplemented our intelligence, it would be because we outsourced some of our memory to them. We would ask questions, and our machines would give oracular - or supremely practical - replies.

Gary Wolf

#17. The Democratic Party is made up of trial lawyers, labor unions, government employees, big city political machines, the coercive utopians, the radical environmentalists, feminists, and others who want to restructure society with tax dollars and government fiat.

Grover Norquist

#18. Don't go to a museum with a destination. Museums are wormholes to other worlds. There are ecstasy machines. Follow your eyes to wherever they lead you, stop, get very quiet, and the world should begin to change for you. And if you see me, say something! We can talk about it together.

Jerry Saltz

#19. When poets go off the boil, they sound like bumble bees; when critics do, they sound like sewing machines.

Mason Cooley

#20. The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly, and that the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today.

J. C. R. Licklider

#21. Humans may progress. They may think that they are moving forward because they have invented clever machines and because they control the land and sea. But man's capacity to inflict and endure pain is constant. Man's desire for power, to beat down his competition - it hasn't changed in the slightest.

Gemma Malley

#22. Animals often strike us as passionate machines.

Eric Hoffer

#23. Okay, why couldn't he just be drinking right now? Still, bassinet jockeying one of these pooping machines had to be better than dodging bullets.
Right?
V glanced at the matched set of milk addicts. Fine, maybe the goo-goo, gaga/Glock assessment was more of a fifty-fifty.

J.R. Ward

#24. I've always worked on the machines, especially the 125 and 250 which are really difficult to set up.

Joey Dunlop

#25. With bundled machines you can throw away the hardware and keep the software, and it's still a good buy.

Adam Osborne

#26. The gaming world is a complete mystery to me! Well, I did play Pac Man and Frogger using big machines at an arcade back in the '80s.

Doug Jones

#27. In many biological structures proteins are simply components of larger molecular machines.

Michael Behe

#28. Movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Off to the side were dozens of keypunch machines - what passed in those days for computer terminals.

Malcolm Gladwell

#29. When you make machines that are capable of obeying instructions slavishly, and among those instructions are 'duplicate me' instructions, then of course the system is wide open to exploitation by parasites.

Richard Dawkins

#30. Man is a fire-stealing animal, and we can't help building machines and machine intelligences, even if, from time to time, we use them not only to outsmart ourselves but to bring us right up to the doorstep of Doom.

Richard Dooling

#31. The instruments of power - arms, gold, machines, magical or technical secrets - always exist independently of him who disposes of them, and can be taken up by others. Consequently all power is unstable.

Simone Weil

#32. History is remembered by its art, not its war machines.

James Rosenquist

#33. She called herself Starla, Queen of the Nile, and she had me from the first moment I saw her walk onto that stage. She wore nine-inch-heels and a dress that shone in the multi-colored lighting, glimmering through the haze created by the smoke machines and cigarettes.

Emma Rose Kraus

#34. As three unwavering bands of light, we were simple and separate and beautiful. As
machines, we were flabby bags of ancient plumbing and wiring, of rusty hinges and
feeble springs.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

#35. Inevitably the machines must win, but there is still a long way to go before a human on his or her best day is unable to defeat the best computer.

Garry Kasparov

#36. When you're dealing with machines or anything that you build, it either works or it doesn't, no matter how good of a salesman you are.

Marc Andreesen

#37. As a precaution, we're making machines extremely heavy with very tiny legs.

Larry Page

#38. By far the most common task for which the machines are used is writing - or word processing, as it's known to the same people who call journalism 'content.

Robert Motherwell

#39. It is never the machines that are dead. It is only the mechanically-minded men that are dead.

Gerald Stanley Lee

#40. The play is the source, it is orchestrated with words. In a movie, you are not dealing with as much as that. There are machines and wires. When you're acting for a camera, it keeps taking and never giving back.

Al Pacino

#41. It was one of those great miracles of history that they managed to smuggle an Enigma machines out to Britain just before they were invaded by the Nazis.

Michael Apted

#42. Tape machines are effects boxes as well because each tape machine has its own sound. You can over-load a tape machine or you can bump it a certain way so it compresses or makes a sound, tape saturation.

Lenny Kravitz

#43. I'm afraid that the following syllogism may be used by some in the future.
Turing believes machines think
Turing lies with men
Therefore machines do not think
Yours in distress,
Alan

Alan Turing

#44. Children and cats are the best machines of fun!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#45. It came to be believed that society could be understood using the same methods that are used to understand machines, and from there it was a small step to think that society is in fact a kind of machine.

John N. Gray

#46. It's good Xerox is known for its copying machines, and it's good Jim Carrey is known for comedy.

Steve Guttenberg

#47. Welcome to the world of the nesting instinct, where Mother Nature turns pregnant women into frenzied cleaning machines ahead of the new arrival.

Mark Woods

#48. Telegraphs are machines for conveying information over extensive lines with great rapidity.

Charles Babbage

#49. What kind of world is this that can send machines to Mars and does nothing to stop the killing of a human being?

Jose Saramago

#50. We also had to bring with us some desired scientific equipment over to the station as well as assemble new machines. For that, I had to conduct two space walks.

Philippe Perrin

#51. Designed from DNA to compute, I said, appalled at the thought of Core machines being given the benefit of the doubt when it came to souls.

Dan Simmons

#52. Used to be in the old days, only the pulp writers wrote like machines. Now everybody is expected to be literary John Henrys. So in that context someone like me is an anomaly.

Junot Diaz

#53. The days when you needed amazing Silicon Graphics machines to run animation software are gone now.

Dave Rowntree

#54. We are metered only by our own machines,
while the book is a clock that forgets her machanics.

Amy King

#55. One reason I'm not worried about the possibility that we will soon make machines that are smarter than us, is that we haven't managed to make machines until now that are smart at all. Artificial intelligence isn't synthetic intelligence: It's pseudo-intelligence.

Alva Noe

#56. Italy in the first years got food, for the first year or the first periods got food. Then we got raw materials and then we got tool machines, let's say, instruments for working.

Gianni Agnelli

#57. Like my father, I would never as a child throw anything away, keeping old toys, electric motors and bits of broken machines under my bed in what I called my Box of Useful Things.

Nick Park

#58. And a revolution of automation finds machines replacing men in the mines and mills of America, without replacing their incomes or their training or their needs to pay the family doctor, grocer and landlord.

John F. Kennedy

#59. In speaking of the work of machines and of natural forces we must, of course, in this comparison eliminate anything in which activity of intelligence comes into play. The latter is also capable of the hard and intense work of thinking, which tries a man just as muscular exertion does.

Hermann Von Helmholtz

#60. Labs, too, can become machines. In science, it is more often a pejorative description than a complimentary one: an efficient, thrumming, technically accomplished laboratory is like a robot orchestra that produces perfectly pitched tunes but no music.

Siddhartha Mukherjee

#61. Music is an angry machine. We are all angry machines

Rachel Cohn

#62. I've always been amazed by Da Vinci, because he worked out science on his own. He would work by drawing things and writing down his ideas. Of course, he designed all sorts of flying machines way before you could actually build something like that.

Bill Gates

#63. Treating living creatures possessing complex emotional worlds as if they were machines is likely to cause them not only physical discomfort, but also much social stress and psychological frustration.

Yuval Noah Harari

#64. Russia and the U. S. have announced they are definitely planning several space machines. So it's quite possible that the first space ships or satellites may encounter other interplanetary machines, manned or otherwise. Our space devices may even be closely approached by such alien machines ...

Donald Keyhoe

#65. The reason why all of us naturally began to live in France is because France has scientific methods, machines and electricity, but does not really believe that these things have anything to do with the real business of living.

Gertrude Stein

#66. Machines have about as much warmth as a cube of ice. And that is why the horse is still part of our lives and will live on. He was here millions of years before man came upon the earth, and if the cycle is completed, he may still be thundering across the world long after man has vanished.

Marguerite Henry

#67. We're just recycled history machines, cavemen in faded blue jeans.

Jimmy Buffett

#68. We're not exactly going to the wilderness, Shane. You don't have to take everything. There are vending machines.

Rachel Caine

#69. it offends the continuum of human dignity to treat people like the appendage of highly efficient machines.

Simon Head

#70. She had a sense of herself being brain dead: running on tubes and machines.

Caroline B. Cooney

#71. Could be anyone. The Kin. I mean ... it's like calling yourselves the People. It's what pretty much every race-name means. Except for Dalek. That means Metal-Cased Hatey Death Machines in Skaronian.

Neil Gaiman

#72. Machines will follow a path that mirrors the evolution of humans. Ultimately, however, self-aware, self-improving machines will evolve beyond humans' ability to control or even understand them.

Ray Kurzweil

#73. In man-machine symbiosis, it is man who must adjust: The machines can't.

Alan Perlis

#74. My first account was Neiman Marcus. I cold-called them just like I had cold-called businesses when I was selling fax machines for seven years.

Sara Blakely

#75. Wilderness and motors are incompatible and the former can best be experienced, understood and enjoyed when the machines are left behind where they belong
on the superhighways and in the parking lots, on the reservoirs and in the marinas.

Edward Abbey

#76. I am against all machines. It's no wonder that so many Americans go on dope when they have no other cultural stimulus than a television.

James Purdy

#77. The societies to which I have been exposed seemed to me largely machines for the suppression of women.

Cormac McCarthy

#78. I took a great joy with inventing new kinds of mechanisms. I invented new kinds of machines. I've been a student of science fiction for a long, long time, and I'm very well-versed in science fact and science fiction.

Jack Kirby

#79. We measure time according to the movement of countless suns; and they measure time by little machines in their little pockets.
Now tell me, how could we ever meet at the same place and the same time?

Kahlil Gibran

#80. People are going to have to make themselves predictable, or the machines will get angry and kill them.

Gregory Bateson

#81. We are a species born from the planet. If the machines truly want to protect the Earth type planets they must learn to take care of us too.- Sun Wukong

Carolina Cody Aldaz

#82. There are many machines throughout history that were built to do something better than a human can.

Mark Zuckerberg

#83. You cutting the lawn, fixing the machines,
all this leprous day and then more vodka,
more soda and the pond forgiving our bodies,
the pond sucking out the throb.

Anne Sexton

#84. People ask me to record their answering machines all the time. I love it. It's a miracle to me that people want to hear back those characters.

Mike Myers

#85. There's something about live players that you cannot get with machines: With live musicians, you can strike a groove, you can feed off each other ... And, even though somebody might make a slight mistake, it's all real!

Isaac Hayes

#86. Fondue sets, martini shakers and juicing machines: three things the world could live completely without.

Douglas Coupland

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

Herbie Hancock

#88. Ask yourself this: Who is more amateurish, more vulnerable - those who rely on machines that need to be plugged in, or logged on, or in some other way connected in order to be more than a useless slab of plastic ... or those who have learned to master life without?

Anne Fortier

#89. I am not some kind of computer. Only machines have glib answers for everything.

Madeleine L'Engle

#90. The ship founders on a sandbank and then gets back afloat. Electric power stops; after a while, the machines start up again. During such recesses, the anarch measures his own strength and autonomy.

Ernst Junger

#91. The feeling that 'no one is listening to me' make us want to spend time with machines that seem to care about us.

Sherry Turkle

#92. To outsource your memory to machines - which is what many of us do with regard to our use of search engines - seems to me to be fairly antithetical to the basic qualities of Jewish life that have kept the Jews alive for so long.

Joshua Cohen

#93. The immense distances to the stars and the galaxies mean that we see everything ins pace int he past, some as they were before the Earth came to be. Telescopes are time machines.

Carl Sagan

#94. Automation does not need to be our enemy. I think machines can make life easier for men, if men do not let the machines dominate them.

John F. Kennedy

#95. Like the invention of the telescope, the introduction of MRI machines and a variety of advanced brain scans

Michio Kaku

#96. If you knew how much information the campaigns had on you, you'd turn off your machines. And I mean that literally.

Joe Trippi

#97. The ability to do this so quickly was largely due to the enthusiastic and efficient services of Mr. C.E. Taylor, who did all the machine work in our shop for the first as well as the succeeding experimental machines.

Orville Wright

#98. The other thing about moments that are given to us? They're limited. We don't get an endless amount. If you miss them, they're gone. Time machines don't exist; you can't go back and fix what's been broken.

Rachel Van Dyken

#99. And he goes round with a fat roll of dollar bills, and got this nice farm, and all them fancy machines, and man let his family starve.' - Louisa Mae Cardinal

David Baldacci

#100. I point out to you, Marcus Claire Luyseyal, a lesson from past over-machined societies which you appear not to have learned. The devices themselves condition the
users to employ each other the way they employ machines.

Frank Herbert