Machines Quotes - Page 16

Life The machine The human soul A 75mm breech My portrait

Software was the key element that would determine how useable and how broadly applicable the machine was.

With the introduction of agriculture mankind entered upon a long period of meanness, misery, and madness, from which they are only now being freed by the beneficent operation of the machine.

A journalistic purpose could be someone with a Xerox machine in a basement.

I have had the feeling that a properly constructed flying-machine should be capable of being flown as a kite; and conversely, that a properly constructed kite should be capable of use as a flying-machine when driven by its own propellers.

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

The whole publicity machine is a very weird one. It's kind of a necessary part of what we do here, but this helps me keep grounded.

The ideal business is one that earns very high returns on capital and that keeps using lots of capital at those high returns. That becomes a compounding machine.

I don't have a ticker-tape machine in my office.

Almost always tradition is nothing but a record and a machine-made imitation of the habits that our ancestors created.

Like our bodies and like our desires, the machines we have devised are possessed of a heart which is slowly reduced to embers.

God made the human body like a machine with built-in obsolescence.

A narrator should not supply interpretations of his work; otherwise he would have not written a novel, which is a machine for generating interpretations.

When I finally bought one, the Buchla was my only piece of furniture. I lived with that thing. It was my boyfriend! I thought there was something wrong with me, because I was in love with a machine

And what we did with this new company in 1985 is we did start focusing on PCs instead of video game machines, because we learned the hard lesson about bringing a product to market in a consumer world where it's very expensive to build a brand and get distribution and so forth.

The classical argument for why a supposedly decent and moral creature like Homo sapiens can mistreat and even extirpate other species rests upon an extreme position in a continuum. The Cartesian tradition, formulated explicitly in the seventeenth century, but developed in "folk" and other versions throughout human history no doubt, holds that other animals are little more than unfeeling machines, with only humans enjoying "consciousness," however defined.

Hopefully, you'll be able to find enough of an audience, each time, that you can keep working, rather than getting caught up in the Hollywood system, which can so quickly become about how much money something makes and how many people went to watch it. It's very alluring. It's such a powerful machine that's playing on you, the whole time.

The ultimate test's always your own serenity. If you don't have this when you start and maintain it while you're working you're likely to build your personal problems right into the machine itself.

We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination. We can even discuss ways of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism - something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world. We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.

Machines will never be able to give the thinking process a model of thought itself, since machines are not mortal. What gives humans access to the symbolic domain of value and meaning is the fact that we die.

In the days when the nation depended on agriculture for its wealth it made the Lord Chancellor sit on a woolsack to remind him where the wealth came from. I would like to suggest we remove that now and make him sit on a crate of machine tools.

When you treat your time as though you are a machine; a doing machine; you are committing violence against the sacredness of life itself.

The 65,536 processors were inside the Connection Machine.

In proportion as the machine is improved and performs man's work with an ever increasing rapidity and exactness, the labourer, instead of prolonging his former rest times, redoubles his ardour, as if he wished to rival the machine. O, absurd and murderous competition!

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