quotations about machines
The World's Fair audience tended to think of the machine as unqualifiedly good, strong, stupid and obedient. They thought of it as a giant slave, an untiring steel Negro, controlled by Reason in a world of infinite resources.
ROBERT HUGHES
The Shock of the New
Behind the virtual worlds of the Internet, machines are still with us, often hidden behind shiny plastic and chrome or under the basement, closeted, silent and sentinel.
FRANCIS C. MOON
introduction, The Machines of Leonardo Da Vinci and Franz Reuleaux
The machine has no feelings, it feels no fear and no hope ... it operates according to the pure logic of probability. For this reason I assert that the robot perceives more accurately than man.
MAX FRISCH
Homo Faber: A Report
People are more difficult to work with than machines. And when you break a person, he can't be fixed.
RICK RIORDAN
The Battle of the Labyrinth
When one speaks of increasing power, machinery, and industry there comes up a picture of a cold, metallic sort of world in which great factories will drive away the trees, the flowers, the birds, and the green fields. And that then we shall have a world composed of metal machines and human machines. With all of that I do not agree. I think that unless we know more about the machines and their use, unless we better understand the mechanical portion of life, we cannot have the time to enjoy the trees, and the birds, and the flowers, and the green fields.
HENRY FORD
introduction, My Life and Work
It is difficult not to wonder whether that combination of elements which produces a machine for labor does not create also a soul of sorts, a dull resentful metallic will, which can rebel at times.
PEARL S. BUCK
My Several Worlds: A Personal Record
So, in the interests of survival, they trained themselves to be agreeing machines instead of thinking machines. All their minds had to do was to discover what other people were thinking, and then they thought that, too.
KURT VONNEGUT JR.
Breakfast of Champions
Our inventions have long been ahead of us in terms of efficiency and sanity, productivity and predictability. Oh, how we've wished we could be manmade, too. What has been keeping us back, keeping us messy? The animal impediment, within and without. Eliminating these impediments, we will surely be catching up with our machines, resembling them more and more impeccably.
AMY LEACH
Things That Are
I'm convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, militarism and economic exploitation are incapable of being conquered.
MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.
Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence
Can men live in a machine-civilization, a civilization in which men are obliged to earn their money with machines, in which they cannot even spend it without machines -- have souls?... I have come to believe that it is not by any economic scheme, or social device, some way of inventing evil off the earth, but by great personal beliefs, that the battle for the existence of the soul in an age of machines will have to be fought. If it is true that these great, splendid, blind machines are crowding me, and crowding my brother, and even crowding God, from off the earth, there can be but one reason for it, and that is that my brother has been so busy in making bigger and bigger machines every year that he has forgotten to make bigger men to go with them, and bigger beliefs to make bigger men out of.
GERALD STANLEY LEE
Inspired Millionaires
We are survival machines -- robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.
RICHARD DAWKINS
The Selfish Gene
In a properly automated and educated world, then, machines may prove to be the true humanizing influence. It may be that machines will do the work that makes life possible and that human beings will do all the other things that make life pleasant and worthwhile.
ISAAC ASIMOV
Robot Visions
Progress is made by the improvement of people, not the improvement of machines.
ADRIAN TCHAIKOVSKY
Blood of the Mantis
The machines men are so intent on making have carried them very far from the old sweet things.
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
Poor White
You do not need to be Alan Greenspan to understand that the more things a machine can do, the bigger the market.
FRED HAPGOOD
Discover Magazine, June 2008
I wondered when that had happened; that we had started making better machines than people.
MAX BARRY
Machine Man