machine Quotes

“Ever seen an abacus? You know, those centipedelike things with wooden beads in rows. They’re sold mostly in knickknack import shops, for wall decoration. But, in fact, an abacus is an adding machine, calculator, and computer. On second thought, that’s not quite true. The abacus is just a visual record of the computations going on in the mind of the person using it.”

“We modern, urban, educated folks yell at traffic and umpires and bills and banks and machines- especially machines. Machines and relatives get most of the yelling.”

“The human being is a machine. An automatic machine. It is composed of thousands of complex and delicate mechanisms, which perform their functions harmoniously and perfectly, in accordance with laws devised for their governance, and over which the man himself has no authority, no mastership, no control.”

“The electric things have their life too. Paltry as those lives are.”

“An android doesn’t care what happens to another android. That’s one of the indications we look for.”

“Only androids show up with false memory systems; it’s been found ineffective in humans.”

″ It, he thought. She keeps calling the owl it.”

“They seemed amazingly busy. I began to ask myself what they could be. Were they intelligent mechanisms? Such a thing I felt was impossible. Or did a Martian sit within each, ruling, directing, using, much as a man’s brain sits and rules in his body? I began to compare the things to human machines, to ask myself for the first time in my life how an ironclad or a steam-engine would seem to an intelligent lower animal.”

“From the very first moment his father had told him about it, the mechanical man had become the center of Hugo’s life.”

″[...] So I figure if the entire world is a big machine, I have to be here for some reason. And that means you have to be here for some reason too.”

“Salo did not question the good sense of his errand, since he was, like all Tralfamadorians, a machine. As a machine, he had to do what he was supposed to do.”

“Once upon a time on Tralfamadore there were creatures who weren’t anything like machines. They weren’t dependable. They weren’t efficient. They weren’t predictable. They weren’t durable. And these poor creatures were obsessed by the idea that everything that existed had to have a purpose, and that some purposes were higher than others. These creatures spent most of their time trying to find out what their purpose was. And every time they found out what seemed to be a purpose of themselves, the purpose seemed so low that the creatures were filled with disgust and shame.”

“You asked the impossible of a machine...and the machine complied.”

“Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develope itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.”

“The Panopticon is a marvelous machine which, whatever use one may wish to put it to, produces homogeneous effects of power.”

“When we picked up my dad at his office he said that I couldn’t play with his copying machine, but I forgot. He also said to watch out for the books on his desk, and I was careful as could be except for my elbow. He also said don’t fool around with his phone, but I think I called Australia. My dad said please don’t pick him up anymore. ”