Quotes and Sayings about Machines

"The chips are in production, the machines aren't. So we've got a little bit of work left to do."
- J Allard
(Related: Work, Machines, Production)

"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
(Related: History, Machines, Miracles)

"Gliders, sail planes, they're wonderful flying machines. It's the closest you can come to being a bird."
- Neil Armstrong
(Related: Being, Flying, Machines)

"Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation."
- Jean Arp
(Related: Life, Contemplation, Day, Humanity, Machines, Meditation, Silence, Will)

"Telegraphs are machines for conveying information over extensive lines with great rapidity."
- Charles Babbage
(Related: Information, Machines)

"In turning from the smaller instruments in frequent use to the larger and more important machines, the economy arising from the increase of velocity becomes more striking."
- Charles Babbage
(Related: Economy, Machines)

"Shoes are the first adult machines we are given to master."
- Nicholson Baker
(Related: First, Machines)

"I still find it hard to understand that anyone could argue that you can't have machines that exhibit consciousness."
- Iain Banks
(Related: Consciousness, Machines)

"In many biological structures proteins are simply components of larger molecular machines."
- Michael Behe
(Related: Machines)

"Opinions are to the vast apparatus of social existence what oil is to machines: one does not go up to a turbine and pour machine oil over it; one applies a little to hidden spindles and joints that one has to know."
- Walter Benjamin
(Related: Existence, Machine, Oil, Opinions)

"If the machines can take the drudgery out of it and just leave us with the joy of drawing, then that's the best of both worlds - and I'll use those computers!"
- Don Bluth
(Related: Joy, Machines)

"Women are nothing but machines for producing children."
- Napoleon Bonaparte
(Related: Women, Children, Machines, Nothing)

"The more we reduce ourselves to machines in the lower things, the more force we shall set free to use in the higher."
- Anna C. Brackett
(Related: Force, Machines)

"The more we pour the big machines, the fuel, the pesticides, the herbicides, the fertilizer and chemicals into farming, the more we knock out the mechanism that made it all work in the first place."
- David R. Brower
(Related: Work, First, Machines)

"The Apple has the fewest bells and whistles. It has simple sound and few graphics special effects. In a way, that is a weakness because markets for the other machines are getting bigger."
- Bill Budge
(Related: Bells, Machines, Sound, Weakness)

"Robots of the world, you are ordered to exterminate the human race. Do not spare the men. Do not spare the women. Preserve only the factories, railroads, machines, mines, and raw materials. Destroy everything else. Then return to work. Work must not cease."
- Karel Capek
(Related: Work, Men, Women, Machines, Race, World)

"Man has made many machines, complex and cunning, but which of them indeed rivals the workings of his heart?"
- Pablo Casals
(Related: Heart, Cunning, Machines, Man)

"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."
- Steve Case
(Related: Company, Machines, World)

"You see, we are not machines and we do not have lots of ideas in a drawer."
- Christo
(Related: Ideas, Machines)

"As the earth spins through space, a view from above the North Pole would encompass most of the wealth of the world - most of its food, productive machines, doctors, engineers and teachers. A view from the opposite pole would encompass most of the world's poor."
- Barry Commoner
(Related: Food, Wealth, Doctors, Earth, Machines, Poor, Space, Teachers, World)

"Before machines the only form of entertainment people really had was relationships."
- Doug Coupland
(Related: People, Entertainment, Machines, Relationships)

"Fondue sets, martini shakers and juicing machines: three things the world could live completely without."
- Doug Coupland
(Related: World)

"The machine has had a pernicious effect upon virtue, pity, and love, and young men used to machines which induce inertia, and fear, are near impotent."
- Edward Dahlberg
(Related: Men, Love, Fear, Virtue, Effect, Machine, Machines, Pity)

"I think there's a tendency for modern man to become dominated by gadgets and machines, taking us further and further away from the things I've been talking about."
- Robin Day
(Related: Machines, Man, Talking)

"When we recorded our first album sixteen track machines were the thing."
- John Deacon
(Related: First, Machines)

"At times, we forget the magnitude of the havoc we can wreak by off-loading our minds onto super-intelligent machines, that is, until they run away from us, like mad sorcerers' apprentices, and drag us up to the precipice for a look down into the abyss."
- Richard Dooling
(Related: Forget, Machines)

"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
(Related: Time, Building, Fire, Help, Machine, Machines, Man, Right)

"I had been impressed by the fact that biological systems were based on molecular machines and that we were learning to design and build these sorts of things."
- K. Eric Drexler
(Related: Design, Fact, Learning, Machines)

"The other advantage is that in conventional manufacturing processes, it takes a long time for a factory to produce an amount of product equal to its own weight. With molecular machines, the time required would be something more like a minute."
- K. Eric Drexler
(Related: Time, Machines, Manufacturing, Weight)

"After realizing that we would eventually be able to build molecular machines that could arrange atoms to form virtually any pattern that we wanted, I saw that an awful lot of consequences followed from that."
- K. Eric Drexler
(Related: Atoms, Consequences, Machines)

"Protein engineering is a technology of molecular machines - of molecular machines that are part of replicators - and so it comes from an area that already raises some of the issues that nanotechnology will raise."
- K. Eric Drexler
(Related: Technology, Engineering, Machines, Will)

"I've always worked on the machines, especially the 125 and 250 which are really difficult to set up."
- Joey Dunlop
(Related: Machines)

"The greatest task before civilization at present is to make machines what they ought to be, the slaves, instead of the masters of men."
- Henry Ellis
(Related: Men, Civilization, Machines, Present)

"The Connection Machines owned by the United States government laboratories were made available to me because they were considered impossible to program and there was no great demand for them at that time."
- Philip Emeagwali
(Related: Government, Time, Connection, Machines, states, United)

"I'm very good with technology, I always have been, and with machines in general. They seem not threatening like other people find them, but a source of fun and amusement."
- Brian Eno
(Related: Technology, People, Amusement, Fun, Machines)

"I have problems with machines which aren't gestural."
- Luc Ferrari
(Related: Machines, Problems)

"As machines become more and more efficient and perfect, so it will become clear that imperfection is the greatness of man."
- Ernst Fischer
(Related: Greatness, Imperfection, Machines, Man, Will)

"There are a lot of people who've been able to ditch their Windows machines and switch over to Linux because they can now use their Exchange server for calendaring and collaboration from their Linux desktop."
- Nat Friedman
(Related: People, Collaboration, Linux, Machines, Now, Windows)

"Red Carpet Enterprise has been really well received since one guy can install it in about an hour, and it makes it trivial to deal with software management issues like deploying updates and creating standard package sets for your various machines."
- Nat Friedman
(Related: Management, Machines, Software)

"Our bodies are machines and have to be functional, and to do that they have to be fed properly."
- Sarah Michelle Gellar
(Related: Machines)

"Let the machine take care of the machines, and I'll go spend more time with my family, or golf."
- Mark Goddard
(Related: Time, Family, Care, Golf, Machine, Machines)

"The biggest challenge has been simulating a tornado with wind machines and dirt and debris. Right when you walk on the set, you feel the energy of a tornado. But the hardest thing is trying to get dialogue out in all of that."
- Mark-Paul Gosselaar
(Related: Challenge, Energy, Machines, Right, Trying, Wind)

"Traditional academic science describes human beings as highly developed animals and biological thinking machines. We appear to be Newtonian objects made of atoms, molecules, cells, tissues, and organs."
- Stanislav Grof
(Related: Science, Animals, Atoms, Machines, Thinking)

"It's good Xerox is known for its copying machines, and it's good Jim Carrey is known for comedy."
- Steve Guttenberg
(Related: Comedy, Machines, Xerox)

"Research is four things: brains with which to think, eyes with which to see, machines with which to measure and, fourth, money."
- Albert Szent Gyorgyi
(Related: Money, Eyes, Machines, Measure, Research)

"The thing that we possess, that machines don't, is the ability to exhibit wisdom."
- Herbie Hancock
(Related: Wisdom, Ability, Machines)

"Some records with drum machines on them sound phony and plastic. It all depends on how you use the tools."
- Don Henley
(Related: Machines, Sound, Tools)

"Animals often strike us as passionate machines."
- Eric Hoffer
(Related: Animals, Machines)

"Become an internationalist and learn to respect all life. Make war on machines. And in particular the sterile machines of corporate death and the robots that guard them."
- Abbie Hoffman
(Related: Death, War, Life, Corporate, Machines, Respect)

"In Hell all the messages you ever left on answering machines will be played back to you."
- Judy Horacek
(Related: Hell, Machines, Will)

"I'm afraid for all those who'll have the bread snatched from their mouths by these machines. What business has science and capitalism got, bringing all these new inventions into the works, before society has produced a generation educated up to using them!"
- Henrik Ibsen
(Related: Business, Science, Society, Capitalism, Inventions, Machines)

"We all have our time machines. Some take us back, they're called memories. Some take us forward, they're called dreams."
- Jeremy Irons
(Related: Dreams, Time, Machines, Memories)

"It is only when they go wrong that machines remind you how powerful they are."
- Clive James
(Related: Machines, Wrong)

"Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible."
- Lord Kelvin
(Related: Flying, Machines)

"We believe that if men have the talent to invent new machines that put men out of work, they have the talent to put those men back to work."
- John F. Kennedy
(Related: Men, Work, Talent, Machines)

"The hardest thing is to go to sleep at night, when there are so many urgent things needing to be done. A huge gap exists between what we know is possible with today's machines and what we have so far been able to finish."
- Donald Knuth
(Related: Machines, Night, Sleep, Today)

"If you want to solve very complex problems, you will have to end up letting machines work out a lot of the details for themselves, and in ways that we don't understand what they are doing."
- Joshua Lederberg
(Related: Work, End, Machines, Problems, Want, Will)

"I think IT projects are about supporting social systems-about communications between people and machines. They tend to fail due to cultural issues."
- Tim Berners Lee
(Related: People, Machines, Projects)

"The more a person learns how to use the forces of nature for his own purposes, by means of perfecting the sciences and the invention and improvement of machines, the more he will produce."
- Friedrich List
(Related: Nature, Improvement, Invention, Machines, Will)

"I can make them voting machines sing Home Sweet Home."
- Earl Long
(Related: Home, Machines, Voting)

"New York is something awful, something monstrous. I like to walk the streets, lost, but I recognize that New York is the world's greatest lie. New York is Senegal with machines."
- Federico Garcia Lorca
(Related: Lie, Machines, World)

"Increasingly, the central question is becoming who will have access to the information these machines must have in storage to guarantee that the right decisions are made."
- Jean-Francois Lyotard
(Related: Decisions, Information, Machines, Question, Right, Will)

"Only a couple of companies in the world have the experience of building these machines, although the market need, if RFID did take off, would be for about 1 million of the machines running in parallel."
- Mike Marsh
(Related: Experience, Building, Machines, Running, World)

"Machines were, it may be said, the weapon employed by the capitalists to quell the revolt of specialized labor."
- Karl Marx
(Related: Labor, Machines, May)

"Manufacturing takes place in very large facilities. If you want to build a computer chip, you need a giant semiconductor fabrication facility. But nature can grow complex molecular machines using nothing more than a plant."
- Ralph Merkle
(Related: Nature, Computer, Machines, Manufacturing, Nothing, Want)

"Machines built by human beings they will function correctly if we provide them with a very specific environment. But if that environment is changed, they won't function at all."
- Ralph Merkle
(Related: Environment, Machines, Will)

"To be honest, I think we should find first the possibility to make it. Research is first - if you're not interested, you never can find something. Many things happen from forgotten machines - ones that are no longer used."
- Issey Miyake
(Related: Possibility, First, Machines, Research)

"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
(Related: Love, Time, People, Machines, Want)

"As part of our layered approach, we have expedited the deployment of new Advanced Imaging Technology (AIT) units to help detect concealed metallic and non-metallic threats on passengers. These machines are now in use at airports nationwide, and the vast majority of travelers say they prefer this technology to alternative screening measures."
- Janet Napolitano
(Related: Technology, Help, Machines, Majority, Now)

"In course of time the Brothers Cowper removed the manufacture of their printing machines from London, to Manchester. There they found skilled and energetic workmen, ready to carry their plans into effect."
- James Nasmyth
(Related: Time, Brothers, Effect, London, Machines, Printing)

"But I was very, very lucky, and it was a wake up call as far as motorbikes are concerned. I never flirted with death on the bike, but now I'm totally convinced they're death machines."
- Liam Neeson
(Related: Death, Machines, Now)

"We have to make machines understand what they're doing, or they won't be able to come back and say, 'Why did you do that?'"
- Nicholas Negroponte
(Related: Machines)

"Flight by machines heavier than air is unpractical and insignificant, if not utterly impossible."
- Simon Newcomb
(Related: Machines)

"That is not to say that we can relax our readiness to defend ourselves. Our armament must be adequate to the needs, but our faith is not primarily in these machines of defense but in ourselves."
- Chester W. Nimitz
(Related: Faith, Defense, Machines, Needs, Relax)

"Materialist philosophies that treat human beings as machines or animals possess the high ground in our culture - academia, the most powerful media and many of our courts."
- Marvin Olasky
(Related: Animals, Culture, Machines, Media)

"We too could wrest iron from the bowels of the earth and fashion it into ships and machines."
- Jose C. Orozco
(Related: Earth, Fashion, Machines, Ships)

"With bundled machines you can throw away the hardware and keep the software, and it's still a good buy."
- Adam Osborne
(Related: Hardware, Machines, Software)

"When I was young, I had one of those Yamaha drum machines, and I used to practice to that quite a bit, just to practice soloing and being in time and completing all my phrases."
- John Otto
(Related: Time, Being, Machines, Practice)

"One has to look out for engineers - they begin with sewing machines and end up with the atomic bomb."
- Marcel Pagnol
(Related: End, Machines)

"I was 17 and just learning what high fidelity was, what good sound was, and learning the mechanics of tape machines. It was a real education, going right from the consumer end to the record factory."
- Alan Parsons
(Related: Education, End, Fidelity, Learning, Machines, Right, Sound)

"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
(Related: Machines, Space)

"No more than these machines need the mathematician know what he does."
- Henri Poincare
(Related: Machines)

"If Unix could present the same face, the same capabilities, on machines of many different types, it could serve as a common software environment for all of them."
- Eric S. Raymond
(Related: Environment, Machines, Present, Software, Unix)

"Thompson and Ritchie were among the first to realize that hardware and compiler technology had become good enough that an entire operating system could be written in C, and by 1978 the whole environment had been successfully ported to several machines of different types."
- Eric S. Raymond
(Related: Technology, Environment, First, Hardware, Machines)

"The workstation-class machines built by Sun and others opened up new worlds for hackers."
- Eric S. Raymond
(Related: Machines, Sun)

"For the first time, individual hackers could afford to have home machines comparable in power and storage capacity to the minicomputers of ten years earlier - Unix engines capable of supporting a full development environment and talking to the Internet."
- Eric S. Raymond
(Related: Home, Power, Time, Development, Environment, First, Internet, Machines, Talking, Unix, Years)

"There were sometimes from forty to sixty English machines, but unfortunately the Germans were often in the minority. With them quality was more important than quantity."
- Manfred von Richthofen
(Related: Quality, English, Machines, Minority, Quantity)

"C was already implemented on several quite different machines and OSs, Unix was already being distributed on the PDP-11, but the portability of the whole system was new."
- Dennis Ritchie
(Related: Being, Machines, Unix)

"When ATM machines came out and people were prosecuted for robbing ATM machines, I don't think anybody thought the banks were against technology because they didn't want their ATM machines lifted."
- Hilary Rosen
(Related: Technology, Thought, People, Banks, Machines, Want)

"The days when you needed amazing Silicon Graphics machines to run animation software are gone now."
- Dave Rowntree
(Related: Animation, Machines, Now, Software)

"Machines are worshipped because they are beautiful and valued because they confer power; they are hated because they are hideous and loathed because they impose slavery."
- Bertrand Russell
(Related: Power, Machines, Slavery)

"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
(Related: Being, Killing, Machines, Nothing, World)

"I learned the business in about two months, and then made as much as the others, and was consequently doing quite well when the factory burned down, destroying all our machines - 150 of them. This was very hard on the girls who had paid for their machines."
- Rose Schneiderman
(Related: Business, Girls, Machines, Months)

"By working hard we could make an average of about $5 a week. We would have made more but had to provide our own machines, which cost us $45, we paying for them on the installment plan. We paid $5 down and $1 a month after that."
- Rose Schneiderman
(Related: Machines)

"We often attribute 'understanding' and other cognitive predicates by metaphor and analogy to cars, adding machines, and other artifacts, but nothing is proved by such attributions."
- John Searle
(Related: Machines, Metaphor, Nothing)

"I visualize a time when we will be to robots what dogs are to humans, and I'm rooting for the machines."
- Claude Shannon
(Related: Time, Dogs, Machines, Will)

"Now the whole point about machines is they are designed not to be random. When you call up a word processing program on your computer, you don't want it to be different every time you call it up. You want it to stay the same."
- Rupert Sheldrake
(Related: Time, Computer, Machines, Now, Want, Word)

"The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do."
- B. F. Skinner
(Related: Men, Machines)

"There are the manufacturing multitudes of England; they must have work, and find markets for their work; if machines and the Black Country are ugly, famine would be uglier still."
- Goldwin Smith
(Related: Work, Country, EnglFamine, Machines, Manufacturing, Ugly)

"Beyond that, states had to also have electronic voting machines that made it possible for people who are physically handicapped to vote in private... and the computerized voting machine made it very easy for, particularly, the blind."
- DeForest Soaries
(Related: People, Blind, Machine, Machines, states, Vote, Voting)

"It wasn't just about flashing lights and pinball machines blowing up and things like that. It was about using encores, bringing back the good songs and using techniques that I knew about from rock performance."
- Pete Townshend
(Related: Performance, Machines, Songs)

"Machines take me by surprise with great frequency."
- Alan Turing
(Related: Machines)

"I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted."
- Alan Turing
(Related: End, Machines, Opinion, Thinking, Will, Words)

"If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money."
- John Updike
(Related: Men, Money, Children, Eating, Machines)

"I hate this fast growing tendency to chain men to machines in big factories and deprive them of all joy in their efforts - the plan will lead to cheap men and cheap products."
- Richard Wagner
(Related: Men, Hate, Joy, Machines, Will)

"Machines aren't replacing proofreaders at all. Copy editors, who proofread and much, much more, use spellcheck as a tool but read every word that appears in the paper."
- Bill Walsh
(Related: Editors, Machines, Word)

"Slot machines are like crack for old people."
- Keenen Ivory Wayans
(Related: People, Machines, Old)

"I think that that multiplatform development is what's on the mind of most high-end PC developers now... this is really the first time in the industry's history that we've had console machines that can handle all that PC developers can deliver."
- Mike Wilson
(Related: History, Time, Development, First, Machines, Mind, Now)

"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
(Related: Work, Ability, First, Machine, Machines)

"The fact that the great scientist believed in flying machines was the one thing that encouraged us to begin our studies."
- Wilbur Wright
(Related: Fact, Flying, Machines)

"The tendency of philosophers who know nothing of machinery is to talk of man as a mere mechanism, intending by this to imply that he is without purpose. This shows a lack of understanding of machines as well as of man."
- Arthur Young
(Related: Purpose, Machines, Man, Nothing, Talk, Understanding)

"The machines, the modern mode of production, slowly undermined domestic production and not just for thousands but for millions of women the question arose: Where do we now find our livelihood?"
- Clara Zetkin
(Related: Women, Machines, Now, Production, Question)