(673 quotes found)
“Big machines are the awe-inspiring cathedrals of the 20th century.”
Daniel Kleppner
“All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.”
Roland Barthes
“Civilization is drugs, alcohol, engines of war, prostitution, machines and machine slaves, low wages, bad food, bad taste, prisons, reformatories, lunatic asylums, divorce, perversion, brutal sports, suicides, infanticide, cinema, quackery, demagogy, strikes, lockouts, revolutions, putsches, colonization, electric chairs, guillotines, sabotage, floods, famine, disease, gangsters, money barons, horse racing, fashion shows, poodle dogs, chow dogs, Siamese cats, condoms, peccaries, syphilis, gonorrhea, insanity, neuroses, etc., etc.”
Henry Miller
“PIANO, n. A parlor utensil for subduing the impenitent visitor. It is operated by pressing the keys of the machine and the spirits of the audience.”
Ambrose Bierce
“The machines that are first invented to perform any particular movement are always the most complex, and succeeding artists generally discover that, with fewer wheels, with fewer principles of motion, than had originally been employed, the same effects may be more easily produced. The first systems, in the same manner, are always the most complex.”
Adam Smith
“Every few seconds it changes - up an eighth, down an eighth -it's like playing a slot machine. I lose $20 million, I gain $20 million...”
Ted Turner
“The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do. The mystery which surrounds a thinking machine already surrounds a thinking man.”
B. F. Skinner
“Standing armies can never consist of resolute robust men; they may be well-disciplined machines, but they will seldom contain men under the influence of strong passions, or with very vigorous faculties.”
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
“The judicial system is the most expensive machine ever invented for finding out what happened and what to do about it.”
Irving R. Kaufman
“One has to look out for engineers they begin with sewing machines and end up with the atomic bomb”
Marcel Pagnol
