Machinery Quotes - Page 17

• The people who keep asking if they can't lead a decent life without Christ, don't know what life is about; if they did they would know that 'a decent life' is mere machinery compared with the thing we men are really made for.

  C. S. Lewis

  Men, People, Asking

  C. S. Lewis (2014). “God in the Dock”, p.113, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

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• Sharks have everything a scientist dreams of. They're beautiful―God, how beautiful they are! They're like an impossibly perfect piece of machinery. They're as graceful as any bird. They're as mysterious as any animal on earth. No one knows for sure how long they live or what impulses―except for hunger―they respond to. There are more than two hundred and fifty species of shark, and everyone is different from every other one.

  Peter Benchley

  Beautiful, Dream, Animal

  Peter Benchley (2012). “Jaws”, p.104, Fawcett

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• Memory whispers someplace in that jumbled machinery.

  Ken Kesey

  Memories

  Ken Kesey (2016). “One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest”, p.8, Hamilton Books

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• So most people go around with grimy machinery, when all it would take is a bit of spit and polish to make them paladins once more, bold knights and true.

  Catherynne M. Valente

  Knights, People, Spit

  Catherynne M. Valente (2011). “The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making”, p.60, Macmillan

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• What has become alien to men is the human component of culture, its closest part, which upholds them against the world. They make common cause with the world against themselves, and the most alienated condition of all, the omnipresence of commodities, their own conversion into appendages of machinery, is for them a mirage of closeness.

  Theodor Adorno

  Men, Mirages, World

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• The republic which sinks to sleep, trusting to constitutions and machinery, to politicians and statesmen, for the safety of its liberties, never will have any.

  Wendell Phillips

  Sleep, Safety, Democracy

  Wendell Phillips (1902). “Selections from the works of Wendell Phillips”

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• Once I thought that to be human was the highest aim a man could have, but I see now that it was meant to destroy me. To-day I am proud to say that I am inhuman, that I belong not to men and governments, that I have nothing to do with creeds and principles. I have nothing to do with the creaking machinery of humanity - I belong to the earth!

  Henry Miller

  Men, Humanity, Principles

  Henry Miller (1964). “Henry Miller on Writing”, New Directions Publishing

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• It is an awful thing to get a glimpse, as one sometimes does, when the time is past, of some little, little wheel which works the whole mighty machinery of fate, and see how our destinies turn on a minute's delay or advance.

  William Makepeace Thackeray

  Fate, Destiny, Past

  William Makepeace Thackeray (1869). “Catherine. Little travels The Fitz-Boodle papers, etc. etc”, p.89

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• Tools arm the man. One can well say that man is capable of bringing forth a world; he lacks only the necessary apparatus, the corresponding armature of his sensory tools. The beginning is there. Thus the principle of a warship lies in the idea of the shipbuilder, who is able to incorporate this thought by making himself into a gigantic machine, as it were, through a mass of men and appropriate tools and materials. Thus the idea of a moment often required monstrous organs, monstrous masses of materials, and man is therefore a potential, if not an actual creator.

  Novalis

  Lying, Men, Ideas

  "Bluthenstaub (Pollen)". Book by Novalis (Fragment No. 88), 1798.

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• Let us stop being afraid. Of our own thoughts, our own minds. Of madness, our own or others'. Stop being afraid of the mind itself, its astonishing functions and fandangos, its complications and simplifications, the wonderful operation of its machinery--more wonderful because it is not machinery at all or predictable.

  Kate Millett

  Mind, Madness, Wonderful

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• I have a feeling-as compelling as a religious conviction-that if industry will constantly pass on to the worker and the customer all the savings of labor-saving machinery and invention, rather than siphon them off into the pools of watered securities, it will by that process keep distribution and production in balance and go as far toward Utopia as our poor human natures will go or be driven.

  Samuel B. Pettengill

  Religious, Feelings, Balance

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• When a livestock farmer is willing to "practice complexity"-to choreograph the symbiosis of several different animals, each of which has been allowed to behave and eat as it evolved to-he will find he has little need for machinery, fertilizer, and, most strikingly, chemicals. He finds he has no sanitation problem or any of the diseases that result from raising a single animal in a crowded monoculture and then feeding it things it wasn't designed to eat. This is perhaps the greatest efficiency of a farm treated as a biological system: health.

  Michael Pollan

  Animal, Practice, Different

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• Indeed, the life of cattle, like that of many men, is but a sort of locomotiveness; they move a side at a time, and man, by his machinery, is meeting the horse and the ox half-way.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Horse, Moving, Men

  Henry David Thoreau (2015). “Walking: Top Essays”, p.15, 谷月社

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• Human nature, as manifested in tribalism and nationalism, provides the momentum of the machinery of human evolution.

  Arthur Keith

  Momentum, Evolution, Human Nature

  Sir Arthur Keith (1947). “Evolution and Ethics”

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• I emphasize the reply that the liberty which a citizen enjoys is to be measured, not by the nature of the governmental machinery he lives under, whether representative or other, but by the relative paucity of the restraints it imposes on him.

  Herbert Spencer

  Liberty, Citizens, Libertarian

  "The man versus the state: with six essays on government, society, and freedom".

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• Those who controlled private capital largely walked away from the US economy for the entire 1930s, refusing to pump in enough new investment even to replace the machinery and goods-in-process that were consumed during the decade.

  Robert P. Murphy

  Pumps, Investment, Enough

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• For it is the working people who have their hands on the machinery. And only by stopping the machinery of destruction can we ever hope to stop this madness.

  Judi Bari

  Hands, People, Stopping

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• Zarathustra was the first to consider the fight of good and evil the very wheel in the machinery of things: the transposition of morality into the metaphysical realm, as a force, cause, and end in itself, is his work. [...] Zarathustra created this most calamitous error, morality; consequently, he must also be the first to recognize it.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Fighting, Errors, Evil

  Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1995). “Philosophical Writings: Friedrich Nietzsche”, p.229, A&C Black

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• Culture looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred; culture has one great passion, the passion for sweetness and light.

  Matthew Arnold

  Hate, Passion, Light

  "Culture and Anarchy" by Matthew Arnold, (Ch. I), 1869.

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• I like Thelonious Monk, he's so gnarled, he's like a piece of machinery that's pulled up the bolts on the floor and gone off on its own.

  Tom Waits

  Art, Gone, Pieces

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• It should be the privilege of every worker to take advantage of all the improved methods of working that relieve him from the tedium and fatigue of purely mechanical toil, for by this means he gains leisure for the thought necessary to working out his designs, and for the finer touches that the hand alone can give. So long as he remains master of his machinery it will serve him well, and his power of artistic expression will be freed rather than stifled by turning over to it work it is meant to do.

  Gustav Stickley

  Mean, Expression, Hands

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• Here is an educational bombshell: Take from all of today's industrial nations all their industrial machinery and all their energy-distributing networks, and leave them all their ideologies, all their political leaders, and all their political organizations, and I can tell you that within six months, two billion people will die of starvation, having gone through great pain and deprivation along the way.

  R. Buckminster Fuller

  Wisdom, Pain, Educational

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• Consider in what way the industrial system developed upon capitalist lines. Why were a few rich men put with such ease into possession of the new methods? Why was it normal and natural in their eyes and in that of contemporary society that those who produced the new wealth with the new machinery should be proletarian and dispossessed?

  Hilaire Belloc

  Eye, Men, Ease

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• Medieval England was a great military power with a sophisticated machinery of government, but her naval administration, at best improvised and for long periods missing altogether, pointed to a grave weakness: the lack of any reliable means of putting a force of warships at the disposal of the crown. Only Richard I and Henry V of all the kings of England can be said to have understood the problem and attempted to remedy it. It is no coincidence that they wer by far the most successful in war.

  Nicholas Rodger

  Kings, Military, War

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• The pre-war empire had been sufficiently informal and sufficiently cheap for Parliament to claim authority over it without having to concern itself too much about what this authority entailed. The post-war empire necessitated a much greater investment in administrative machinery and military force. This build-up of control had to be paid for, either by British taxpayers or by their colonists.

  Linda Colley

  Military, War, Empires

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