Machines Quotes - Page 31

• Before World War II, Modernist architects sometimes had to resort to custom fabrication or outright fakery to achieve the machine imagery advocated by the Bauhaus after its initial, Expressionist, phase. Stucco masqueraded as reinforced concrete; rivets were used for decoration.

  Martin Filler

  War, World, Phases

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• The financial benefits of prefabrication have never been as large as its advocates predicted, for although some labor costs can be reduced by machine manufacturing, on-site assembly of any building still depends to some extent on the handwork of skilled craftsmen.

  Martin Filler

  Cost, Benefits, Financial

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• Comparing science and religion isn't like comparing apples and oranges - it's more like apples and sewing machines.

  Jack Horner

  Apples, Orange, Compare

  The Wired Interview, www.wired.com. February 23, 2009.

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• Children are being adultified because our economy is depending on them to make purchasing decisions. So they're essentially the victims of a marketing and capitalist machine gone awry.

  Douglas Rushkoff

  Children, Decision, Marketing

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• I am much less concerned with whatever it is technology may be doing to people that what people are choosing to do to one another through technology. Facebook's reduction of people to predictively modeled profiles and investment banking's convolution of the marketplace into an algorithmic battleground were not the choices of machines.

  Douglas Rushkoff

  Technology, People, Choices

  Douglas Rushkoff (2013). “Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now”, p.162, Penguin

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• I find myself unable to let go of the sense that human beings are somehow special, and that moment-to-moment human experience contains a certain unquantifiable essence. I still suspect there is something too quirky, too paradoxical, or too interpersonal to be imitated or re-created by machine life.

  Douglas Rushkoff

  Letting Go, Essence, Special

  Douglas Rushkoff (2013). “Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now”, p.162, Penguin

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• Your email inbox is a bit like a Las Vegas roulette machine. You know, you just check it and check it, and every once in a while there's some juicy little tidbit of reward, like the three quarters that pop down on a one-armed bandit. And that keeps you coming back for more.

  Douglas Rushkoff

  Vegas, Email, Three

  "In A World That's Always On, We Are Trapped In The 'Present'". Interview with Audie Cornish, www.wyso.org. March 27, 2013.

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• By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.

  Donna J. Haraway

  Century, Chimera, Late

  "Become Who You Are: The World’s First Legally Recognized Cyborg May Be Onto Something" by Priscilla Frank, www.huffingtonpost.com. July 20, 2015.

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• With that, the poignant charm vanished. Inside the fifth machine, all was rampant malignity. Deformed flowers thrust monstrous horned tusks and trumpets ending in blaring teeth through the crimson walls, rending them; the ravenous garden slavered over its prey and every brick was shown in the act of falling. Amid the violence of this transformation, the oblivion of the embrace went on. The awakened girl, in all her youthful loveliness, still clasped in the arms of a lover from whom all the flesh had fallen. He was a grinning skeleton.

  Angela Carter

  Girl, Wall, Flower

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• We are all subject to the fates. But we must all act as if we are not, or die of despair...death will sweep through all the worlds; it will be the triumph of despair, forever. The universes will all become nothing more than interlocking machines, blind and empty of thought, feeling, life...

  Philip Pullman

  Fate, Forever, Feelings

  "Northern Lights/The Golden Compass". Book by Philip Pullman, 1995.

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• We are slaves in the sense that we depend for our daily survival upon an expand-or-expire agro-industrial empire—a crackpot machine—that the specialists cannot comprehend and the managers cannot manage. Which is, furthermore, devouring world resources at an exponential rate. We are, most of us, dependent employees. …Edward Abbey (1927-1989)

  Edward Abbey

  Survival, World, Empires

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• Sometimes I still have American dreams. I mean literally. I see microwave ovens and exercise machines and grocery store shelves with 30 brands of shampoo, and I look at these things oddly, in my dream. I stand and think, "What is all this for? What is the hunger that drives this need?" I think it's fear. Codi, I hope you won't be hurt by this, but I don't think I'll ever be going back. I don't think I can.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Dream, Hurt, Mean

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• A car crash harnesses elements of eroticism, aggression, desire, speed, drama, kinesthetic factors, the stylizing of motion, consumer goods, status - all these in one event. I myself see the car crash as a tremendous sexual event really: a liberation of human and machine libido (if there is such a thing).

  J. G. Ballard

  Drama, Car, Desire

  Penthouse magazine Interview, September 1970.

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• ...we took the 10 machines we agreed were the most beguiling, and we put them on permanent exhibit in the foyer of this library underneath a sign whose words can surely be applied to this whole ruined planet nowadays: THE COMPLICATED FUTILITY OF IGNORANCE

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Ignorance, Library, Foyers

  Kurt Vonnegut (1997). “Hocus Pocus”, p.19, Penguin

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• CALVIN: When I grow up I want to be an inventor. First I will invent a time machine. Then I'll come back to yesterday and take myself to tomorrow and skip this dumb assignment.

  Bill Watterson

  Growing Up, Yesterday, Dumb

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• The universe... is a machine for the making of gods.

  Henri Bergson

  Universe

  "The Two Sources of Morality and Religion". Book by Henri Bergson, 1932.

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• As beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table.

  Isidore Ducasse Lautreamont

  Beauty, Beautiful, Encounters

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• The passion for revenge should never blind you to the pragmatics of the situation. There are some people who are so blighted by their past, so warped by experience and the pull of that silken cord, that they never free themselves of the shadows that live in the time machine... And if there is a kind thought due them, it may be found contained in the words of the late Gerald Kersh, who wrote:"... there are men whom one hates until a certain moment when one sees, through a chink in their armour, the writhing of something nailed down and in torment.

  Harlan Ellison

  Revenge, Hate, Passion

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• I read," I say. "I study and read. I bet I've read everything you read. Don't think I haven't. I consume libraries. I wear out spines and ROM-drives. I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it." My instincts concerning syntax and mechanics are better than your own, I can tell, with all due respect. But it transcends the mechanics. I'm not a machine. I feel and believe. I have opinions. Some of them are interesting. I could, if you'd let me, talk and talk.

  David Foster Wallace

  Believe, Thinking, Interesting

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• We were young. We were bored. And the old electroshock therapy machine was just under the stairs in a box next to the Hoover.

  Augusten Burroughs

  Bored, Next, Stairs

  Augusten Burroughs (2010). “Running with Scissors: A Memoir”, p.45, Macmillan

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• it occurred to me what a simple thing reality is, how easy it is to make it work. It's just reality. Just housework. Just a home. Like running a simple machine. Once you learn to run it, it's just a matter of repetition. You push this button and pull that lever. You adjust a gauge, put on the lid, set the timer. The same thing, over and over.

  Haruki Murakami

  Running, Home, Simple

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• Something went klunk. Like a nickel dropping in a soda machine. One of those small insights that explains everything. This was puberty for these boys. Adolescence. The first date, the first kiss, the first chance to hold hands with someone special. Delayed, postponed, a decade's worth of longing--while everybody around you celebrates life, you pretend, suppress, inhibit, deprive yourself of you own joy--but finally ultimately, eventually, you find a place where you can have a taste of everything denied.

  David Gerrold

  Kissing, Boys, Hands

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• Man is a machine, but a very peculiar machine. He is a machine which, in right circumstances, and with right treatment, can know that he is a machine, and having fully realized this, he may find the ways to cease to be a machine. First of all, what man must know is that he is not one; he is many. He has not one permanent and unchangeable “I” or Ego. He is always different. One moment he is one, another moment he is another, the third moment he is a third, and so on, almost without end.

  P.D. Ouspensky

  Men, Ego, May

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• There is one other error in the Gondsman's line of resoning, I believe, on ap urely emotional level. If machines replace achievement, then to what will people aspire? And who are we, truly, without such goals? Beware the engineers of society, I say, who would make everyone in all the world equal. Opportunity should be equal, must be equal, but achievement must remain individual.

  R. A. Salvatore

  Believe, Opportunity, Emotional

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• Life The machine The human soul A 75mm breech My portrait

  Blaise Cendrars

  Soul, Portraits, Humans

  Blaise Cendrars (1966). “Selected writings”

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