Machine Quotes - page 15
There was a daily exchange of courtesies between our machine guns and the Germans' at stand-to; by removing cartridges from the ammunition-belt one could rap out the rhythm of the familiar prostitutes' call: "MEET me DOWN in PICC-a-DILL-y", to which the Germans would reply, though in slower tempo, because our guns were faster than theirs: "YES, with-OUT my DRAWERS ON!"
Robert Graves
Today I think we are beginning to suspect that man is not a tiny cog that doesn't really make much difference to the running of the huge machine, but rather that there is a much more intimate tie between man and the universe than we heretofore suspected...The physical world is in some deep sense tied to the human being.
John Archibald Wheeler
Philip Kaufman's Twisted walks like a thriller and talks like a thriller, but it squawks like a turkey.
But back to deus ex machina. This is a phrase you will want to study and master, not merely to amaze friends during long bus journeys but because it so perfectly describes what otherwise might take you thousands of words. Imagine a play on a stage. The hero is in a fix. The dragon is breathing fire, his sword is broken, his leg is broken, his spirit is broken, and the playwright's imagination is broken. Suddenly there is the offstage noise of the grinding of gears, and invisible machinery lowers a god onto the stage, who slays the dragon, heals the hero, and fires the playwright. He is the "god from the machine."
Roger Ebert
We have come more and more under the dominance of mechanics and sacrificed living humanity to the dead rhythm of the machine without most of us even being conscious of the monstrosity of the procedure. Hence we frequently deal with such matters with indifference and in cold blood as if we handled dead things and not the destinies of men.
Rudolf Rocker
I constructed a machine that I imagined was capable of taking me as high as I wanted to go. I launched myself into the air from the edge of a cliff. But I had miscalculated, and I crashed into the valley below.
I returned to my room, quite rumpled but not discouraged. I took some beef marrow and slathered it all over my body, which was bruised from head to toe. I fortified my courage with a bottle of cordial and went back for my machine.
Cyrano de Bergerac
As musicians and artists, it's important we have an environment - and I guess when I say environment, I really mean the industry, that really nurtures these gifts. Oftentimes, the machine can overlook the need to take care of the people who produce the sounds that have a lot to do with the health and well-being of society.
Lauryn Hill
I ran and grabbed the arm of the soldier who was lighting the fire. I tore the fuse away from him and, furious, threw myself into my machine to break down the contraption surrounding it. But I was too late. Hardly had I stepped inside when I found myself propelled into the clouds.
I was terrified, but my mind was not too upset for me to remember all that happened at that moment. I can tell you, then, that the fire burned out a bank of rockets (which had been linked together in rows of six with a hook at the edge of each set of half-dozen). Another stage ignited, then another, so that the danger in the gunpowder was left behind as it burned. When the material was used up, the scaffolding was gone. I was thinking that all I had left to do was ram my head against some mountain when I felt (without moving in the slightest) that I was still going up. My machine separated from me, and I saw it fall back to earth.
Cyrano de Bergerac
Never mind what two tons refers to. What is it? How has it entered in so definite a way into our exprerience? Two tons is the reading of the pointer when the elephant was placed on a weighing machine. Let us pass on. ... And so we see that the poetry fades out of the problem, and by the time the serious application of exact science begins we are left only with pointer readings.
Arthur Eddington
The fact is simple. The Spitfire looked good. It was every bit as dashing as the young men who flew it, and in flight it was as graceful as any bird. Its progress through the sky seemed effortless, as though it was simply riding the breeze and its Merlin engine was only there to provide a suitable soundtrack. You had Mr. Churchill on the radio explaining that we'd never surrender, and above you had the Spitfire, and you couldn't help thinking: Yes, we can win this thing. Possibly, just possibly, the Spitfire is the greatest machine ever made.
Jeremy Clarkson
Over the years the Flying Scotsman has travelled the world and been owned by pretty well everyone except my wife, and possibly Kate Moss. As I write he's for sale again, for a not inconsiderable 2.5 million Pounds. That may seem a lot for something that no longer has a purpose, even if he is Britain's engineering heritage. But he is not simply a machine. Like an Aston Martin DB7 or an F-16 fighter, he works as an art form too, a piece of sculpture. So what if you can't go anywhere in him anymore. Put him in your garden and spend your days just looking at him.
Jeremy Clarkson
Some say that no machine conceived to kill could ever be called beautiful. Magnificent, maybe, and awesome perhaps. But not beautiful. The thing is though that in the battleship's short life of just 90 years it turned out to be a less effective killing machine than amost any other weapon of war. All they did was steam around the oceans, making the people who paid for them feel good.
Jeremy Clarkson
...today's...newspapers...full of...diminishing exports, the unkillable widening grin of the pullulating East, the expanding machine of the almighty infallible State.... He himself could only turn to the past, but he heard that it was already possible to change the past, bringing the past perpetually up to date, a perpetual jackal fawning on the present, a malleable witness with no qualms about perjury. He knew that the armies were on the march, the Tannoys blaring, the collective mind – tool of oligarchy – being fashioned under the anaesthetic of the catchphrase and the mass entertainment...
Anthony Burgess
The current term of protection for software is the life of an author plus 70 years, or, if it's work-for-hire, a total of 95 years. This is a bastardization of the Constitution's requirement that copyright be for "limited times." By the time Apple's Macintosh operating system finally falls into the public domain, there will be no machine that could possibly run it. The term of copyright for software is effectively unlimited.
Lawrence Lessig
Today, the Panzer-like Bush machine controls all three branches of our federal government, the first time that has happened since Calvin Coolidge was in the White House. And that makes it just about impossible to mount any kind of Congressional investigation of a firmly-entrenched president like George Bush. The time has come to get deeply into football. It is the only thing we have left that ain't fixed.
Hunter S. Thompson
There are all kinds of atrocities, and I would have to say that, yes, yes, I committed the same kind of atrocities as thousands of other soldiers have committed in that I took part in shootings in free fire zones. I conducted harassment and interdiction fire. I used 50-caliber machine guns, which we were granted and ordered to use, which were our only weapon against people. I took part in search and destroy missions, in the burning of villages. All of this is contrary to the laws of warfare, all of this is contrary to the Geneva Conventions and all of this is ordered as a matter of written established policy by the government of the United States from the top down. And I believe that the men who designed these, the men who designed the free fire zone, the men who ordered us, the men who signed off the air raid strike areas, I think these men, by the letter of the law, the same letter of the law that tried Lieutenant [William] Calley, are war criminals.
John Kerry
Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an "intelligence explosion", and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.
I. J. Good
