Automatons Quotes

But that evening, driving back to the plant in the little underground train, I firmly believed my bad luck was over. One of the cars I had admired that morning took me back to the city. Fortunately some shops were still open here and there; I could buy myself a new suit. For Teresa I bought a nice summer dress with red stripes, which reminded me of the one in which I had seen her for the first time. It fitted to perfection – I knew her measurements. She had shared many hours with me, mainly bitter ones.

We went out for dinner; it was one of the days one never forgets. Quite soon the happenings in Zapparoni's garden began to fade in my memory. There is much that is illusory in techniques. But I never forgot Teresa's words, and her smile when she spoke. Now she was happy about me. This smile was more powerful than all the automatons – it was a ray of reality. ~ Ernst Junger

What people don't appreciate, when they picture Terminator-style automatons striding triumphantly across a mountain of human skulls, is how hard it is to keep your footing on something as unstable as a mountain of human skulls. Most humans probably couldn't manage it, and they've had a lifetime of practice at walking without falling over. ~ Randall Munroe

The life of the body, reduced to its
essentials, paradoxically produces an abstract and gratuitous universe, continuously denied, in its turn, by
reality. This type of novel, purged of interior life, in which men seem to be observed behind a pane of
glass, logically ends, with its emphasis on the pathological, by giving itself as its unique subject the
supposedly average man. In this way it is possible to explain the extraordinary number of "innocents"
who appear in this universe. The simpleton is the ideal subject for such an enterprise since he can only be
defined - and completely defined - by his behavior. He is the symbol of the despairing world in which
wretched automatons live in a machine-ridden universe, which American novelists have presented as a
heart-rending but sterile protest. ~ Albert Camus

Today's workplace has become heartless and soulless. Employees are seen as units of labour, automatons, functionaries, objects for achieving designated tasks, and as costs to be minimised. ~ Tim Field

When I say that evil has to do with killing, I do not mean to restrict myself to corporeal murder. Evil is that which kills spirit. There are various essential attributes of life -- particularly human life -- such as sentience, mobility, awareness, growth, autonomy, will. It is possible to kill or attempt to kill one of these attributes without actually destroying the body. Thus we may "break" a horse or even a child without harming a hair on its head.

Erich Fromm was acutely sensitive to this fact when he broadened the definition of necrophilia to include the desire of certain people to control others-to make them controllable, to foster their dependency, to discourage their capacity to think for themselves, to diminish their unpredectibility and originalty, to keep them in line. Distinguishing it from a "biophilic" person, one who appreciates and fosters the variety of life forms and the uniqueness of the individual, he demonstrated a "necrophilic character type," whose aim it is to avoid the inconvenience of life by transforming others into obedient automatons, robbing them of their humanity.

Evil then, for the moment, is the force, residing either inside or outside of human beings, that seeks to kill life or liveliness. And goodness is its opposite. Goodness is that which promotes life and liveliness. ~ M. Scott Peck

In the age of revolution you have to be able to imagine revolutionary alternatives to the status quo. If you can't, you'll be relegated to the swollen ranks of keyboard-pounding automatons. ~ Gary Hamel

The illusion of self-awareness. Happy automatons, running on trivial programs. I'll bet you never guess. From the inside, how can you? ~ Vernor Vinge

Germany no longer feels bound by the Locarno Treaty. In the interest of the primitive rights of its people to the security of their frontier and the safeguarding of their defence, the German Government has re-established, as from today, the absolute and unrestricted sovereignty of the Reich in the demilitarized zone!" Now the six hundred deputies, personal appointees all of Hitler, little men with big bodies and bulging necks and cropped hair and pouched bellies and brown uniforms and heavy boots, little men of clay in his fine hands, leap to their feet like automatons, their right arms upstretched in the Nazi salute, and scream Heils, the first two or three wildly, the next twenty-five in unison, like a college yell. Hitler raises his hand for silence. It comes slowly. Slowly the automatons sit down. Hitler now has them in his claws. He appears to sense it. He says in a deep, resonant voice: "Men of the German Reichstag!" The silence is utter. ~ William L. Shirer

Most satyrs excel at running away.
Gleeson Hedge, however, was not most satyrs. He grabbed a barrel brush from his cart, yelled, "DIE!" and charged the three-hundred-pound manager.
Even the automatons were too surprised to react, which probably saved Hedge's life. I grabbed the satyr's collar and dragged him backwards as the employees' first shots went wild, a barrage of bright orange discount stickers flying over our heads.
I pulled Hedge down the aisle as he launched a fierce kick, overturning his shopping trolley at our enemies' feet. Another discount sticker grazed my arm with the force of an angry Titaness's slap.
"Careful!" Macro yelled at his men. "I need Apollo in one piece, not half-off! ~ Rick Riordan

If I were to give a summary of the tendency of our times, I would say, Quantity. The multitude, the mass spirit, dominates everywhere, destroying quality. Our entire life
production, politics, and education
rests on quantity, on numbers. The worker who once took pride in the thoroughness and quality of his work, has been replaced by brainless, incompetent automatons, who turn out enormous quantities of things, valueless to themselves, and generally injurious to the rest of mankind. Thus quantity, instead of adding to life's comforts and peace, has merely increased man's burden. ~ Emma Goldman

I wish my genius ran to making automatons," he said. "I would invent one that would follow you around with a tray. It would wait patiently for you to look up from whatever you were doing, and as soon as you did, it would say, 'Lady Cambury, you must have something to eat.'"

She swallowed her bite of apple. "That would be extremely annoying."

"I do not consider that a detriment."

"I consider it a waste of a good automaton. I would modify your invention," she said, reaching for some cheese. "I'd dress my version up in my best silk and send it out to pay morning calls. Oh, how I hate making morning calls. It wouldn't need much of a vocabulary. 'Yes,' my automaton would say, 'this weather is dreadful, isn't it?' In fact, I think that's how I would do it. Whatever the other person says, it would answer, 'Yes, it most certainly is, isn't it?' My automaton would have perfect manners. ~ Courtney Milan

Parents who can feel, who are conscious of their feelings and realize that uncontrolled anger, though it may be triggered by the child, usually has little to do with it, are less in danger of acting out their rage in the guise of pedagogy. I use the words "guilt" and "victim," rather than "causes" and "effects," as I am often politely urged to do, advisedly. Children are turned into victims by people, by their parents, not by some kind of automaton. These people have no right to behave as though they were merely destructive automatons and adhere to their ignorance, even though conventional wisdom and even moral and religious teachings confirm them in their actions by preaching forgiveness to their victims. One day the effects of such opinions will be seen in all their destructiveness. ~ Alice Miller

We see North Koreans as automatons, goose-steeping at parades, doing mass gymnastics with fixed smiles on their faces - but beneath all that, real life goes on with the same complexity of human emotion as anywhere else. ~ Barbara Demick

Freedom to creat and construct, to wonder and to venture. Such freedom requires that the individual be active and responsible, not a slave or a well-fed cog in the machine ... It is not enough that men are not slaves; if social conditions further the existence of automatons, the result will not be love of life, but love of death. ~ Erich Fromm

Without Love, humanity dies of thirst, grasps at riches, destroys the earth through insatiable greed. Without Love, we are walking dust, dead matter stumbling from the dawn of birth to the dusk of death. Without Love, our Earth is stripped of beingness, left barren and lifeless, a pile of rocks and resources, objects to possess and control. Without Love, humanity sleepwalks as automatons, controlled, manipulated, and shoved through a nightmarish existence. ~ Rivera Sun

After a sleepless night, the people in the street seem automatons. No one seems to breathe, to walk, Each looks as if he is worked by clockwork: nothing spontaneous; mechanical smiles, spectral gesticulations. Yourself a specter, how would you see others as alive? ~ Emil M. Cioran

Nevertheless, the potential and actual importance of fantastic literature lies in such psychic links: what appears to be the result of an overweening imagination, boldly and arbitrarily defying the laws of time, space and ordered causality, is closely connected with, and structured by, the categories of the subconscious, the inner impulses of man's nature. At first glance the scope of fantastic literature, free as it is from the restrictions of natural law, appears to be unlimited. A closer look, however, will show that a few dominant themes and motifs constantly recur: deals with the Devil; returns from the grave for revenge or atonement; invisible creatures; vampires; werewolves; golems; animated puppets or automatons; witchcraft and sorcery; human organs operating as separate entities, and so on. Fantastic literature is a kind of fiction that always leads us back to ourselves, however exotic the presentation; and the objects and events, however bizarre they seem, are simply externalizations of inner psychic states. This may often be mere mummery, but on occasion it seems to touch the heart in its inmost depths and become great literature. ~ Franz Rottensteiner

It is the liberal philosophy, not the conservative one, that views humans as selfish automatons. ~ Allen West

To become self-aware, people must be allowed to hear a plurality of opinions and then make up their own minds. They must be allowed to say, write and publish whatever they want. Freedom of expression is the most basic, but fundamental, right. Without it, human beings are reduced to automatons. ~ Ma Jian

Truly smart technologies will remind us that we are not mere automatons who assist big data in asking and answering questions. ~ Evgeny Morozov

A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for a second; that second for a third; and so on, till the bulk of the society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery, to have no sensibilities left but for sin and suffering. ~ Thomas Jefferson

Geopolitical drama lessened but did not die after the Cold War; in 2008, the specter of thousands of seeming automatons banging drums at the opening of the Beijing Games frightened and enthralled the world, reminding us that China was a nation on the rise, a competitor for global dominance. ~ Ben Shapiro

Something went greatly wrong in our collective history and the starting point of it was the industrial revolution. Our school systems are focussed on a single objective: to produce model citizens for society in order to feed this machine and prevent its breakdown. That's why our school systems have no interest in developing models that actually require and stimulate useful values in people, such as courage or imagination or inventiveness.
None of these are taught in our schools, on the contrary the system focuses on memorizing. Memorizing is a way of overloading the mind with mental baggage it doesn't really need. Besides being horribly dull and stiffening the effect of 20 years of abundant memorization training is modern man: an unimaginative creature stuffed with useless knowledge and unable to clean his mind of this information dirt: our school systems are purposely constructed to deliver mental automatons that are unable to think creatively. ~ Martijn Benders

The brown earth, the torn, blasted earth, with a greasy shine under the sun's rays; the earth is the background of this restless, gloomy world of automatons, our gasping is the scratching of a quill, our lips are dry, our heads are debauched with stupor - thus we stagger forward, and into our pierced and shattered souls bores the torturing image of the brown earth with the greasy sun and the convulsed and dead soldiers, who lie there - it can't be helped - who cry and clutch at our legs as we spring away over them. We have lost all feeling for one another. We can hardly control ourselves when our glance lights on the form of some other man. We are insensible, dead men, who through some trick, some dreadful magic, are still able to run and to kill. ~ Erich Maria Remarque

Ennui had more distractions far more amusing than the automatons of a watchmaker in Mühlenberg. ~ Steven Millhauser

What are we promoting in society? Well-behaved automatons that spew back what they learned in a book. That's not science. You can get a parrot to do that. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Beckendorf, whose legs were now working fine (nothing like being chased by a huge monster to get your body back in order) shook his head and gasped for breath. You shouldn't have turned it on! It's unstable! After a few years, automatons go wild! ~ Rick Riordan

Almost everyone today is brain-damaged by our education which is designed to produce docile automatons. ~ Timothy Leary

Each of us must find our work and do it. Militancy no longer means guns at high noon, if it ever did. It means actively working for change, sometimes in the absence of any surety that change is coming. It means doing the unromantic and tedious work necessary to forge meaningful coalitions, and it means recognizing which coalitions are possible and which coalitions are not. It means knowing that coalition, like unity, means the coming together of whole, self-actualized human beings, focused and believing, not fragmented automatons marching to a prescribed step. It means fighting despair. ~ Audre Lorde

But why is God so slow in conquering the forces of evil? Why does not God break in and smash the evil schemes of wicked men? ... We are responsible human beings, not blind automatons; persons, not puppets. By endowing us with freedom, God relinquished a measure of his own sovereignty and imposed certain limitations upon himself. If his children are free, they must do his will by a voluntary choice. Therefore, God cannot at the same time impose his will upon his children and also maintain his purpose for man. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

If men were the automatons that behaviorists claim they are, the behaviorist psychologists could not have invented the amazing nonsense called 'behaviorist psychology.' ~ Robert A. Heinlein

We do not imagine that the "masses" may consist of automatons obeying external stimuli and may move, not under the influence of the will, consciousness, or inclination of individuals, but under the influence of external stimuli coming possibly from very far away. ~ P.D. Ouspensky

Poetry: that can mean an Atemwende, a breathturn. Who knows, perhaps poetry travels this route - also the route of art - for the sake of such a breathturn? Perhaps it will succeed, as the strange, I mean the abyss and the Medusa's head, the abyss and the automatons, seem to lie in one direction - perhaps it will succeed here to differentiate between strange and strange, perhaps it is exactly here that the Medusa's head shrinks, perhaps it is exactly here that the automatons break down - for this single short moment? Perhaps here, with the I - with the estranged I set free here and in this manner - perhaps here a further Other is set free? Perhaps the poem is itself because of this ... and can now, in this art-less, art-free manner, walk its other routes, thus also the routes of art - time and again? Perhaps. ~ Paul Celan

Poor things, she thought - do they have to spend all this energy just to surround me? It seemed pitiful that these automatons should be created and wasted, never knowing more than a minor fragment of the pattern in which they were involved, to learn and follow through insensitively a tiny step in the great dance which was seen close up as the destruction of Natalie, and far off, as the end of the world.

They had all earned their deaths, Natalie thought, by a job well done - the woman in the seat ahead who had never needed a face, had perhaps been given for her part only the back of a head and a dark cloth coat collar, the man in the seat next to Natalie, a full-dress part, even to the watchchain and the grimy shirt collar - had not this same man, as a matter of fact, been close to Natalie in the station, memorising her face so that although when next they met she would not know him, he would be able to identify her, winking and gesturing with his head to the others, murmuring perhaps to the bus driver, 'That one, there. ~ Shirley Jackson

Many things happen in life. There are joyous days and times of suffering. Sometimes unpleasant things occur. But that's what makes life so interesting. The dramas we encounter are part and parcel of being human. If we experienced no change or drama in our lives, if nothing unexpected ever happened, we would merely be like automatons, our lives unbearably monotonous and dull. Therefore, please develop a strong self so that you can enact the drama of your life with confidence and poise in the face of whatever vicissitudes you may encounter. ~ Daisaku Ikeda

When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow. ~ Anais Nin

Automatons cannot love; they can exchange their "personality packages" and hope for a fair bargain. ~ Erich Fromm

My litmus test of compatibility is 'Tom Cruise.' I hate people who hate Tom Cruise, cultural automatons who at the mention of his name reflexively bridle and say the diminutive thespian and Theta level Scientoligist is 'crazy' and 'a terrible actor'. They hate him because he's easy to hate. They think that despising Tom Cruise's lack of personality and supposed lack of talent is somehow a blow against the bland American Anschluss of the rest of the planet. Tom Cruise may indeed be the Christopher Columbus of the twentieth century, sent off by the kings of Hollywood to prove the new world of International Box Office isn't flat and to find a direct route into the Asian market, but the decline of everything isn't his fault; he's just a cinematic explorer and a damn fine actor. And hating him doesn't make you seditious- it makes you complicit. ~ Paul Beatty

Each of the essays in this volume ranges widely across technical and philosophical domains. They examine both familiar automatons from throughout history and delight us with yet more that will likely be unfamiliar to most readers. But the real treat of the essays is how they will make Artificial Life researchers squirm as they recognize their own intellectual sleights of hand exposed for all to see. Those researchers and the Genesis Redux contributors are all ultimately interested in what it is that truly distinguishes us beings from other lumps of matter. ~ Rodney Brooks

God never sends suffering. Never. It is never "God's will" that we should suffer. God would like us not to suffer. But since the world brings suffering, and since God refuses to use His almighty power and treat us as foolish children, He aligns Himself with us, goes into Auschwitz with us, is devastated by 9/11 with us, and draws us with Him through it all into fulfillment. This is a high price to pay for our human freedom, but it is worth it. To be mere automatons for whom God arranges the world to cause us no suffering would mean we never have a self. We could not make choices. ~ Wendy Beckett

The central law of all wholesome life is reciprocity, mutuality ... But the group is valuable only as it permits personalities, not automatons, to emerge. ~ Norman Thomas

Of course, differences existed between military service under Henry IV, Louis XIII, or Louis XIV, but one always served on horseback. Today these magnificent creatures were doomed. They had disappeared from the fields and streets, from the villages and towns, and for years they had not been seen in combat. Everywhere they had been replaced by automatons. Corresponding to this change was a change in men: they became more mechanical, more calculable, and often you hardly felt that you were among human beings. Only at rare moments did I still hear a sound from the past – the sound of bugles at sunrise and the neighing of horses, which made our hearts tremble. All that has gone. ~ Ernst Junger

Amory had rather a Puritan conscience. Not that he yielded to it--later in life he almost completely slew it--but at fifteen it made him consider himself a great deal worse than other boys... unscrupulousness... the desire to influence people in almost every way, even for evil... a certain coldness and lack of affection, amounting sometimes to cruelty... a shifting sense of honor... an unholy selfishness... a puzzled, furtive interest in everything concerning sex.

There was, also, a curious strain of weakness running crosswise through his make-up... a harsh phrase from the lips of an older boy (older boys usually detested him) was liable to sweep him off his poise into surly sensitiveness, or timid stupidity... he was a slave to his own moods and he felt that though he was capable of recklessness and audacity, he possessed neither courage, perseverance, nor self-respect.

Vanity, tempered with self-suspicion if not self-knowledge, a sense of people as automatons to his will, a desire to "pass" as many boys as possible and get to a vague top of the world... with this background did Amory drift into adolescence. ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

At this very moment in time there will be people making, breaking relationships, regretting deeply what they've done, and causing hurt, but that is a fact of life, and if we weren't full of emotion, we'd be automatons, and I don't think people want us to be that. ~ David Blunkett

If we were committing an injustice, we ought to think about it, and decide if it was necessary and inevitable, or if it was only the result of taking the easy way out, of laziness, of a lack of thought. It was a question of rigor. I knew that these decisions were made at a much higher level than our own; still, we weren't automatons, it was important not just to obey orders, but to adhere to them; yet I was having doubts, and that troubled me. Finally ~ Jonathan Littell

We're automatons in a symphony conducted by a lunatic and performed by blind idealists. Damon ~ Eleni Papanou

That's the worst thing, isn't it?' Charlie said. 'Things that act alive but aren't. ~ Scott Cawthon

For some time now the impression has been growing upon me that everyone is dead.
It happens when I speak to people. In the middle of a sentence it will come over me: yes, beyond a doubt this is death. There is little to do but groan and make an excuse and slip away as quickly as one can. At such times it seems that the conversation is spoken by automatons who have no choice in what they say. I hear myself or someone else saying things like: "In my opinion the Russian people are a great people, but
" or "Yes, what you say about the hypocrisy of the North is unquestionably true. However
" and I think to myself: this is death. Lately it is all I can do to carry on such everyday conversations, because my cheek has developed a tendency to twitch of its own accord. ~ Walker Percy

Crime begins with God. It will end with man, when he finds God again. Crime is everywhere, in all the fibres and roots of our being. Every minute of the day adds fresh crimes to the calendar, both those which are detected and punished, and those which are not. The criminal hunts down the criminal. The judge condemns the judger. The innocent torture the innocent. Everywhere, in every family, every tribe, every great community, crimes, crimes, crimes. War is clean by comparison. The hangman is a gentle dove by comparison. Attila, Tamerlane, Genghis Khan reckless automatons by comparison. Your father, your darling mother, your sweet sister: do you know the foul crimes they harbor in their breasts? Can you hold the mirror to iniquity when it is close at hand? Have you looked into the labyrinth of your own despicable heart? Have you sometimes envied the thug for his forthrightness? The study of crime begins with the knowledge of oneself. All that you despise, all that you loathe, all that you reject, all that you condemn and seek to convert by punishment springs from you. The source of it is God whom you place outside, above and beyond. Crime is identification, first with God, then with your own image. ~ Henry Miller

This is why tyrants of all stripes, infernal servants, have such deep-seated hatred for the nomads - this is why they persecute the Gypsies and the Jews, and why they force all free peoples to settle, assigning the addresses that serve as our sentences.
What they want is to create a frozen order, to falsify time's passage. They want for the days to repeat themselves, unchanging, they want to build a big machine where every creature will be forced to take its place and carry out false actions. Institutions and offices, stamps,newsletters, a hierarchy, and ranks, degrees, applications and rejections, passports, numbers, cards, elections results, sales and amassing points, collecting, exchanging some things for others.
What they want is to pin down the world with the aid of barcodes, labelling all things, letting it be known that everything is a commodity, that this is how much it will cost you. Let this new foreign language be illegible to humans, let it be read exclusively by automatons, machines. That way by night, in their great underground shops, they can organize reading of their own barcoded poetry.

Move. Get going. Blesses is he who leaves. ~ Olga Tokarczuk

I was ovulated, fertilized, and born in the 20th century. I can't wipe out my whole personal background, or the fact that almost everyone I talk to today is brain-damaged by our education. I think American education makes us hopeless symbol addicts. It's designed to produce docile automatons. But it's going to take years before you can urge young people to drop out of school without appearing to be an eccentric or a mad-man. ~ Timothy Leary

Sometimes at night the only sound was the syncopated footfalls of a Nazi patrol stiffly marching past in their nailed boots. It was like the noise of a pitiless machine. The sound of those unseen boots created an abyss in the atmosphere that you felt yourself falling into. You can't imagine how sinister it seemed that they marched in step like that when there was no one around to see them. They didn't seem like human beings, more like programmed automatons. ~ Glenn Haybittle

The person who gives up his individual self and becomes an automaton, identical with millions of other automatons around him, need not feel alone and anxious any more. But the price he pays, however, is high; it is the loss of his self. ~ Erich Fromm

Ernst Mayr characterized the Cartesian view of animals as dumb automatons.2 ~ Frans De Waal