Machine Quotes

He was free, free for everything, free to act like an animal or like a machine. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

As we learned from the Clinton administration and much of the media, a machine gun in the hands of a federal agent is now a symbol of benevolence and concern for a child's well-being. ~ James Bovard

There came a shrill beep followed by another message. "Listen bitch! You better stop lying about Coach T. If you don't, you're gonna find yourself in a world of hurt! It's real hard to screw up people's lives when you're dead!"

With trembling hands, I turned the machine off. I didn't want to hear anymore. Name calling was one thing, but now my life had been threatened.

Mom never came in that night, and I never went to sleep. I sat in the middle of my bed with her loaded .45 by my side until morning."---Jordan ~ Katie Ashley

This getting straight not only applies to people but to things as well, such as favorite music, disliked foods, special treats, avoided places, all your toys, etc. Everything must be rerun through your compassion machine. ~ Ram Dass

In August 1867, a thirteen-year-old142 boy who had severely cut his arm while operating a machine at a fair in Glasgow was admitted to Lister's infirmary. The boy's wound was open and smeared with grime - a setup for gangrene. But rather than amputating the arm, Lister tried a salve of carbolic acid, hoping to keep the arm alive and uninfected. The wound teetered on the edge of a terrifying infection, threatening to become an abscess. But Lister persisted, intensifying his application of carbolic acid paste. For a few weeks, the whole effort seemed hopeless. But then, like a fire running to the end of a rope, the wound began to dry up. A month later, when the poultices were removed, the skin had completely healed underneath. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

three conclusions: (1) at least weak forms of superintelligence are achievable by means of biotechnological enhancements; (2) the feasibility of cognitively enhanced humans adds to the plausibility that advanced forms of machine intelligence are feasible - because even if we were fundamentally unable to create machine intelligence (which there is no reason to suppose), machine intelligence might still be within reach of cognitively enhanced humans; and (3) when we consider scenarios stretching significantly into the second half of this century and beyond, we must take into account the probable emergence of a generation of genetically enhanced populations - voters, inventors, scientists - with the magnitude of enhancement escalating rapidly over subsequent decades. ~ Nick Bostrom

The camera machine cannot evade the objects which are in front of it. When the photographer selects this movement, the light, the objects, he must be true to them. If he includes in his space a strip of grass, it must be felt as the living differentiated thing it is and so recorded. It must take its proper but no less important place as a shape and a texture in relationship to the mountain tree or what not, which are included. ~ Paul Strand

God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on petrol, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself. ~ C.S. Lewis

The construction of the nuclear doomsday machine - and its continued maintenance and development since the mid-twentieth century - is surely one of the most astounding acts of collective insanity in the history of the human species. ~ Richard L. Currier

You want me to be rational. The most rational thing is the machine. Go to the machines. All their separate parts work together. But I live with no purpose, irrationally. ~ Jonas Mekas

The protomolecule can alter the host organism at the molecular level; it can create genetic change on the fly. Not just DNA, but any stable replicator. But it is only a machine. It doesn't think. It follows instructions. If we learn how to alter that programming, then we become the architects of that change. Holden ~ James S.A. Corey

Maybe there's a machine in Berkeley that will save me, too. Perhaps my problems can be automated out of existence. ~ Philip K. Dick

I would drive through the desert, and there's this one spot in the desert that, every time I drove through it, I would get crazy ideas. I would either sing into the cell phone recorder or I would sing into a DAT machine. ~ Tim Rutili

A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. ~ William Strunk Jr.

For to him, and nearly all the educated youth of that epoch, the stars were cruel things; though they glowed in the great dome every night, they were an enormous and ugly secret; they uncovered the nakedness of nature; they were a glimpse of the iron wheels and pulleys behind the scenes. For the young men of that sad time thought that the god always came from the machine. They did not know that in reality the machine only comes from the god. In short, they were all pessimists, and starlight was atrocious to them--atrocious because it was true. All their universe was black with white spots. ~ G.K. Chesterton

However the machine would permit us to test the hypothesis for any special value of n. We could carry out such tests for a sequence of consecutive values n=2,3,.. up to, say, n=100. If the result of at least one test were negative, the hypothesis would prove to be false; otherwise our confidence in the hypothesis would increase, and we should feel encouraged to attempt establishing the hypothesis, instead of trying to construct a counterexample. ~ Alfred Tarski

A poem is a small machine made of words ... Its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character. ~ William Carlos Williams

[D]iscipline consists in this, that the men who undergo the instruction and have followed it for a certain time are completely deprived of everything which is precious to a man-of the chief human property, rational freedom-and become submissive, machine-like implements of murder in the hands of their organized hierarchic authorities. ~ Leo Tolstoy

I saw opportunity appear in an ugly six-spindle shake machine ... and grabbed it. ~ Ray Kroc

Nature, machine-like, works definitely and heartlessly, if in the main beautifully. Hence, if we, as individuals, do not make this dream of a god or what he stands for us real in our thoughts and deeds, then he is not real or true. ~ Theodore Dreiser

They had human qualities a Jeopardy computer could never approach: fluency in language, an intuitive feel for hints and suggestion, and a mastery of ideas and concepts. Beyond that, they appeared to boast computer-like qualities: vast memories, fast processors, and nerves of steel. No tip-of-the-tongue glitches for Jennings or Rutter. But would a much-ballyhooed match against a machine awaken their human failings? Ferrucci and his team could always hope. ~ Stephen Baker

If you treat what you value most in life more like a garden and less like a vending machine, you'll probably be happier. (from You Oughta Know By Now) ~ Brian P. Cleary

I found an online knife store. I'd rather go and pick one up so that I had it today, but then I noticed they had a category called. California Legal. Apparently, I lived in a state that had really solid knife control-but still allowed you to own a machine gun. Logical. ~ Marshall Thornton

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 whole thing with recording is you have to know when to turn off the tape machine and just stop recording because you want to keep fixing, fixing, fixing, you know? ~ Linda Ronstadt

The individual is not a cog in a monstrous machine; it is within his power to modify the very laws which imprison him and the very relationship maintained by the Judge with the accused and witnesses. If it is true, as the Baal Shem says, that it is possible for man to hide the light of dawn emanating from the forest simply by shielding his eyes with his hands, still it is no less true that he can rediscover it by merely moving his hands. ~ Elie Wiesel

A soldier would snake his way painfully through rocks and rubble to set up a light machine gun, raise his head cautiously to aim, and find a dozen natives clustered solemnly around him. Street ~ Rick Atkinson

I invented an invisible machine to help you get to sleep. It only works after your eyes stay shut for a length of time. It's also so quiet that you won't hear it. ~ Jarod Kintz

The Healing spells on his chest were certainly earning their keep tonight. Sullivan got to his feet. The lack of noise from the courtyard indicated that his team had gotten all the mechanical men. "Thanks."

Toru just grunted a noncommittal response as he lifted the feed tray to check the condition of his borrowed machine gun. They didn't see the final robot inside until it turned on its eye and illuminated the Iron Guard in blue light.

Sullivan's Spike reversed gravity, and the gigantic machine fell upward to hit the steel beams in the ceiling. Sullivan cut his Power and the robot dropped. It crashed hard into the floor where it lay twitching and kicking. The two of them riddled the mechanical man with bullets until the light died and it lay still in a spreading puddle of oil.

"Normally, this would be the part where you thank me for returning the favor and saving your life."

"Yes. Normally… If we were court ladies instead of warriors," Toru answered. "Shall we continue onward or do you wish to stop and discuss your feelings over tea?"

Sullivan looked forward to the day that the two of them would be able to finish their fight. "Let's go. ~ Larry Correia

Religious truth is captive in a small number of little manuscripts which guard the common treasures, instead of expanding them. Let us break the seal which binds these holy things; let us give wings to truth that it may fly with the Word, no longer prepared at vast expense, but multitudes everlastingly by a machine which never wearies to every soul which enters life. ~ Johannes Gutenberg

If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth
certainly the machine will wear out ... but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn. ~ Henry David Thoreau

If the world turned Fascist, if Cummings had his century, there was a little thing he could do. There was always terrorism. But a neat terrorism with nothing sloppy about it, no machine guns, no grenades, no bombs, nothing messy, no indiscriminate killing. Merely the knife and the garrote, a few trained men, and a list of fifty bastards to be knocked off, and then another fifty. ~ Norman Mailer

The smell of the earth, so astoundingly fresh: it strikes Brown like a thing he might eat. His ears throb. His body feels as if it is still moving through the air. He is, he thinks, the first man ever to fly and stand at the exact same time. The war out of the machine. He holds the small bag of letters up in salute. On they come, soldiers, people, the light drizzle of gray.
Ireland.
A beautiful country. A bit savage on a man all the same.
Ireland. ~ Colum McCann

If you have a machine with three or four parts, you can shake them up in a box and it's still pretty clear what's there. If you have a machine with 10,000 parts and you shake them up in a box, what you have is a box of junk. ~ Gene Wolfe

As devices multiply and usage changes (many users coming online today may never use a desktop machine), it becomes more and more important to ensure that people can access all of their stuff anywhere. ~ Larry Page

I feel this is very important for us to have serene buildings because our civilization is chaotic as it is, you see; our whole machine age has brought about a chaos that has to be somehow counterbalanced, I think. ~ Minoru Yamasaki

I love clean sheets. It's the simultaneous reminiscence of how they got dirtied to begin with, and hopeful anticipation of what stories they will live to tell next time you are standing fatefully in front of the washing machine. ~ Kristie LeVangie

It Rained for Two Days Straight

Yesterday, Ryan told me his grandfather was admitted to the hospital. It was raining the way it rains in the movies, like whoever does the dishes left the faucet running, heavy drops polishing everything in the city dark. We ran from one drooling awning to the next, quicker, then slower, quicker, slower. If one had watched from the sky, our bodies would have looked like two small needles being pulsed forward by some invisible machine, stitching the streets together. Today, Patric was left by a girl he did not love but did not not love. He told me it was impossible to imagine himself both alone and whole. It was still raining--the sky's silly metaphor for sadness, untimely, startling, the way it makes the whole world more honest. Death is like this, too. Heartache, also. The sudden absence of what was there but now not. I touched Patrick's shoulder, attempting to pass my human to his. I sent Ryan a poem. I cannot do more than this art of bearing witness, to be both the bucket and the mirror, to say, yes, you are here but I am here also, to say you won't be here forever, or to say nothing and just walk beside each other in the rain. ~ Sierra DeMulder

Our bodies are the time machine. ~ Rudy Rucker

But it's clear to me that us slow-poke writers are a dying breed. It's amazing how thoroughly my young writing students have internalized the new machine rhythm, the rush many of my young writers are in to publish. The majority don't want to sit on a book for four, five years. The majority don't want to listen to the silence inside and outside for their artistic imprimatur. The majority want to publish fast, publish now. ~ Junot Diaz

The thing that you learn in directing is that when you're on the floor, no matter how complex the shooting is ... you have to remain absolutely sensitive to every nuance of the behavior of the people around you. Because, ultimately, if you don't keep in mind the overall humanity, then the machine takes over and suddenly all you have are technically fine shots, technically good performances. The story's being told, but something's lacking, something mysterious, indefinable. ~ Irvin Kershner

Not wishing to be disturbed over moral issues of the political economy, Americans cling to the notion that the government is a sort of automatic machine, regulated by the balancing of competing interests. ~ C. Wright Mills

The human brain is an incredible pattern-matching machine. ~ Jeff Bezos

In a few years, men will be able to communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face. That is a rather startling thing to say, but it is our conclusion ... And we believe that we are entering a technological age in which we will be able to interact with the richness of living information
not merely in the passive way that we have become accustomed to using books and libraries, but as active participants in an ongoing process, bringing something to it through our interaction with it, and not simply receiving something from it by our connection to it. ~ J. C. R. Licklider

Blind hate against the enemy creates a forceful impulse that cracks the boundaries of natural human limitations, transforming the soldier in an effective, selective and cold killing machine. A people without hate cannot triumph against the adversary. ~ Che Guevara

Meanwhile, in a lecture at the Sverdlov University two years later, under the
pressure of outside events and interior realities, Lenin spoke with a precision which left little doubt about the
indefinite continuation of the proletarian super-State. "With this machine, or rather this weapon [the State], we shall
crush every form of exploitation, and when there are no longer any possibilities of exploitation left on earth, no more
people owning land or factories, no more people gorging themselves under the eyes of others who are starving,
when such things become impossible, then and only then shall we cast this machine aside. Then there will be neither
State nor exploitation." Therefore as long as there exists on earth, and no longer in a specific society, one single
oppressed person and one proprietor, so long the State will continue to exist. It also will be obliged to increase in
strength during this period so as to vanquish one by one the injustices, the governments responsible for injustice, the
obstinately bourgeois nations, and the people who are blind to their own interests. And when, on an earth that has
finally been subdued and purged of enemies, the final iniquity shall have been drowned in the blood of the just and
the unjust, then the State, which has reached the limit of all power, a monstrous idol covering the entire earth, will
be discreetly absorbed into the silent city of Justice.
Under the easily ~ Albert Camus

Sadhana You can experiment: arrange the best possible meal for yourself, get angry with something, curse the whole world, and then eat it. You will see that day how food behaves within you. At the next meal, approach your food with the reverence that the life-making material deserves and eat it. You will now see how it will behave within you. (Of course, if you're sensible, you'll ignore the first and only do the second!) Most people can bring down the quantum of food they are eating to a third and be much more energetic and not lose weight. It is just a question of how much receptivity you have created within yourself. Accordingly your body receives. If you can do the same amount of work, maintain all the bodily processes, with thirty percent of the food that you eat, that definitely means you are running a much more efficient machine. ~ Sadhguru

Wherever there is smoke there is a good smoke machine. ~ John F. Kennedy

I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted. ~ Alan Turing

This kind of pragmatism has become a hallmark of our psychological culture. In the mid-1990s, I described how it was commonplace for people to "cycle through" different ideas of the human mind as (to name only a few images) mechanism, spirit, chemistry, and vessel for the soul.14 These days, the cycling through intensifies. We are in much more direct contact with the machine side of mind. People are fitted with a computer chip to help with Parkinson's. They learn to see their minds as program and hardware. They take antidepressants prescribed by their psychotherapists, confident that the biochemical and oedipal self can be treated in one room. They look for signs of emotion in a brain scan. Old jokes about couples needing "chemistry" turn out not to be jokes at all. ~ Sherry Turkle

That the machine of Heaven is not a hard and impervious body full of various real spheres, as up to now has been believed by most people. It will be proved that it extends everywhere, most fluid and simple, and nowhere presents obstacles as was formerly held, the circuits of the Planets being wholly free and without the labour and whirling round of any real spheres at all, being divinely governed under a given law. ~ Tycho Brahe

Even Proust - there's a famous passage where Odette opens the door with a cold, she's sulky, her hair is loose and undone, her skin is patchy, and Swann, who has never cared about her until that moment, falls in love with her because she looks like a Botticelli girl from a slightly damaged fresco. Which Proust himself only knew from a reproduction. He never saw the original, in the Sistine Chapel. But even so - the whole novel is in some ways about that moment. And the damage is part of the attraction, the painting's blotchy cheeks. Even through a copy Proust was able to re-dream that image, re-shape reality with it, pull something all his own from it into the world. Because - the line of beauty is the line of beauty. It doesn't matter if it's been through the Xerox machine a hundred times. ~ Donna Tartt

Fiction is a kind of compassion-generating machine that saves us from sloth. Is life kind or cruel? Yes, Literature answers. Are people good or bad? You bet, says Literature. But unlike other systems of knowing, Literature declines to eradicate one truth in favor of another; rather, it teaches us to abide with the fact that, in their own way, all things are true, and helps us, in the face of this terrifying knowledge, continually push ourselves in the direction of Open the Hell Up. ~ George Saunders

Machines are admirable and tyrannize only with the user's consent. Where, then, is the enemy? Not where the machine gives relief from drudgery but where human judgment abdicates. The smoothest machine-made product of the age is the organization man, for even the best organizing principle tends to corrupt, and the mechanical principle corrupts absolutely. ~ Jacques Barzun

Artificial Intelligence is not just learning patterns from data, but understanding human emotions and its evolution from its depth and not just fulfilling the surface level human requirements, but sensitivity towards human pain, happiness, mistakes, sufferings and well-being of the society are the parts of the evolving new AI systems. ~ Amit Ray

I heard from clear across the city, over the Hudson in the Jersey yards, one fierce whistle of a locomotive which took me to a train late at night hurling through the middle of the West, its iron shriek blighting the darkness. One hundred years before, some first trains had torn through the prairie and their warning had congealed the nerve. "Beware," said the sound. "Freeze in your route. Behind this machine comes a century of maniacs and a heat which looks to consume the earth." What a rustling those first animals must have known. ~ Norman Mailer

The voice that navigated was definitely that of a machine, and yet you could tell that the machine was a woman, which hurt my mind a little. How can machines have genders? The machine also had an American accent. How can machines have nationalities? This can't be a good idea, making machines talk like real people, can it? Giving machines humanoid identities? ~ Matthew Quick

The fundamental weakness in the Tea Party machine is the stark difference between what the leaders of the Tea Party elite - plutocrats like the Koch Brothers -want and what the average grassroots Tea Party follower wants. ~ Chuck Schumer

Our children should learn the general framework of their government and then they should know where they come in contact with the government, where it touches their daily lives and where their influence is exerted on the government. It must not be a distant thing, someone else's business, but they must see how every cog in the wheel of a democracy is important and bears its share of responsibility for the smooth running of the entire machine. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

Visual cortex is fundamentally a machine whose job is to generate a model of the world. ~ David Eagleman

There are things I've given up on
Like recording funny answering machine messages.
It's part of growing older
And the human race as a group has matured along the same lines.
It seems our comedy dates the quickest.
If you laugh out loud at Shakespeare's jokes
I hope you won't be insulted
if I say you're trying too hard.
Even sketches from the original Saturday Night Live
seem slow-witted and obvious now. ~ David Berman

Well, forgive the fuck out of me for being shocked senseless when I realized he wasn't dead. Why didn't you tell me he was the beast, Ryodan? Why did we have to kill him? I know it's not because he can't control himself when he's the beast. He controlled himself last night when he rescued me from the Book. He can change at will, can't he? What happened in the Silvers? Does the place have some kind of effect on you, make you uncontrollable?"
I almost slapped myself in the forehead. Barrons had told me that the reason he tattooed himself with black and red protection runes was because using dark magic called a price due, unless you took measures to protect yourself against the backlash. Did using IYD require the blackest kind of magic to make it work? Would it grant his demand to magically transport him to me no matter where I was but devolve him into the darkest, most savage version of himself as the price?
"It was because of how he got there, wasn't it?" I said. "The spell you two worked sent him to me like was it was supposed to, but the cost was that it turned him into the lowest common denominator of himself. An insane killing machine. Which he figured was all right, because if I was dying, I'd probably need a killing machine around. A champion to show up and decimate all my enemies. That was it, wasn't it?"
Ryodan had gone completely still. Not a muscle twitched. I wasn't sure he was breathing.
"He knew what would happen if I pressed IYD, and he made ~ Karen Marie Moning

The nose can't help catchin' what the ears get sick with. Yessir, rock bands just sweat evil. Evil's been around for a long time, ever since rocks started getting real hot and making a lot of noise as they exploded out o' the ground and evil spirits wisped out of hell. If a band ever uses a fog machine, hold your breath so you don't become possessed by one. ~ M.C. Humphreys

Machine guns are taken through grit and determination. ~ Douglas Haig, 1st Earl Haig

It's harder to make money when you're not a machine in a massive apparatus designed only to make money, but artists will figure it out. ~ Ken Baumann

A museum is like a valuing machine. Museums and the industrial society started at the same moment, and they're really tied into each other. They've been all about displaying objects and the kind of wealth that can be derived from objects and promoting that point. ~ Tino Sehgal

Although humans today remain more capable than machines for many tasks, by 2030 machine capabilities will have increased to the point that humans will have become the weakest component in a wide array of systems and processes. Humans and machines will need to become far more closely coupled, through improved human-machine interfaces and by direct augmentation of human performance ~ Werner J. A. Dahm

Perhaps no matter how fast computers progress, artificial intelligence may never outstrip the intelligence of the human-machine partnership. Let ~ Walter Isaacson

Observation performed merely on its own is no more than what a machine can do - a surveillance camera, for instance. And imagination on its own, practiced by itself for too long, can cut you off from the world. You might wander away, like a hermit to a cave, becoming only a spirit to the rest of humanity. However, if you remain in the world, and you train yourself to combine observation and imagination in proper proportion...then you may change the world itself. ~ Chris Raschka

It's a big, big advantage because understanding what changes we might make takes time and it takes time to work out settings and to understand everything about the new machine. ~ Valentino Rossi

The connection to place, to the land, the wind, the sun, stars, the moon ... it sounds romantic, but it's true - the visceral experience of motion, of moving through time on some amazing machine - a few cars touch on it, but not too many compared to motorcycles. I always felt that any motorcycle journey was special. ~ Antoine Predock

The machine may even carry mail is special cases. But the useful load will be very small. The machines will eventually be fast, they will be used in sport, but they are not to be thought of as commercial carriers. ~ Octave Chanute

American fighter planes came in under the smoke to see if anything was moving. They saw Billy and the rest moving down there. The planes sprayed them with machine-gun bullets, but the bullets missed. Then they saw some other people moving down by the riverside and they shot at them. They hit some of them. So it goes. The idea was to hasten the end of the war. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Twisting space-time into knots requires energy on a scale that will not be available within the next several centuries or even millenia-if ever. Even if all the nations of the world were to band together to build a machine that could probe hyperspace, they would ultimately fail. And, as Guth points out, the temperatures necessary to create a baby universe in the laboratory is 1,000 trillion trillion degrees, far in excess of anything available to us. In fact, that temperature is much greater than anything found in the interior of a star. So, although it is possible that Einstein's laws and the laws of quantum theory might allow for time travel, this is not within the capabilities of earthlings like us, who can barely escape the feeble gravitational field of our own planet. While we can marvel at the implications of wormhole research, realizing its potential is strictly reserved for advanced extraterrestrial civilizations. ~ Michio Kaku

I'm a machine man, and I head a machine. ~ Harry Bridges

Some of the streets are, however, genuinely narrow. These same streets may not be filled with machine-gun fire and the dramatic screech of violins, but they overflow with the invisible and innumerable longings of the human heart. Love continues to minister here, but betrayal still wears its perfidious face, hatred hollows out the weak man's breast, revenge pursues its self-defeating course; and the unfulfilled dreams of the multitude haunt the island like so many hungry ghosts. ~ John Dolan

There is machinery in the mind that is consciousness. Knowing the machine is the dawn of a new era. ~ Allan Wesler

A machine is a great moral educator. If a horse or a donkey won't go, men lose their tempers and beat it; if a machine won't go, there is no use beating it. You have to think and try till you find what is wrong. That is real education. ~ Gilbert Murray

She stared at me "You have a message," she said. "On you machine."
I looked over at my answering machine. Sure enough, the light was blinking. The woman really was a detective.
"It's some girl," La Guerta said. "She sounds kind of sleepy and happy. You got a girlfriend, Dexter?" there was a strange hint of a challenge in her voice.
"You know how it is," I said. "Women today are so forward, and when you are as handsome as I am they absolutely fling themselves at your head." Perhaps an unfortunate choice of words; as I said it I couldn't help thinking of the woman's head flung at me not so long ago.
"Watch out," La Guerta said. "Sooner or later one of them will stick." I had no idea what she thought that meant, but it was a very unsettling image.
"I'm sure you're right," I said. "Until then, carpe diem."
"What?"
"It's Latin," I said. "It means, complain in the daylight. ~ Jeff Lindsay

As an actor, if you're just sitting and staring and you don't know who you are in your own mind, it's vacant. And sometimes the camera is an X-ray machine, it can pick it up. ~ Albert Brooks

So it's actually way easier just to humor these men who grew up watching movies where the girl doesn't like the hero until he's been persistent enough to make her like him. This is the grease that keeps the gears of the heteronormativity machine spinning, obviously, but it's just easier to slip out of an awkward situation with an awkward guy than it is to call out the misogyny inherent in what he's doing. It's a tough spot to be in, but also this is coming from an angry dyke who's also trans and who, at one point, had society try to use her as a vessel for that kinda of misogyny. ~ Imogen Binnie

Many say that DOS is the dark side [from Star Wars], but actually UNIX is more like the dark side: It's less likely to find the one way to destroy your incredibly powerful machine, and more likely to make upper management choke. ~ Lore Sjoberg

In Seattle you haven't had enough coffee until you can thread a sewing machine while it's running. ~ Jeff Bezos

Cash was running low, so I'd applied for a job as an administrative assistant for a nonprofit arts group. Without question, my organizational skills were as sharp as my vision, and I had no office experience to speak of. Luckily for me, none of this surfaced during the interview.

'Ryan, pretend it's a rough morning for a sec. Handle this situation for me. When you arrive at work to open the arts resource centre, several people are already at the door. Two clients want immediate help with grant applications - you know those artists, they just can't wait! - and a third wants to use our library, which isn't open till noon. Entering the office, you hear the phone is ringing and see the message light is blinking. The fax machine looks jammed again, and we're expecting an important document. Among the people waiting is a courier with a package you need to sign for. Think about it, though. The lights haven't been turned on yet, and the sign put out front. The alarm needs the code within a minute, too. So, wow, rough morning. I'd like to know what you'd do first.'

'First I'd tell everybody how weird this is. I'm in the same test situation from my job interview. What are the chances?'

I started the next day. ~ Ryan Knighton

They had puddled in the floorboards and they poured out onto the pavement like the jackpot from the Devil's slot machine, the bugs raining down with a sound like frying bacon. ~ David Wong

This was war: a vast machine that chewed up people. ~ Michael Pryor

I'm interested in what happens to people when they get into that publicity machine. We tend to think things have changed, but there's still a deep sexism underlying the way women are treated publicly. ~ Erica Jong

That also means the antivirus software you are running on your own computer is likely only catching 5 percent of the emerging threats targeting your machine. If your body's own immune system had a batting average like that, you would be dead in a matter of hours. ~ Marc Goodman

I made some fresh pasta with a neat machine Frank brought from New York; it flattens the dough in sheets and cuts the pasta into any shape you want. It's important to have toys like that, if you live in Maine. ~ John Irving

I grabbed the sides of the machine and tried to shake it. No dice. Then I kicked it. Still nothing.
I glared at the machine. "Let them out." I punctuated my statement with a few more useless kicks.
"You have an anger-management problem."
I whipped around at the sound of the warm, lilting British accent behind me. ~ Michelle Hodkin

SECOND AMENDMENT
A "well-regulated militia" means regulated by the government. We need prudent regulation for guns. Let's all accept that. We don't need anyone to have machine guns. We can wait a little while on a background check (but if you're white with a bowl cut, then you have to go to the back of the line, Preston). Support prudent legislation designed to keep other guns away from the mentally ill and criminal elements. If you're paranoid that all these laws are designed to take away your gun, then we're going to assume you're mentally ill or criminal. But now let's be clear: guns rock. Hunting is awesome. Keep your guns. But, like, we gotta regulate 'em, y'all. We have to. ~ Trae Crowder

It's not an academic question any more to ask what's going to happen to a cloud. People very much want to know - and that means there's money available for it. That problem is very much within the realm of physics and it's a problem very much of the same caliber. You're looking at something complicated, and the present way of solving it is to try to look at as many points as you can, enough stuff to say where the cloud is, where the warm air is, what its velocity is, and so forth. Then you stick it into the biggest machine you can afford and you try to get an estimate of what it's going to do next. But this is not very realistic. ~ James Gleick

One common puzzle for the security-minded is how to work with confidential data on the road. Sometimes you can't bring your laptop, or don't want to. But working on somebody else's machine exposes you to malware and leaves behind all kinds of electronic trails. ~ Barton Gellman

To try to become happy is to try to build a machine with no other specifications than it shall run noiselessly. ~ J. Robert Oppenheimer

Join us in the fight to defeat the Washington machine. It's fun and easy to get started. You can make a difference and change the direction of our country! Join today. ~ Rand Paul

What is a hobby anyway? Where is the line of demarcation between hobbies and ordinary normal pursuits? I have been unable to answer this question to my own satisfaction. At first blush I am tempted to conclude that a satisfactory hobby must be in large degree useless, inefficient, laborious, or irrelevant. Certainly many of our most satisfying avocations today consist of making something by hand which machines can usually make more quickly and cheaply, and sometimes better. Nevertheless I must in fairness admit that in a different age the mere fashioning of a machine might have been an excellent hobby... Today the invention of a new machine, however noteworthy to industry, would, as a hobby, be trite stuff. Perhaps we have here the real inwardness of our own question: A hobby is a defiance of the contemporary. It is an assertion of those permanent values which the momentary eddies of social evolution have contravened or overlooked. If this is true, then we may also say that every hobbyist is inherently a radical, and that his tribe is inherently a minority.

This, however, is serious: Becoming serious is a grievous fault in hobbyists. It is an axiom that no hobby should either seek or need rational justification. To wish to do it is reason enough. To find reasons why it is useful or beneficial converts it at once from an avocation into an industry–lowers it at once to the ignominious category of an 'exercise' undertaken for health, power, or profit. Lifting dumbbel ~ Aldo Leopold

My mind is a time machine ~ Richard L. Ratliff

I remarked to Dennis that easily half the code I was writing in Multics was error recovery code. He said, "We left all that stuff out of Unix. If there's an error, we have this routine called panic, and when it is called, the machine crashes, and you holler down the hall, 'Hey, reboot it.'" ~ Tom Van Vleck

We men of intelligence will learn to harness the insanities of reason. We can't leave the world any longer to the direction of chance. We can't allow dangerous maniacs like Luther, mad about dogma, like Napoleon, mad about himself, to go on casually appearing and turning everything upside down. In the past it didn't so much matter; but our modern machine is too delicate. A few more knocks like the Great War, another Luther or two, and the whole concern will go to pieces. In future, the men of reason must see that the madness of the world's maniacs is canalised into proper channels, is made to do useful work, like a mountain torrent driving a dynamo ... ~ Aldous Huxley

Speech is a rolling machine that always stretches the feelings it expresses. ~ Gustave Flaubert