Machine

A machine is a tool consisting of one or more parts that is constructed to achieve a particular goal. Machines are powered devices, usually mechanically, chemically, thermally or electrically powered, and are frequently motorized. Historically, a device required moving parts to classify as a machine; however, the advent of electronics technology has led to the development of devices without moving parts that are considered machines.

Sourced

• Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation... tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego. His anxiety subsides. His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a gray vegetation.
  • Jean Arp; As cited in: Carol Dingle (2000) Memorable Quotations: French Writers of the Past. p. 8

• The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment.
  • Warren G. Bennis; As cited in: Mark Fisher (1991) The millionaire's book of quotations. p. 151

• Do you realize if it weren't for Edison we'd be watching TV by candlelight?
  • Al Boliska, as cited in: Stuart Kantor (2004) Beer, Boxers, Batteries, And Bodily Noises. p. 39

• It is difficult not to wonder whether that combination of elements which produces a machine for labor does not create also a soul of sorts, a dull resentful metallic will, which can rebel at times.
  • Pearl S. Buck; As cited in: Rosalie Maggio (1996) The New Beacon book of quotations by women. p. 424

• When a machine begins to run without human aid, it is time to scrap it - whether it be a factory or a government.
  • Alexander Chase (1966) Perspectives. Cited in: Anna Hart (1988) Expert systems: an introduction for managers. p. 111

• It is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.
  • T.S. Eliot, about radio; Cited in: Robert Andrews (1987) The Routledge dictionary of quotations. p. 262

• The greatest task before civilization at present is to make machines what they ought to be, the slaves, instead of the masters of men.
  • Havelock Ellis (1948) Morals, manners, and men. p. 41

• Education makes machines which act like men and produces men who act like machines.
  • Erich Fromm; as cited in: Noah benShea (2001) Great Quotes to Inspire Great Teachers. p. 23

• We are becoming the servants in thought, as in action, of the machine we have created to serve us.
  • John Kenneth Galbraith (2007) The new industrial state. p. 9

• Once upon a time we were just plain people. But that was before we began having relationships with mechanical systems. Get involved with a machine and sooner or later you are reduced to a factor.
  • Ellen Goodman (1978) "The Human Factor," The Washington Post, January 1987

• One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.
  • Elbert Hubbard, The Roycroft Dictionary and Book of Epigrams, 1923

• All of the biggest technological inventions created by man - the airplane, the automobile, the computer - says little about his intelligence, but speaks volumes about his laziness.
  • Mark Kennedy as cited in: Stuart Kantor (2004) Beer, Boxers, Batteries, And Bodily Noises. p. 39

• You cannot endow even the best machine with initiative; the jolliest steam-roller will not plant flowers.
  • Walter Lippmann in: ictor Earl Amend, Leo Thomas Hendrick eds. (1964) Ten contemporary thinkers. p. 315

• It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being.
  • John Stuart Mill (1848); As cited in: Colin Renfrew (1972) The Emergence of Civilisation. p.499

• The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.
  • Saint-Exupéry (1939) Wind, Sand, and Stars

• I think I should not go far wrong if I asserted that the amount of genuine leisure available in a society is generally in inverse proportion to the amount of labor-saving machinery it employs.
  • E.F. Schumacher (1985) Good Work. p. 25

• The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.
  • B.F. Skinner, Contingencies of Reinforcement, 1969

See also

• Automation
• Computers
• Invention
• Technology