Quotes About Cogs

Time is so strange, and life is twice as strange. The cogs miss, the wheels turn, and lives interlace too early or too late. I lived too long, that much is certain. And you were born either too early or too late. It was a terrible bit of timing. But perhaps I am being punished for being a silly girl. Anyway, the next spin around, wheels might function right again.

Time is so strange and life is twice as strange. The cogs miss, the wheels turn, and lives interlace too early or too late.

We're just cogs in a machine really, aren't we? Miss Fawcett said to her and Ursula said, But remember, without the cog there is no machine.

Stern accuracy in inquiring, bold imagination in describing, these are the cogs on which history soars or flutters and wobbles.

He had the suspicion that cogs were spinning, the universe beyond his walls was functioning and he was not, but he had no choice.

The onlooker had better wipe the sympathy off his face. What he has seen is a revolution, not the home of little cogs and drones. What he has seen is the dormitory of the next managerial class.

Modern society is based on a modern idea: get the work done by replaceable cogs, by individuals programmed to do what they're told, follow instructions and work cheap. The attraction of this system is evident by how easily ordinary organizations replace ordinary employees, and how eagerly schools indoctrinate their students.

Babbage's Three Laws of Difference Engines First Law: A difference engine must have at least six cogs. Second Law: A difference engine must be able to operate a loom. Third law: A difference engine must be able to kill a man, should the mood so take it.

In the heart of the clock tower, cog fought cog in darkness, each biting with all the force of its metal teeth, never guessing that they were part of one great, relentless machine.

you can go to the trenches and be blown to bits; nothing will create that spark of passion if there isn't the intervention of a human hand. Somebody has to put his hand into the machine and let it be wrenched off if the cogs are to mesh again.

A fact was the hard outer cover of meaning, and meaning was the soft living stuff inside a fact. Fact and meaning were the driving cogs of living. If the gear of fact drove the gear of meaning, then they revolved in opposite directions, but put the gear of fantasy between the two and they both revolved in the same direction. Fantasy was and is important; it leads to heaven knows where, but follow it and see. Sometimes it pays off.

We overestimate the power of people who become cogs in giant organizations. The fact that they become cogs actually limits what they can do. . . . There's something very corrupting that happens to people who think they're going to work from inside a corrupt system.

Sometimes he felt priveleged being part of Maycarpe's magical machine, but at other times, he felt like a fly caught in the grease of the cogs, who would presently be ground up by the inexorable, slowly turning metal.

When the machine grinds to a halt, the cogs themselves begin wondering about their function.

I see a film or a TV series or a play as being this machine. It sounds quite robotic, in its description, but it's basically a machine and you're just one of the cogs that goes in it. You're not the biggest one, and you're not the smallest one. Everyone's the same size.

Vocational training is the training of animals or slaves. It fits them to become cogs in the industrial machine. Free men need liberal education to prepare them to make a good use of their freedom.

Humanity is old, civilization new: the mesh of cogs is by no means smooth — and this is as it should be. Never should a man enter a building of glass or metal, or a spaceship, or a submarine, without a small shock of astonishment; never should he avoid an act of passion without a small sense of effort …

Thought is a melody, Audrey thinks, while the body is an inert mechanism of cogs, springs, chains and ratchets...

Brilliant little irruptions Brilliant little connections Brilliant little illusions Brilliant little lips Brilliant little altercations Very brilliant little honey combs Brilliant little adversities Very brilliant little ravages Brilliant little cogs Brilliant little circumvolutions Around a vertical axis Why has the deficiency of the mentally deficient become a cultural fact, whereas the very much more terrible fact of ordinary stupidity strikes no one as very odd?

the state is something purely mechanical — and there is no [spiritual] idea of a machine. Only what is an object of freedom may be called 'idea'. Therefore we must transcend the state! For every state must treat free men as cogs in a machine. And this is precisely what should not happen; hence the state must perish.

Yoyo said to me recently, 'Love and pain, that's what families are, and they fit together like this'--he slotted the tips of our fingers together--'like cogs.' Then he smiled and put a hand on my swollen belly. 'And what makes these cogs turn is hope, of course.