Quotes About Mechanical

I just always loved pinball.

I was always good at fixing things growing up. I wanted to work on boats. That was what my dad did.

Must simplicity and humanity go under in the interest of progress? What is the most important component of civilization - is it human or mechanical? Must thought processes become involved and insincere? Must the class-struggle warp those who are involved in it?

After all,how long could it take to fix a garbage disposal? He could have built her a freaking new one by now. With his teeth.

If we were magically shrunk and put into someone's brain while she was thinking, we would see all the pumps, pistons, gears and levers working away, and we would be able to describe their workings completely, in mechanical terms, thereby completely describing the thought processes of the brain. But that description would nowhere contain any mention of thought! It would contain nothing but descriptions of pumps, pistons, levers! —G. W. LEIBNIZ (1646–1716)

When a machine manages to be simultaneously meaningful and surprising in the same rich way, it too compels a mentalistic interpretation. Of course, somewhere behind the scenes, there are programmers who, in principle, have a mechanical interpretation. But even for them, that interpretation loses its grip as the working program fills its memory with details too voluminous for them to grasp.

I have an old car that I've rebuilt myself - a 1973 Dodge Challenger - and I also have a 1967 Pontiac GTO.

Music's supposed to come from the heart. I felt like that if it ever got mechanical, I was going to back away from it.

he breathed like an old Ford with a leaky head gasket.

Hinged to forgetfulness like a door, she slowly closed out of sight, and she was the woman I loved, but too many times she slept like a mechanical deer in my caresses, and I ached in the metal silence of her dreams.

Love is anti-mechanical, anti-materialist: that's why bad love is still good love. It may make us unhappy, but it insists that the mechanical and the material needn't be in charge

In the brief silence, an antique clock ticked with a sound like stones falling off a ledge.

The spiral stairs looked like a robot's asshole.

I do wish I believed in the life eternal, for it makes me quite miserable to think man is merely a kind of machine endowed, unhappily for himself, with consciousness.

Look well on this, my son," said the green-skinned man, "for one day I shall rule a clockwork kingdom of such beings, and you shall be its prince.

How inferior the human machine is, compared to man-made machines. They can be decoked, unscrewed, oiled and parts replaced. Decidedly, nature is not a very wonderful thing.

My favorite piece of technical writing: Assembly of Japanese bicycle require great peace of mind.

I'm good with machines. I know where to scratch, pet, and tickle them.

Clocks slay time... time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.

His first determination, in 1843, of the mechanical equivalent of heat was ignored, and subsequent determinations were given little attention until Thomson and Stokes took notice at the British Association meeting in 1847.

In mechanical terms, humans are quite efficient converters of food into energy, so human slaves were often more valuable than animal slaves, if one could afford them.21 The importance of human beings as a source of energy helps explain why forced labor was so ubiquitous in the premodern world, just as the existence of fossil fuels helps explain why human slavery has largely vanished today.

mechanical reinterpretations of human affairs not only lack explanatory power, they are morally wrong as well, for in effect they deny the humanity of the participants, casting them and their ideas merely as side effects of the landscape. Diamond

While Newton seemed to draw off the veil from some of the mysteries of nature, he showed at the same time the imperfections of the mechanical philosophy, so agreeable to the natural vanity and curiosity of men; and thereby restored her ultimate secrets to that obscurity, in which they ever did and ever will remain.

Recent history is the record of one vast conspiracy to impose one level of mechanical consciousness on mankind.