logo

Quotes About Automaton

I was merely an automaton endowed with power of movement, responding to the stimuli of the sense organs and thinking and acting accordingly.
~ Nikola Tesla
How can we dare to predict the behavior of man? We may predict the movements of a machine, of an automaton; more than this, we may even try to predict the mechanisms or "dynamisms" of the human psyche as well. But man is more than psyche.
~ Viktor E. Frankl
Durham said, "Do you know what a Garden-of-Eden configuration is?" Maria was caught blank for a second, then she said, "Yes, of course. In cellular automaton theory, it's a state of the system that can't be the result of any previous state. No other pattern of cells can give rise to it. If you want a Garden-of-Eden configuration, you have to start with it – you have to put it in by hand as the system's first state.
~ Greg Egan
The disappearance of the conscious personality, the predominance of the unconscious personality, the turning of feelings and ideas in an identical direction by means of suggestion and contagion, the tendency to immediately transform the suggested ideas into acts; these, we see, are the principal characteristics of the individual forming part of a crowd. He is no longer himself, but has become an automaton who has ceased to be guided by his will.
~ Gustave Le Bon
Sometimes he seems like a droid--or a drone. Fang of Nine. Fang2-D2.
~ James Patterson
Als conformist leef ik, probeer ik te leven, door na te bootsen, uit respect voor de regels van het spel, uit afkeer van originaliteit. Gelatenheid van een automaat: de schijn van hartstocht veinzen en er in het geheim om lachen; je naar de conventies plooien om ze heimelijk te verwerpen; in alle registers voorkomen, maar zonder residentie in de tijd; je gezicht redden terwijl het nodig is het te verliezen...
~ Cioran
Automotones, escaped
~ Holly Black
ACTRESS: Nonsense! It was an automaton controlled by the boy's mesmeric waves as part of a plot organised by my rivals.
~ Philip Pullman
Fly enough, and you learn to go brain-dead when you have to. It's sort of like time travel. One minute you're bending to unlace your shoes,and the next thing you know you're paying fourteen dollars for a fruit cup, wondering, How did I get here?
~ David Sedaris
He was smothered by dread. Fear. A horrible sense of being hunted. And then one of the automaton lions turned its head toward him. The eyes shone red. Red like blood. Red like fire. They could smell it on him, the illegal book. Or maybe just his fear
~ Rachel Caine
Stahl criticized the metaphor of the automaton because, unlike a living being, the purpose of an automaton does not lie within itself; its organization is imposed upon it by its maker.
~ Ilya Prigogine
que parecía el juguete inerte y mecánico de la felicidad.
~ Marcel Proust
The psychoanalysis of objective knowledge is interminable, or rather...like every psychoanalysis, it is destined not to suppress the past, the phantasms, but to transform them from powers of death into poetic productivity, and...the very idea of objective knowledge and the idea of algorithm as a spiritual automaton and finally the idea of an object that informs itself and knows itself are, as much as any other ideas, and more than any other, supported by our reveries.
~ Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Doctors don't go through life mentally integrating trial results; but any automaton who had regulated his practice that way would have been in danger of underprescribing.
~ Peter D. Kramer