Pastoral Resources

I learned the business in about two months, and then made as much as the others, and was consequently doing quite well when the factory burned down, destroying all our machines - 150 of them. This was very hard on the girls who had paid for their machines.

By working hard we could make an average of about $5 a week. We would have made more but had to provide our own machines, which cost us $45, we paying for them on the installment plan. We paid $5 down and $1 a month after that.

We often attribute 'understanding' and other cognitive predicates by metaphor and analogy to cars, adding machines, and other artifacts, but nothing is proved by such attributions.

My car and my adding machine understand nothing: they are not in that line of business.

I will argue that in the literal sense the programmed computer understands what the car and the adding machine understand, namely, exactly nothing.

Music has brought me some of the highest moments of my life. I don't even hear the music. I don't even hear the notes. I'm not aware that someone has turned on a tape machine - I'm in another world.

I visualize a time when we will be to robots what dogs are to humans, and I'm rooting for the machines.

If I have an idea, I write it down, although I usually carry a little dictation machine with me because I'm too lazy to write.

Of all human inventions the organization, a machine constructed of people performing interdependent functions, is the most powerful.

When I was growing up, it was 'Communists'. Now it's 'Terrorists'. So you always have to have somebody to fight and be afraid of, so the war machine can build more bombs, guns, and bullets and everything.

I'd have these weird experiences where I'd just be walking down the street with this chord progression in my head, this happened more than a few times, and I'd walk home and find a fax in my machine and it would match the music in my head.

Now the whole point about machines is they are designed not to be random. When you call up a word processing program on your computer, you don't want it to be different every time you call it up. You want it to stay the same.

The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.

There are the manufacturing multitudes of England; they must have work, and find markets for their work; if machines and the Black Country are ugly, famine would be uglier still.

Beyond that, states had to also have electronic voting machines that made it possible for people who are physically handicapped to vote in private... and the computerized voting machine made it very easy for, particularly, the blind.

To call a man an animal is to flatter him; he's a machine, a walking dildo.

I'm not one of those writers I learned about who get up in the morning, put a piece of paper in their typewriter machine and start writing. That I've never understood.

I don't really have time to sit down and write. But when I think of a melody, I call up my answering machine and sing it, so I won't forget it.

I'm always in favor of Israel responding strongly when it's threatened. At the same time, a response to a response doesn't really solve anything. It just creates a perpetual-motion machine.

I thought administration was the running of the office. The Xerox machine. Paying bills.