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1 " It is up to us to decide what human means, and exactly how it is different from machine, and what tasks ought and ought not to be trusted to either species of symbol-processing system. But some decisions must be made soon, while the technology is still young. And the deciding must be shared by as many citizens as possible, not just the experts. In that sense, the most important factor in whether we will all see the dawn of a humane, sustainable world in the twenty-first century will be how we deal with these machines a few of us thought up and a lot of us will be using. "
2 " Though Emerson is a firm believer in the equality of the female sex, he has some secret reservations, and one of them involves the car. (There is something about these machines that makes men want to pound their chests and roar like gorillas. I speak figuratively, of course.) "
― Elizabeth Peters , He Shall Thunder in the Sky (Amelia Peabody, #12)
3 " Machineries of reason, machineries of conduct, machineries of virtue. The machine that regulates instinct, keeps one’s hands free of another man’s throat, free of one’s own. These machines have all, as someone said, gone too long in the elements. Gummed now, rusted, bloodless.I forget who said it and I no longer care. "
― Ben Marcus , The Flame Alphabet
4 " Nature, ... in order to carry out the marvelous operations [that occur] in animals and plants has been pleased to construct their organized bodies with a very large number of machines, which are of necessity made up of extremely minute parts so shaped and situated as to form a marvelous organ, the structure and composition of which are usually invisible to the naked eye without the aid of a microscope. ... Just as Nature deserves praise and admiration for making machines so small, so too the physician who observes them to the best of his ability is worthy of praise, not blame, for he must also correct and repair these machines as well as he can every time they get out of order. "
― Marcello Malpighi
5 " While human spaceflight is certainly compelling – and it has always been a big part of my reporting career -- there is something about unmanned robotic spacecraft that has always tugged at my heart. These machines are our emissaries out into the cosmos, flung to faraway places that humans can’t yet visit. I grew up hearing about spacecraft like Mariner, Viking and Voyager boldly going on some of the first-ever deep space missions and making monumental discoveries that changed our view of the Solar System. They showed us worlds we previously could only dream about and artists could only imagine. "
― Nancy Atkinson , Incredible Stories From Space: A Behind the Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos
6 " The idea behind digital computers may be explained by saying that these machines are intended to carry out any operations which could be done by a human computer. "
7 " That is not to say that we can relax our readiness to defend ourselves. Our armament must be adequate to the needs, but our faith is not primarily in these machines of defense but in ourselves. "
8 " As part of our layered approach, we have expedited the deployment of new Advanced Imaging Technology (AIT) units to help detect concealed metallic and non-metallic threats on passengers. These machines are now in use at airports nationwide, and the vast majority of travelers say they prefer this technology to alternative screening measures. "
