I think of myself as a kind of pulverizing machine into which everything I look at and feel is fed. I believe that I am different from the mixed-media jackdaws who use photographs etc. more or less literally.

-Bacon, Francis
On the use of photographs in his art. Quoted in  John Russell Francis Bacon (1979).

Piano, n. A parlour utensil for subduing the impenitent visitor. It is operated by depressing the keys of the machine and the spirits of the audience.

-Bierce, Ambrose Gwinett
  The Cynic's Word Book. Retitled  The Devil's Dictionary (1911).

   What is man, when you come to think upon him, but a minutelyset, ingeniousmachinefor turning, with infinite artfulness, the red wine of Shiraz into urine?

-Blixen, Karen, Baroness pseudonym Isak Dinesen
  Seven Gothic Tales,'The Dreamers'.

Too much importance isgiven thewriterand not enough to his work.What difference does it make who he is and what he feels, since he's merelya machine for transmission of ideas. In reality he doesn't existöhe's a cipher, a blank. A spy sent into life by the forces of death. His main objective is to get the information across the border, back into death.

-Bowles, Paul Frederick
  Letter to  James Leo Herlihy, 30  Apr.

Only thestudyof militaryhistory iscapable of giving those who have no experience of their own a clear picture of what I have just called the friction of the whole machine.

-Clausewitz, Karl von
  Principles of  War (translated by  J  J Graham).

   One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.

-Hubbard, Elbert Green
Thousand and One Epigrams.

   In Conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work†all planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctoryaffair. The idea becomes the machine that makes the art.

-LeWitt, Sol
  'Paragraphs on Conceptual  Art', in  Artforum, summer.

A reading machine, always wound up and going, He mastered whatever was not worth knowing.

-Lowell,James Russell
  Of a scholar.'A Fable for Critics'.

We feel the machine slipping from our hands As if someone else were steering; If we see the light at the end of the tunnel, It's the light of the oncoming train.

-Lowell, RobertTraill Spence,Jr
  Day by Day,'Since1939'.

Oh, no, the machine, the machine is necessary. A man comesintoagreat hotelandsays,Iama messenger. Who is this man? He disappears walking, there is no noise, nothing. Maybe he will never come back, maybe he will never deliver the message.But a man who rides up on a great machine, this man is responsible, this man exists. He will be given messages.

-Miller, Arthur
  Rodolpho.  A View From the Bridge, act1.

Words are beautiful things, but muskets and machine guns are even more beautiful.

-Mussolini, Benito also called Il Duce [the Leader]
c.1932  Quoted in Denis Mack-Smith Mussolini's Roman Empire (1976).

  The press, the machine, the railway, the telegraph are premises whose thousand-year conclusion no one has yet dared to draw.

-Nietzsche, FriedrichWilhelm
  The Wanderer and His Shadow, aphorism 278.

He was like a man who takes a machine-gun to a shooting gallery. Everybody falls flat on his face, the proprietor at once takes to the hills, and when you cautiously peep up, you find that he has wrecked the place but got three perfect bull's-eyes.

-O'Faolain, Sean
On Frank O'Connor (pseudonym of Michael O'Donovan), attributed.

Thankstohis bodily formand thankstohismind, [man] is a universal machine, capable of an infinite diversity of movement.

-Redtenbacher, Ferdinand
  Resultate fur den Maschinenbau (published1848).

The dogma of the Ghost in the Machine.

-Ryle, Gilbert
  The Concept of Mind.

You're not a man, you're a machine.

-Shaw, George Bernard
  Sergius to Bluntschli. Arms and the Man, act 3.

   Our body is a machine for living. It is organized for that, it is its nature. Let life go on in it unhindered and let it defend itself, it will do more than if you paralyse it by encumbering it with remedies.

-Tolstoy, Leo Nikolayevich
  War and Peace, bk.10, ch.29.

Prayers for the condemned man will be offered on an adding machine. Numbers constitute the only universal language.

-Weinstein
  Miss Lonelyhearts.

The automatic machine, whatever we thinkof any feelings it may or may not have, is the precise economic equivalent of the slave.

-Wiener, Norbert
  The Human Use of Human Beings.

Themachineisrunning away withhimasit ranaway with me.

-Wilhelm II, Kaiser
  Of Adolf Hitler at the start ofWorldWar II, said to Sir Robert Bruce-Lockhart, 27 Aug.