Vice and Virtue, iii
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part II - Elementary Morality
“He knew that most machines are amoral, neither bad nor good. But by the way you built and shaped them you in turn shaped men, women, and children to be bad or good. A car, for instance, dead brute, unthinking, an unprogrammed bulk, is the greatest destroyer of souls in history. It makes boy-men greedy for power, destruction, and more destruction. It was never intended to do that. But that's how it turned out.”
I Sing the Body Electric! (1969)
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Ray Bradbury 401
American writer 1920–2012Related quotes
Frame of Government (1682)
Context: Governments, like clocks, go from the motion men give them; and as governments are made and moved by men, so by them they are ruined too. Wherefore governments rather depend upon men, than men upon governments. Let men be good, and the government cannot be bad; if it be ill, they will cure it. But, if men be bad, let the government be never so good, they will endeavor to warp and spoil it to their turn.
“There is one god, greatest among gods and men, similar to mortals neither in shape nor in thought.”
Fragment 23, as quoted in Notes on Greek Philosophy by Anthony Preus (Global Academic Publishing, 1996), p. 10
Colorado Springs Gazette-Telegraph, “Unlimited Government” (Dec. 29, 1961).
2010s, 2016, June, Speech about the Orlando Shooting (June 13, 2016)
“They say you can't turn a bad girl good
But once a good girl's gone bad, she's gone forever”
Song Cry
The Blueprint (2001)