“You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.”

— Cormac McCarthy

Source: Blood Meridian (1985), Chapter II
Source: Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
Context: A man’ s at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. It aint the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it. You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can …" by Cormac McCarthy?

Cormac McCarthy 270

American novelist, playwright, and screenwriter 1933

Related quotes

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

Elbert Hubbard (1856–1915) American writer, publisher, artist, and philosopher fue el escritor del jarron azul

Source: A Thousand & One Epigrams: Selected from the Writings of Elbert Hubbard (1911), p. 151

“Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an "intelligence explosion", and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.”

I. J. Good (1916–2009) British statistician, cryptographer

"Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine" http://www.stat.vt.edu/tech_reports/2005/GoodTechReport.pdf, Advances in Computers, vol. 6, 1965

“Remembering is just an invention of the mind… It means that if you want to, you can remember anything, whether it happened or not… You don't need a time machine if you can remember.”

Rodman Philbrick book Freak the Mighty

Source: Freak the Mighty

“This is a machine and anything can go wrong with it.”

Prakash Javadekar (1951) Indian politician

Responding to allegations that an inferior rath was given to Rajnath Singh for his rath-yatra, as quoted in " Rajnath Singh will get new rath: BJP http://www.rediff.com/news/2006/apr/08yatra6.htm", Rediff (8 April 2006)

“You can predict exactly what a machine will do if you have sufficient knowledge of it. A machine cannot go beyond the limitations of its design. The man-machine fears death because a machine cannot see beyond its own destruction.”

Barry Long (1926–2003) Australian spiritual teacher and writer

Knowing Yourself: The True in the False (1996)

“God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on petrol, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Mere Christianity

Book II, Chapter 3, "The Shocking Alternative"
Mere Christianity (1952)

“Often people, especially computer engineers, focus on the machines. They think, "By doing this, the machine will run faster. By doing this, the machine will run more effectively. By doing this, the machine will something something something." They are focusing on machines. But in fact we need to focus on humans, on how humans care about doing programming or operating the application of the machines. We are the masters. They are the slaves.”

Yukihiro Matsumoto (1965) Japanese computer scientist

Yukihiro Matsumoto " The Philosophy of Ruby, A Conversation with Yukihiro Matsumoto, Part I http://www.artima.com/intv/ruby4.html" by Bill Venners on 2003-09-29 (Artima Developer).

“Algebra is the offer made by the devil to the mathematician. The devil says: `I will give you this powerful machine, it will answer any question you like. All you need to do is give me your soul: give up geometry and you will have this marvellous machine.”

Michael Atiyah (1929–2019) British mathematician

[Michael Atiyah, Collected works. Vol. 6, The Clarendon Press Oxford University Press, Oxford Science Publications, http://www.math.tamu.edu/~rojas/atiyah20thcentury.pdf, 978-0-19-853099-2, 2160826, 2004]

“How inferior the human machine is, compared to man-made machines. They can be decoked, unscrewed, oiled and parts replaced. Decidedly, nature is not a very wonderful thing.”

Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848–1907) French novelist and art critic

“The German army is a machine, and machines can be broken!”

Konstantin Rokossovsky (1896–1968) Soviet and Polish military commander

Quoted in "Current Biography" - Page 562 - by H.W. Wilson Company - 1945

“You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.”

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Cormac McCarthy 270

Related quotes

Related topics