Quotes about device (414 quotes, page 4)

“The whole trouble with a folk song is that once you have played it through there is nothing much you can do except play it over again and play it rather louder. Most Russian music, indeed, consists in ringing changes on this device, skilfully disguised though the fact may be.”

Constant Lambert (1905–1951) British composer and conductor

"The Conflict Between Nationalism and Form", p. 146.
Music, Ho! (1934)

Music , Change

“Socialism, or the Red Republic, is all one; for it would tear down the tricolour and set up the red flag. It would make penny pieces out of the Column Vendome. It would knock down the statue of Napoleon and raise up that of Marat in its stead. It would suppress the Académie, the Ecole Polytechnique, and the Legion of Honour. To the grand device Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, it would add “Ou la mort. It would bring about a general bankruptcy. It would ruin the rich without enriching the poor. It would destroy labour, which gives to each one his bread. It would abolish property and family. It would march about with the heads of the proscribed on pikes, fill the prisons with the suspected, and empty them by massacres. It would convert France into the country of gloom. It would strangle liberty, stifle the arts, silence thought, and deny God. It would bring into action these two fatal machines, one of which never works without the other—the assignat press and the guillotine. In a word, it would do in cold blood what the men of 1793 did in fever, and after the grand horrors which our fathers saw, we should have the horrible in all that was low and small.”

Victor Hugo (1802–1885) French poet, novelist, and dramatist

Statement of May 1848, as quoted in Paris Under the Commune : Or, Seventy-Three Days of the Second Siege (1871) by John Leighton

Men , God , Family , Art

“If you have a portable surveillance and tracking device, please turn it off. They have already tracked you in here, they already know you are listening to me; so, there is no need for you to keep it on. And by the way, these portable tracking devices emit signals for tracking purposes even when they are apparently switched off; the only way to stop them is to take out all the batteries. And if they want to listen, they don't have to do it through your portable surveillance device, I expect recordings will be posted they can listen to those, and they are even welcome to come and attend. So there is absolutely no reason why your portable tracking and surveillance device has to be on.”

Richard Stallman (1953) American software freedom activist, short story writer and computer programmer, founder of the GNU project

After a mobile phone rang at his talk at Moscow State University (3 March 2008)
2000s

Way

“Time ‘keeping’ devices produce a measure of duration, according to general principles of standardized mechanical production, so that a clock-marked minute is stripped of qualitative distinctness automatically. Chronometrically, any difference between one minute and another is a mechanical discrepancy, strictly analogous to a production line malfunction.”

Nick Land (1962) British philosopher

"Time in Transition" https://web.archive.org/web/20121113235339/http://www.thatsmags.com/shanghai/article/777/time-in-transition (2011) (original emphasis)

Time

“The State legislatures should be immediately urged to relinquish the right of establishing banks of discount. Most of them will comply, on patriotic principles, under the convictions of the moment; and the non-complying may be crowded into concurrence by legitimate devices.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to Thomas Cooper, 1814. ME 14:190
Posthumous publications, On financial matters

“The fact that most of the time human beings put the truth about the nature and risks of the nuclear war out of their minds because it is too painful and therefore not "acceptable", does not alter the nature and risks of such war. The device of "rejection" may temporarily cover up anxiety, but it does not bestow peace of mind and emotional security.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, The Quest for Peace and Justice (1964)

Pain , War , Truth , Peace

“The techniques of the practitioner are usually called 'synthetic'. He designs by organizing known principles and devices into larger systems.”

Herbert A. Simon (1916–2001) American political scientist, economist, sociologist, and psychologist

Simon (1945, p. 353); As cited in: Philosophy of Technology and Engineering Sciences (2009) p. 425.
1940s-1950s

“But what would become of mass production and its system of financial expansion if technical perfection, durability, social efficiency, and human satisfaction were the guiding aims. The very conditions for current financial success — constantly expanding production and replacement — works against these ends. To ensure the rapid absorption of its immense productivity, megatechnics resorts to a score of different devices: consumer credit, installment buying, multiple packaging, non-functional designs, meretricious novelties, shoddy materials, defective workmanship, built-in fragility, or forced obsolescence through frequent arbitrary changes of fashion. Without constant enticement and inveiglement by advertising, production would slow down and level off to normal replacement demand. Otherwise many products could reach a plateau of efficient design which would call for only minimal changes from year to year.”

Lewis Mumford book The Myth of the Machine

Megatechnic Costs and Benefits
The Myth of the Machine (1967-1970), The Pentagon of Power (1970)

Fashion , Change , Success , Perfection

“Their deceitful role in Ayodhya – which in the end harmed their clients more than anyone else – was just symptomatic. For fifty years this bunch has been suppressing facts and inventing lies. How concerned they pretend to be today about that objective of the ICHR – to promote objective and rational research into events of our past! How does this concern square with the guidelines issued by their West Bengal government in 1989 which Outlook itself had quoted – ‘Muslim rule should never attract any criticism. Destruction of temples by Muslim rulers and invaders should not be mentioned?’ But incorporating their wholesale fabrications of the destruction of Buddhist viharas, about the non-existent ‘Aryan invasion’, that is mandatory – to question them is to be communal, chauvinist! The capture of institutions like the ICHR has been bad enough, but in the end it has been a device. The major crime of these ‘historians’ has been this partisanship: suppresso veri, suggesto falsi.”

Arun Shourie (1941) Indian journalist and politician

Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud

Quotes , Communication , Question , Past

“It is interesting to note that poetry, a literary device whose very construct involves the use of words, is itself the word of choice by persons grasping to describe something so beautiful, it is marvelously ineffable.”

Vanna Bonta (1958–2014) Italian-American writer, poet, inventor, actress, voice artist (1958-2014)

The Cosmos as a Poem (2010)

Beauty , Personality

“Fascism denies that numbers, as such, can direct human society. It denies that numbers can govern by means of periodical consultations: It asserts the unavoidable fruitful and beneficent inequality of men who cannot be leveled by any such mechanical and extrinsic device as universal suffrage.”

Benito Mussolini book The Doctrine of Fascism

"The Doctrine of Fascism", June 1932. Quoted in Marco Piraino, Stefano Fiorito, Fascist identity : political project and doctrine of fascism. Lulu.com, 2009. (p. 107)
1930s

Men , Universe

“The device [electronic I Ching calculator] also functioned as an ordinary calculator, but only to a limited degree. It could handle any calculation which returned an answer of anything up to 4. …anything above 4 it represented merely as "A Suffusion of Yellow." Dirk was not certain if this was a programming error or an insight beyond his ability to fathom, but he was crazy about it anyway, enough to hand over twenty pounds of ready cash for the thing.”

Douglas Adams The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

Source: The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988), Ch. 10

Error

“Two centuries ago Leibnitz invented a calculating machine which embodied most of the essential features of recent keyboard devices, but it could not then come into use. The economics of the situation were against it: the labor involved in constructing it, before the days of mass production, exceeded the labor to be saved by its use, since all it could accomplish could be duplicated by sufficient use of pencil and paper. Moreover, it would have been subject to frequent breakdown, so that it could not have been depended upon; for at that time and long after, complexity and unreliability were synonymous.”

Vannevar Bush book As We May Think

As We May Think (1945)

Time , Dependency

“The premise of neo-conservatives is that markets left to their own devices will produce the best possible result, and that political interference is not required. This defies the human reality that people are not commodities, and simply refuse to behave as if they were.”

Bob Rae (1948) Canadian politician

Source: The Three Questions - Prosperity and the Public Good (1998), Chapter Two, The First Question: Self Interest and Prosperity, p. 39-40

People , Reality

“What the worker needs is to see the plant as if he were a manager. Only thus can he see his part, from his part he can reach the whole. This "seeing" is not a matter of information, training courses, conducted plant tours, or similar devices. What is needed is the actual experience of the whole in and through the individual's work.”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

1930s- 1950s, The New Society (1950)

Parting , Training

“Religion is the most inflammatory enemy-labelling device in history.”

Richard Dawkins book A Devil's Chaplain

"Time to Stand Up"
A Devil's Chaplain (2003)

Religion , History

“In quotation not only does language turn on itself, but it does so word by word and expression by expression, and this reflexive twist is inseparable from the convenience and universal applicability of the device. Here we already have enough to draw the interest of the philosopher of language.”

Donald Davidson (philosopher) (1917–2003) scriitor amator

Donald Davidson. "Quotation" in: Theory and Decision, March 1979, Vol. 11, Iss. 1, pp 27-40; Cited by Willis Goth Regier, Quotology, (2010), p. 4

Universe , Drawing

“How does artificial intelligence refer to social relationships – for example, the functioning of one or another political system? Well, the evolution of the world is not a closed and completed process. For sure, we are awaiting a change in social relations due to moving of the labor market, especially as a result of transferring the burden of performing various activities on the devices. The invention of machines during the English Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries resulted in mass strikes and revolts, because many workers were afraid that they would be replaced by the machines. The societies has somehow coped with it. Will they defend themselves in the situation of the next step towards the automation of everything? It's an open matter.”

Zygmunt Vetulani (1950) Polish mathematician

Polish Press Agency (July 17, 2018): Polish Scientist warns against cyborgization perils https://polandinenglish.info/38094623/polish-scientist-warns-against-cyborgization-perils.

World , Intelligence , Change

“The myth that holds that the great corporation is the puppet of the market, the powerless servant of the consumer, is, in fact one of the devices by which its power is perpetuated.”

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) American economist and diplomat

Source: The Age of Uncertainty (1977), Chapter 9, p. 258

“We don't have the user centricity. Until we understand context, which is way beyond presence — presence is the most trivial notion, just am I on this device or not; it doesn't say am I meeting with something, am I focused on writing something. i had to suck dicks this morning help me i gayyyyyy”

Bill Gates (1955) American business magnate and philanthropist

.NET Briefing Day Speech (24 July 2002) http://www.microsoft.com/billgates/speeches/2002/07-24netstrategy.asp
2000s

Way , Understanding

“Do you pine for the nice days of minix-1.1, when men were men and wrote their own device drivers?
[…]
I can (well, almost) hear you asking yourselves "why?". Hurd will be out in a year (or two, or next month, who knows), and I've already got minix.”

Linus Torvalds (1969) Finnish-American software engineer and hacker

, announcing Linux version 0.02. The Hurd 0.0 was released in August 1996 and as of 2015, is still not complete.</p>
1990s, 1991-94

Men

“Psycho-pathologists very often have to deal with people whose thinking is thus “compulsive.” And when analysis is possible, it is usually found that such persistent ideas are associated with some unconscious impulse. It is characteristic of all compulsive thinking that it is not the outgrowth of conscious reasoning and cannot be modified by evidence. Persons whose thinking is compulsive often seek to “rationalize” it—that is, they resort to ingenious devices to render it plausible or to explain away that which would contradict it. This sort of thinking, as I have tried to show, is a common characteristic of the crowd mind. The thinking of the crowd is dogmatic as a result of causes which are similar to those which render compulsive that of certain neurotics. And dogma is a common element in religion.”

Everett Dean Martin (1880–1941)

Source: The Mystery of Religion (1924), pp. 52-53

People , Religion , Idea , Thinking

“Before the prospect of an intelligence explosion, we humans are like small children playing with a bomb. Such is the mismatch between the power of our plaything and the immaturity of our conduct. Superintelligence is a challenge for which we are not ready now and will not be ready for a long time. We have little idea when the detonation will occur, though if we hold the device to our ear we can hear a faint ticking sound.”

Nick Bostrom book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

Source: Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014), Ch. 15

Children , Intelligence , Idea , Time

“As best demonstrated by Nature in the case of the aerofoil maple-seed, today's propeller is a pressure-screw and therefore a braking screw, whose purpose is to allow the heavy maple-seed to fall parachute-like slowly towards the ground and to be carried away sideways by the wind in the process. No bird has such a whirling thing on its head, nor a fish on its tail. Only man made use of this natural brake-screw for forward propulsion. As the propeller rotates, so does the resistance rise by the square of the rotational velocity. This is also a sign that this supposed propulsive device is unnaturally constructed and therefore out of place.”

Viktor Schauberger (1885–1958) austrian philosopher and inventor

Implosion Magazine, No. 112, p. 52 (Callum Coats: Energy Evolution (2000))
Implosion Magazine

Nature , Bird , Fish

“I have to confess that I felt rather proud
of the simple device of my suffocating cloud.
The Prospero of poisons, the Faustus of the front,
bringing mental magic to modern armament.”

Tony Harrison (1937) British writer

"Fritz Haber", line 5; from Square Rounds (London: Faber & Faber, 1992).
The title character of the poem was responsible for developing chlorine gas as a weapon of war.

“Men are the dominant sign-using animals. Animals other than man do, of course, respond to certain things as signs of something else, but such signs do not attain the complexity and elaboration which is found in human speech, writing, art, testing devices, medical diagnosis, and signaling instruments. Science and signs are inseparably interconnected, since science both presents men with more reliable signs and embodies its results is systems of signs. Human civilization is dependent upon signs and systems of signs, and the human mind is inseparable from the functioning of signs - if indeed mentality is not to be identified with such functioning.”

Charles W. Morris (1903–1979) American philosopher

Source: "Foundations of the Theory of Signs," 1938, p. 1 (1971:17), Lead paragraph first chapter

Men , Art , Science , Animals

“In a time such as ours when people believe they can do without an ideal, cast away what they call abstract ideas, live on realism, rationalism, positivism, reduce everything to knowledge or to the use of more or less ingenious and casual devices — let us acknowledge it here — in such a time there is only one means of avoiding error, crime, disaster, of determining the conduct to be followed on a given occasion — but a safe means it is, and a fruitful one; this is the exclusive devotion to two abstract notions in the field of ethics: duty and discipline; such a devotion, if it is to lead to happy results, further implies besides… knowledge and reasoning.”

Ferdinand Foch (1851–1929) French soldier and military theorist

Variant translation: In our time, which thinks it can do without ideals, that it can reject what it calls abstractions, and nourish itself on realism, rationalism and positivism; which thinks it can reduce all questions to matters of science or to the employing of more or less ingenious expedients; at such a time, I say, there is but one resource if you are to avoid disaster, and only one which will make you certain of what course to hold upon a given day. It is the worship — to the exclusion of all others — of two Ideas in the field of morals: duty and discipline. And that worship further needs, if it is to bear fruit and produce results, knowledge and reason.
As quoted in "A Sketch of the Military Career of Marshal Foch" by Major A. Grasset
Source: Precepts and Judgments (1919), p. 150

People , Error , Idea , Knowledge

“Whatever device you use… Windows will be there. … Windows will be everywhere on every device without compromise.”

Steve Ballmer (1956) American businessman who was the chief executive officer of Microsoft

Live from Microsoft's CES 2011 keynote http://engadget.com/2011/01/05/live-from-microsofts-ces-2011-keynote in Engadget (5 January 2011)
2010s

“One man I know, and one only, who can be praised for his achievements in this science. Of discourses and battles of words he takes no heed: he follows the works of wisdom, and in these finds rest. What others strive to see dimly and blindly, like bats in twilight, he gazes at in the full light of day, because he is a master of experiment. Through experiment he gains knowledge of natural things, medical, chemical, indeed of everything in the heavens or earth. He is ashamed that things should be known to laymen, old women, soldiers, ploughmen, of which he is ignorant. Therefore he has looked closely into the doings of those who work in metals and minerals of all kinds; he knows everything relating to the art of war, the making of weapons, and the chase; he has looked closely into agriculture, mensuration, and farming work; he has even taken note of the remedies, lot casting, and charms used by old women and by wizards and magicians, and of the deceptions and devices of conjurors, so that nothing which deserves inquiry should escape him, and that he may be able to expose the falsehoods of magicians. If philosophy is to be carried to its perfection and is to be handled with utility and certainty, his aid is indispensable. As for reward, he neither receives nor seeks it. If he frequented kings and princes, he would easily find those who would bestow on him honours and wealth. Or, if in Paris he would display the results of his researches, the whole world would follow him. But since either of these courses would hinder him from pursuing the great experiments in which he delights, he puts honour and wealth aside, knowing well that his wisdom would secure him wealth whenever he chose. For the last three years he has been working at the production of a mirror that shall produce combustion at a fixed distance; a problem which the Latins have neither solved nor attempted, though books have been written upon the subject.”

Roger Bacon book Opus Tertium

Bridges assumes that Bacon refers here to Peter Peregrinus of Maricourt.
Source: Opus Tertium, c. 1267, Ch. 13 as quoted in J. H. Bridges, The 'Opus Majus' of Roger Bacon (1900) Vol.1 http://books.google.com/books?id=6F0XAQAAMAAJ Preface p.xxv

Wisdom , Women , War , Books

“There appears to me to be no device at present but between an absolute surrender of the liberties of the People and a vigorous exertion…My view of things is I own very gloomy, and I am convinced that in a few years this Government will become completely absolute, or that confusion will arise of a nature almost as much to be deprecated as despotism itself…This is a great Crisis.”

Charles James Fox (1749–1806) British Whig statesman

Letter to Lord Holland (15 November 1795), quoted in L. G. Mitchell, Charles James Fox (London: Penguin, 1997), p. 140.
1790s

People , Nature , Appearance

“Socratic trustworthiness depends upon devices of irony, both spoken and acted. … The irony of words prevents Socrates from being taken as the source of doctrines. The irony of actions prevents Socrates from being made into the literal founder of a philosophic school. … The ironic voice does not seek to possess the student, but directs him, lustlessly, to the desire of philosophy itself.”

Mark D. Jordan (1953)

Authority and persuasion in philosophy (1985)

School , Dependency

“He had enormous and poetic admiration, though very little understanding, of all mechanical devices. They were his symbols of truth and beauty. Regarding each new intricate mechanism—metal lathe, two-jet carburetor, machine gun, oxyacetylene welder—he learned one good realistic-sounding phrase, and used it over and over, with a delightful feeling of being technical and initiated.”

Sinclair Lewis book Babbitt

Babbitt (1922), Ch. 6

Truth , Beauty , Feeling , Understanding

“The might which kills outright is an elementary and coarse form of might. How much more varied in its devices; how much more astonishing in its effects is that other which does not kill; or which delays killing.”

Simone Weil (1909–1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist

La force qui tue est une forme sommaire, grossière de la force. Combien plus variée en ses procédés, combien plus surprenante en ses effets, est l'autre force, celle qui ne tue pas; c'est-à-dire celle qui ne tue pas encore.
in The Simone Weil Reader, p. 155
Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986), The Iliad or The Poem of Force (1940-1941)

“Do not be alarmed by simplification, complexity is often a device for claiming sophistication, or for evading simple truths.”

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) American economist and diplomat

The Age of Uncertainty (1977), BBC Television series (also published in book form, non verbatim version)

Truth

“As with all quantum devices, a qubit is a delicate flower. If you so much as look at it, you destroy it.”

Hans Christian von Baeyer (1938) American physicist

Source: Information, The New Language of Science (2003), Chapter 21, The Qubit, Information in the quantum age, p. 187

Flowers

“The fact that a computer player wins a game of chess or bridge with a human does not necessarily mean that the device is intelligent. The victory results from the fact that in the final analysis the device has been applied appropriate algorithms developed by man, e. g. using the properties of artificial neural networks. It is not the device that wins with a man, e. g. a chess player, but a man – the designer of the device. It is simply the rivalry of one intellect with another through the medium of computer science.”

Zygmunt Vetulani (1950) Polish mathematician

Tumiłowicz, Bronisław (February 2018): Zrób sobie mózg https://www.tygodnikprzeglad.pl/zrob-sobie-mozg/. Przegląd (6/2018): pp. 58–59.

Game , Intelligence , Science , Victory

“Personally, I'm not interested in making device drivers look like user-level. They aren't, they shouldn't be, and microkernels are just stupid.”

Linus Torvalds (1969) Finnish-American software engineer and hacker

Post, mlist.linux.kernel newsgroup, 2002-05-25, Google Groups, Torvalds, Linus, 2006-08-28 http://groups.google.com/group/mlist.linux.kernel/msg/938ffa86ae60dc7a,
2000s, 2000-04

Stupidity , Personality

“Artistic expression might be seen as a Darwinian protection device for the psyche of fragile individuals, for whom sensuous contact with the outside world is too much to bear, and is repressed, and must be brought up and thrust out into the open from time to time at great effort in order for them to simply survive emotionally.”

Mark Heard (1951–1992) American musician and record producer

Life in the Industry: A Musician's Diary

World , Effort , Time

“She…cast an eye over the contents of his cart, wondering whether this was totally random stuff…to perfect his Walmart shopper disguise: 5.56-millimeter cartridges, a water purification device, jerky, bug repellent, a camouflage hat. Freeze-dried meals. A roll of black plastic sheeting. Parachute cord. Batteries. A folding bucksaw. Camouflage binoculars.…
It turned out that Sokolov really did want to buy all that stuff. Not because he envisioned any particular use for it. He just believed in stocking up on such things, on general principles, whenever an opportunity presented itself.
He would fit in well here.”

Neal Stephenson book Reamde

Day 20, Northern Idaho
Reamde (2011), Part II: American Falls

Water , Perfection

“Among life’s cruelest truths is this one: Wonderful things are especially wonderful the first time they happen, but their wonderfulness wanes with repetition. Just compare the first and last time your child said "Mama" or your partner said "I love you" and you’ll know exactly what I mean. When we have an experience hearing a particular sonata, making love with a particular person, watching the sunset from a particular window of a particular room—on successive occasions, we quickly begin to adapt to it, and the experience yields less pleasure each time. Psychologists call this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility, and the rest of us call it marriage. But human beings have discovered two devices that allow them to combat this tendency: variety and time.”

Daniel T. Gilbert book Stumbling on Happiness

Source: Stumbling on Happiness, 2006, p. 30

Love , Life , Marriage , Pleasure

“And because this Experimental Science is wholly ignored by the general run of students, for that reason I can not convince people of its utility unless I show at the same time its excellence and its property. This science alone, then, knows how to test perfectly by experience what can be done by nature, what by the industry of art, what by imposture; what the incantations, conjurations, invocations, deprecations, sacrifices (which are magical devices) seek and dream of; and what is done in them, so that all falsity may be removed and that only the truth of art and nature be retained. This science alone teaches one to consider all the insanities of magicians, not that they may be confirmed but that they may be avoided, just as logic considers sophistical argument.”

Roger Bacon book Opus Majus

6th part Experimental Science, Ch.2 Tr. Richard McKeon, Selections from Medieval Philosophers Vol.2 Roger Bacon to William of Ockham
Opus Majus, c. 1267

People , Truth , Dreams , Art

“The problem is not that we were once in charge, but that we are not in charge any more… Consider Uganda, pearl of Africa, as an example of the British record. … the British planted coffee and cotton and tobacco, and they were broadly right… If left to their own devices, the natives would rely on nothing but the instant carbohydrate gratification of the plantain. You never saw a place so abounding in bananas: great green barrel-sized bunches, off to be turned into matooke. Though this dish (basically fried banana) was greatly relished by Idi Amin, the colonists correctly saw that the export market was limited… The best fate for Africa would be if the old colonial powers, or their citizens, scrambled once again in her direction; on the understanding that this time they will not be asked to feel guilty.”

Boris Johnson (1964) British politician, historian and journalist

Discussing his views on Africans and "Instant Carbohydrate Gratification" The Spectator 2 February 2002
2000s, 2002

Fate , Feeling , Coffee , Understanding

“"The environment has to be balanced against the economy." This quote portrays environmental concerns as a luxury, views measures to solve environmental problems as incurring a net cost, and considers leaving environmental problems unsolved to be a money-saving device. This one-liner puts the truth exactly backwards. Environmental messes cost us huge sums of money both in the short run and in the long run; cleaning up or preventing those messes saves us huge sums in the long run, and often in the short run as well. In caring for the health of our surroundings, just as of our bodies, it is cheaper and preferable to avoid getting sick than to try to cure illnesses after they have developed.”

Jared Diamond book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

Source: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005), Chapter "The world as a polder: what does it all mean to us today?", section "One-liner objections" (Penguin Books, 2011, page 503, .

Money , Health , Truth , Quotes

“Programming in the abstract sense is what I really enjoy. I enjoy lots of different areas of it… I'm taking a great deal of enjoyment writing device drivers for Linux. I could also be having a good time writing a database manager or something because there are always interesting problems.”

John D. Carmack (1970) American computer programmer, engineer, and businessman

Quoted in Bob Colayco, "John Carmack Interview" http://www.firingsquad.com/features/carmack/page3.asp Firing Squad(2000-02-09)

Problem , Sense , Time

“By his very success in inventing labor-saving devices, modern man has manufactured an abyss of boredom that only the privileged classes in earlier civilizations have ever fathomed.”

Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) American historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and literary critic

"The Challenge of Renewal"
The Conduct Of Life (1951)

Success

“I've been telling people for 12 years that if you want to get a nuclear device into the United States, just bring it through the port of Miami disguised as cocaine.”

Tom Clancy (1947–2013) American author

2000s, Kudlow & Cramer interview (2003)

People

“[To read a novel or see a play was to drink life through a straw — to smoke it through a filter-tip. If we were not afraid of blackening our teeth or riddling our lungs with cancer — if we were a dauntless race of men with strong digestions — we would be able to devour life without the aid of these over-civilized devices.”

Quentin Crisp book The Naked Civil Servant

Source: The Naked Civil Servant (1968), Ch. 27

Life , Men , Drink , Strong

“A god that created the world and then walked off the site leaving it to its own devices is not a fit object of worship, nor a source of moral authority.”

Simon Blackburn (1944) British academic philosopher

Source: Think (1999), Chapter Five, God, p. 169

God , World

“There is also no lack of deterrents which keep saintliness at a distance from a person, but then again there is no lack of devices by which these deterrents may be held afar.”

Moshe Chaim Luzzatto book Mesillat Yesharim

Mesillat Yesharim (1738), Introduction

Personality

“I love the Surface. And that's true even though I know very little about it. … I was only permitted to touch the device while the machine was powered off. … despite all these unknowns, I'm already deeply smitten. Not because the Surface is so great — though it seems like it might be — but because it represents a new and potentially powerful force in the tech industry.”

Farhad Manjoo (1978) American journalist

Why I Love Surface http://slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/06/microsoft_surface_is_this_the_ipad_rival_the_tech_world_desperately_needs_.html in Slate (19 June 2012)

Love

“The ultimate repository of herd influence is language—a device which not only condenses the opinions of those with whom we share a common vocabulary, but sums up the perceptual approach of swarms who have passed on.”

Howard Bloom (1943) American publicist and author

Source: Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century (2000), Ch.8 Reality is a Shared Hallucination

“They don't make poles long enough for me want to touch Microsoft products, and I don't want any mass-marketed game-playing device or Windows appliance near my desk or on my network. This is my workbench, dammit, it's not a pretty box to impress people with graphics and sounds. When I work at this system up to 12 hours a day, I'm profoundly uninterested in what user interface a novice user would prefer.”

Erik Naggum (1965–2009) Norwegian computer programmer

Re: Why lisp failed in the marketplace http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/6dd13ffe0e273031 (Usenet article).
Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

People , Game , Box

“Most of us have grown so blase about computer developments and capabilities — even some that are spectacular — that it is difficult to believe or imagine there was a time when we suffered the noisy, painstakingly slow, electromechanical devices that chomped away on punched cards.”

Nicholas Metropolis (1915–1999) Greek American physicist

The beginning of the Monte Carlo method, published by [Necia Grant Cooper, Roger Eckhardt, Nancy Shera, From cardinals to chaos: reflections on the life and legacy of Stanislaw Ulam, CUP Archive, 1989, 0521367344, 125]

Imagination , Suffering , Time

“The two greatest blinders of the intellectual who today might fight against the main drift are new and fascinating career chances, which often involve opportunities to practice his skill rather freely, and the ideology of liberalism, which tends to expropriate his chance to think straight. The two go together, for the liberal ideology, as now used by intellectuals, acts as a device whereby he can take advantage of the new career chances but retain the illusion that his soul remains his own.”

C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) American sociologist

The New Men of Power (1948), p. 281.
1940s

Soul , Thinking , Chance , Fight

“[Netscape will soon reduce Windows to] a poorly debugged set of device drivers.”

Marc Andreessen (1971) American entrepreneur, investor, and software engineer

Source: 1995 remark quoted in Ian Murdock, "Windows as a poorly debugged set of device drivers?" https://web.archive.org/web/20060812205515/http://www.ianmurdock.com/, Ian Murdock's Weblog (2006-08-02); Andreessen in 2012 attributed the original quote https://www.wired.com/2012/04/ff-andreessen/ to Bob Metcalfe, describing it as a "retweet".

“Like the Soviet regime before it, the Putin government spreads fear by destroying the illusion that one can protect oneself… People who work at two Moscow restaurants have warned me, separately, about the precise locations of listening devices at the eateries. The warnings came unbidden. The food at both places was, incidentally, not only very good but also apparently safe. That, along with the springtime sun, helps maintain the bizarre sense of normalcy that has a way of going hand in hand with the mortal danger that has become a fact of everyday life.”

Masha Gessen (1967) Russian-American journalist and activist

"Putin's Russia: Don't Walk, Don't Eat, and Don't Drink" http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/putins-russia-dont-walk-dont-eat-and-dont-drink?intcid=mod-yml (28 May 2015), The New Yorker.

Life , People , Fear , Food

“When a device as simple as a door has to come with an instruction manual—even a one-word manual—then it is a failure, poorly designed.”

Donald A. Norman book The Design of Everyday Things

Source: The Design of Everyday Things (1988, 2002), Ch. 4, p. 87; regarding doors labeled "Push" and "Pull".

Failure

“There is no doubt that Goya thought that one of the drugs chiefly responsible for the sleep of reason was the Church, and he had the lowest possible opinion of ecclesiastical institutions. However, this did not prevent him from painting religious pictures, completely sincerely because, like all Latin people, however little he believed in Christianity, he felt himself to be within the structure of the Catholic Church. One of his finest works was the decoration of a church near Madrid called S. Antonio de la Florida. He used the kind of device that would have appealed to Tiepolo. He painted a balcony round the drum of a cupola, and behind it he put a crowd of loiterers who are supposed to be watching the saint raise a man from the dead. Very few of them are interested in this unusual event. They are interested in each other or themselves, and show very well the curious tension between the individual and the collective, which is the essence of a crowd.”

Kenneth Clark (1903–1983) Art historian, broadcaster and museum director

Source: The Romantic Rebellion (1973), Ch. 3: Goya

People , Sleep , Painting , Sincerity

“The Mathematical School; Although mathematical methods can be used by any school of management theory, and have been, I have chosen to group under a school those theorists who see management as a system of mathematical models and processes. Perhaps the most widely known group I arbitrarily so lump are the operations researchers or operations analysts, who have sometimes anointed themselves with the rather pretentious name of "management scientists." The abiding belief of this group is that, if management, or organization, or planning, or decision making is a logical process, it can be expressed in terms of mathematical symbols and relationships. The central approach of this school is the model, for it is through these devices that the problem is expressed in its basic relationships and in terms of selected goals or objectives.”

Harold Koontz (1909–1984)

Source: "The Management Theory Jungle," 1961, p. 181

School , Mathematics , Problem , Decision

“First, utopianism is probably a necessary social device for generating the superhuman efforts without which no major revolution is achieved.”

Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) British academic historian and Marxist historiographer

Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries http://books.google.com/books?id=sCK8AAAAIAAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PA60#v=onepage&q=&f=false (1971), p. 60.

Effort

“Traditional guerrilla activity such as bombings, snipings and kidnappings complete with printed manifestos seem like so many ecologically risky short change feedback devices compared with the real possibilities of portable video, maverick data banks, acid metaprogramming, Cable TV, satellites, cybernetic craft industries, and alternative lifestyles. Yet the guerrilla tradition is highly relevant in the current information environment. Guerrilla warfare is by nature irregular and non-repetitive. Like information theory, it recognizes that redundancy can easily become reactionary and result in entropy and defeat.”

Paul Ryan (video artist) (1943–2013) American video artist

Paul Ryan, "Cybernetic Guerilla Warfare," Radical Software 3 (Spring 1971): 1

Nature , Change

“The Noisiest buzz in the industry lately has been over the emerging use of cable TV systems to provide fast network data transmissions using a device called a cable modem. But the likelihood of this technology succeeding is zilch.”

John C. Dvorak (1952) US journalist and radio broadcaster

"The Looming Cable Modem Fiasco" in PC Magazine (12 September 1995) http://web.archive.org/web/20000118075802/www.zdnet.com/pcmag/issues/1415/pcm00059.htm
1980s & 1990s

“As I luxuriate in the discovery that I am no special sponge for sorrow, but merely another fallible animal in this stone maze of a city, I come simultaneously to see that I am the focus of some vast device fueled by an obscure desire.”

William Gibson book Count Zero

On Marly Krushkhova
Count Zero (1986)

Animals

“Whenever logical processes of thought are employed — that is, whenever thought for a time runs along an accepted groove — there is an opportunity for the machine. Formal logic used to be a keen instrument in the hands of the teacher in his trying of students' souls. It is readily possible to construct a machine which will manipulate premises in accordance with formal logic, simply by the clever use of relay circuits. Put a set of premises into such a device and turn the crank, and it will readily pass out conclusion after conclusion, all in accordance with logical law, and with no more slips than would be expected of a keyboard adding machine.”

Vannevar Bush book As We May Think

As We May Think (1945)

Law , Soul , Teachers , Time

“A man who crosses the street must be careful not to be hit by a car, even if the car is an automatic vehicle without a driver, because the car is stronger than a man. We should be afraid of devices that function in a dangerous way for us. The robot will become such a device if we manage to equip it not so much in intelligence as in mechanisms imitating the effects of a certain human functionality. I mean equipping robots with mechanisms that function in a similar way to consciousness of existence and the instinct of self-preservation of a human being. I do not mean to say that the device will be conscious, but that its behavior will be similar to the behavior of a rational unit, such as a man aware of his existence. The machine will not receive consciousness, but it will behave as if it did.”

Zygmunt Vetulani (1950) Polish mathematician

Tumiłowicz, Bronisław (February 2018): Zrób sobie mózg https://www.tygodnikprzeglad.pl/zrob-sobie-mozg/. Przegląd (6/2018): pp. 58–59.

Cars , Way , Behavior , Intelligence

“Hui Shih was a man of many devices and his writings would fill five carriages. But his doctrines were jumbled and perverse and his words wide of the mark. His way of dealing with things may be seen from these sayings:
"The largest thing has nothing beyond it; it is called the One of largeness. The smallest thing has nothing within it; it is called the One of smallness."
"That which has no thickness cannot be piled up; yet it is a thousand li in dimension."
"Heaven is as low as earth; mountains and marshes are on the same level."
"The sun at noon is the sun setting. The thing born is the thing dying."
"Great similarities are different from little similarities; these are called the little similarities and differences. The ten thousand things are all similar and are all different; these are called the great similarities and differences."
"The southern region has no limit and yet has a limit."
"I set off for Yueh today and came there yesterday."
"Linked rings can be separated."
"I know the center of the world: it is north of Yen and south of Yueh."”

Hui Shi

"Let love embrace the ten thousand things; Heaven and earth are a single body."
'With sayings such as these, Hui Shih tried to introduce a more magnanimous view of the world and to enlighten the rhetoricians.'
Zhuangzi, Ch. 33, as translated by Burton Watson (1968), p. 374; this contains the core of what has survived of Hui Shi's philosophy, most of the records of it having been eradicated in the vast "burning of books and burying of scholars" during the Legalism of the Qin dynasty.

Love , World , Way , Mountain

“Having been enslaved for 250 years, black people were not left to their own devices. They were terrorized. In the Deep South, a second slavery ruled. In the North, legislatures, mayors, civic associations, banks, and citizens all colluded to pin black people into ghettos, where they were overcrowded, overcharged, and undereducated. Businesses discriminated against them, awarding them the worst jobs and the worst wages. Police brutalized them in the streets. And the notion that black lives, black bodies, and black wealth were rightful targets remained deeply rooted in the broader society. Now we have half-stepped away from our long centuries of despoilment, promising, “Never again.” But still we are haunted. It is as though we have run up a credit-card bill and, having pledged to charge no more, remain befuddled that the balance does not disappear. The effects of that balance, interest accruing daily, are all around us.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates (1975) writer, journalist, and educator

" The Case for Reparations https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/" (June, 2014) The Atlantic

People , Business , Wealth

“I have been surprised at the unanimity with which the notion of the unacceptability of a Doomsday Machine is greeted. I used to be wary of discussing the concept for fear that some colonel would get out a General Operating Requirement or Development Planning Objective for the device, but it seems that I need not have worried. Except by some scientists and engineers who have overemphasized the single objective of maximizing the effectiveness of deterrence, the device is universally rejected. It just does not look professional to senior military officers, and it looks even worse to senior civilians. The fact that more than a few scientists and engineers do seem attracted to the idea is disquieting, but as long as the development project is expensive, even these dedicated experts are unlikely to get one under way.”

Herman Kahn (1922–1983) American futurist

The Magnum Opus; On Thermonuclear War

Fear , Way , Idea , Universe

“The distinction between micro- and macro inventions matters because they appeared to be governed by different laws. Microinventions generally result from an intentional search for improvements, and are understandable -if not predictable- by economic forces. They are guided, at least to some extent, by the laws of supply and demand and by the intensity of search and the resources committed to them, and thus by signals emitted by the price mechanism. Furthermore, in so far as micro inventions are the by-products of experience through learning by doing or learning by using they are correlated with output or investment. Macroinventions are more difficult to understand, and seem to be governed by individual genius and luck as much as by economic forces. Often they are based on some fortunate event, in which an inventor stumbles on one thing while looking for another, arrives at the right conclusion for the wrong reason, or brings to bear a seemingly unrelated body of knowledge that just happen to hold the clue to the right solution. The timing of these inventions is consequently often hard to explain. Much of the economic literature dealing with the generation of technological progress through market mechanisms and incentive devices thus explain only part of the story. This does not mean that we have to give up the attempt to try to understand macroinventions. We must, however, look for explanations largely outside the trusted and familiar market mechanisms relied upon by economists.”

Joel Mokyr (1946) Israeli American economic historian

Source: The lever of riches: Technological creativity and economic progress, 1992, p. 295; as cited by Pol, Eduardo, and Peter Carroll.

Law , Search , Literature , Understanding

“They never knew what they were making, those old philosophers. They invented a device that could split open the very smallest particles of matter, and they used it to steal candy. They had no idea that they'd made the one weapon in all the universes that could defeat the tyrant.”

Philip Pullman His Dark Materials trilogy

Source: His Dark Materials, The Subtle Knife (1997), Ch. 15 : Bloodmoss
Context: If you're the bearer of the knife, you have a task that's greater than you can imagine. A child... How could they let it happen? Well, so it must be.... There is a war coming, boy. The greatest war there ever was. Something like it happened before, and this time the right side must win. We've had nothing but lies and propaganda and cruelty and deceit for all the thousands of years of human history. It's time we started again, but properly this time...."
He stopped to take in several rattling breaths.
"The knife," he went on after a minute. "They never knew what they were making, those old philosophers. They invented a device that could split open the very smallest particles of matter, and they used it to steal candy. They had no idea that they'd made the one weapon in all the universes that could defeat the tyrant. The Authority. God. The rebel angels fell because they didn't have anything like the knife; but now..."
"I didn't want it! I don't want it now!" Will cried. "If you want it, you can have it! I hate it, and I hate what it does — "
"Too late. You haven't any choice: you're the bearer. It's picked you out. And, what's more, they know you've got it; and if you don't use it against them, they'll tear it from your hands and use it against the rest of us, forever and ever."

Idea , Universe

“I have designed a decorative and monumental work as a group of subjects representing the three ages of sacred and profane mythology: the Golden Age, the Silver Age and the Iron Age. I have symbolised these different ages by dividing each one into compositions representing the three phases of the day: morning, noon and evening.
The Golden Age comprises three compositions (Adam and childhood):
:1. Prayer at sunrise.
:2. A walk in Paradise or the ecstasy before nature.
:3. All nature asleep.
The Silver Age. The second phase is taken from pagan mythology (Orpheus and youth):
:1. The dream nature is revealed to the senses of the inspired poet.
:2. The song.
: 3. Orpheus in the forest, his lyre broken and he longs for unknown countries and immortality.
The Iron Age (Cain and the maturity of man):
:1. The Sower making the earth productive (production).
:2. The Ploughman (work).
:3. Death (Cain and Abel).
Fourth panel:
The Triumph of Christ.
These three periods of humanity also correspond to the three periods in the life of a man:
The purity of childhood: Adam –
The poetic and unhappy aspirations of youth: Orpheus –
The grievous sufferings and death of mature age: Cain with the redemption of Christ.
D— thought it was an extremely ingenious and intelligent device to have used a figure from pagan antiquity for the cycle of youth and poetry instead of a Biblical figure, because intelligence and poetry are far better personified in these periods which were devoted to art and the imagination than in the Bible which is all sentiment and religiosity.
The Golden Age: the beginning of the world, naïveté, candour, purity. The morning: prayer. Noon: ecstasy and evening: sleep. No passion, nothing but elementary feelings. —
The Silver Age, corresponding to the civilization of humanity, already begins to feel emotion; it is the age of poets. I can only find this cycle in Greece. The morning: inspiration. Noon: song. Evening: tears. —
The Iron Age. Decadence and fall of humanity. I shall represent Cain ploughing and Abel sowing. Noon: Cain rests while Abel tends the altar of the Lord from which smoke, a symbol of purity, rises straight to the heavens. The evening: death at the hands of Cain.
The first death corresponds to the other deaths in the two other paintings: sleep and death of the senses; tears and the death of the heart. Do you understand the progression?
Sleep, though sad, is gentler than tears which, though painful, are gentler than death. Ecstasy is more delightful than song, which is gentler than work. Prayer is superior to dreaming which is more elevated than manual work.”

Gustave Moreau (1826–1898) French painter

Notes to his mother, on The Life of Humanity (1884-6) http://www.wikiart.org/en/gustave-moreau/humanity-the-golden-age-depicting-three-scenes-from-the-lives-of-adam-and-eve-the-silver-age-1886, his composition of a ten image polyptych, p. 48 · Photo of its exhibition on the 3rd Floor of Musée National Gustave Moreau http://en.musee-moreau.fr/house-museum/studios/third-floor
Gustave Moreau (1972)

Life , Death , Pain , Youth

“The Chinese delegate blinked his eyes and produced a shoebox, from which he drew a living flower which looked very like an iris. 'What is that?' they all inquired, pleased with the sight of so delicate a symbol.
'That,' said the Chinese, 'is a wild flag, Iris tectorum. In China we have decided to adopt this flag, since it is a convenient and universal device and very beautiful and grows everywhere in the moist places of the earth for all to observe and wonder at. I propose all countries adopt it, so that it will be impossible for us to insult each other's flag.'”

E. B. White (1899–1985) American writer

The Wild Flag (1943)
Context: Each delegate brought the flag of his homeland with him-each, that is, except the delegate from China. When the others asked him why he had failed to bring a flag, he said that he had discussed the matter with another Chinese survivor, an ancient and very wise man, and that between them they had concluded that they would not have any cloth flag for China anymore.
'What kind of flag do you intend to have?' asked the delegate from Luxembourg. The Chinese delegate blinked his eyes and produced a shoebox, from which he drew a living flower which looked very like an iris. 'What is that?' they all inquired, pleased with the sight of so delicate a symbol.
'That,' said the Chinese, 'is a wild flag, Iris tectorum. In China we have decided to adopt this flag, since it is a convenient and universal device and very beautiful and grows everywhere in the moist places of the earth for all to observe and wonder at. I propose all countries adopt it, so that it will be impossible for us to insult each other's flag.

Beauty , Flowers , Universe , Country

“Praise his good points and use every device to encourage him, perhaps by talking about one's own faults without touching on his, but so that they will occur to him.”

Tsunetomo Yamamoto book Hagakure

Variant translation:
It is very important to give advice to a man to help him mend his ways. It is a compassionate and important duty. However, it is extremely difficult to comprehend how this advice should be given. It is easy to recognise the good and bad points in others. Generally it is considered a kindness in helping people with things they hate or find difficult to say. However, one impracticality is that if people do not take in this advice they will think that there is nothing they should change. The same applies when we try to create shame in others by speaking badly of them. It seems outwardly that we are just complaining about them. One must get to know the person in question. Keep after him and get him to put his trust in you. Find out what interests he has. When you write to him or before you part company, you should express concrete examples of your own faults and get him to recall to mind whether or not he has the same problems. Also positively praise his qualities. It is important that he takes in your comments like a man thirsting for water. It is difficult to give such advice. We cannot easily correct our defects and weak points as they are dyed deeply within us. I have had bitter experience of this.
Hagakure (c. 1716)
Context: To give a person one's opinion and correct his faults is an important thing. It is compassionate and comes first in matters of service. But the way of doing this is extremely difficult. To discover the good and bad points of a person is an easy thing, and to give an opinion concerning them is easy, too. For the most part, people think that they are being kind by saying the things that others find distasteful or difficult to say. But if it is not received well, they think that there is nothing more to be done. This is completely worthless. It is the same as bringing shame to a person by slandering him. It is nothing more than getting it off one's chest.
To give a person an opinion one must first judge well whether that person is of the disposition to receive it or not. One must become close with him and make sure that he continually trusts one's word. Approaching subjects that are dear to him, seek the best way to speak and to be well understood. Judge the occasion, and determine whether it is better by letter or at the time of leave-taking. Praise his good points and use every device to encourage him, perhaps by talking about one's own faults without touching on his, but so that they will occur to him. Have him receive this in the way that a man would drink water when his throat is dry, and it will be an opinion that will correct faults.
This is extremely difficult. If a person's fault is a habit of some years prior, by and large it won't be remedied. I have had this experience myself. To be intimate with all one's comrades, correcting each other's faults, and being of one mind to be of use to the master is the great compassion of a retainer. By bringing shame to a person, how could one expect to make him a better man?

“Of course, one cannot represent all possible bargaining devices as moves in the non-cooperative game.”

John Nash (1928–2015) American mathematician and Nobel Prize laureate

"Non-cooperative Games" in Annals of Mathematics, Vol. 54, No. 2 (September 1951)
1950s
Context: We give two independent derivations of our solution of the two-person cooperative game. In the first, the cooperative game is reduced to a non-cooperative game. To do this, one makes the players’ steps of negotiation in the cooperative game become moves in the noncooperative model. Of course, one cannot represent all possible bargaining devices as moves in the non-cooperative game. The negotiation process must be formalized and restricted, but in such a way that each participant is still able to utilize all the essential strengths of his position. The second approach is by the axiomatic method. One states as axioms several properties that it would seem natural for the solution to have and then one discovers that the axioms actually determine the solution uniquely. The two approaches to the problem, via the negotiation model or via the axioms, are complementary; each helps to justify and clarify the other.

Game

“Now it is symptomatic of our rusty-beer-can type of sanity that our culture produces very few magical objects. Jewelry is slick and uninteresting. Architecture is almost totally bereft of exuberance, obsessed with erecting glass boxes. Children's books are written by serious ladies with three names and no imagination, and as for comics, have you ever looked at the furniture in Dagwood's home? The potentially magical ceremonies of the Catholic Church are either gabbled away at top speed, or rationalized with the aid of a commentator. Drama or ritual in everyday behavior is considered affectation and bad form, and manners have become indistinguishable from manerisms—where they exist at all. We produce nothing comparable to the great Oriental carpets, Persian glass, tiles, and illuminated books, Arabian leatherwork, Spanish marquetry, Hindu textiles, Chinese porcelain and embroidery, Japanese lacquer and brocade, French tapestries, or Inca jewelry. (Though, incidentally, there are certain rather small electronic devices that come unwittingly close to fine jewels.)
The reason is not just that we are too much in a hurry and have no sense of the present; not just that we cannot afford the type of labor that such things would now involve, nor just that we prefer money to materials. The reason is that we have scrubbed the world clean of magic. We have lost even the vision of paradise, so that our artists and craftsmen can no longer discern its forms. This is the price that must be paid for attempting to control the world from the standpoint of an "I" for whom everything that can be experienced is a foreign object and a nothing-but.”

Alan Watts (1915–1973) British philosopher, writer and speaker

Source: The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966), p. 84-85

Money , Children , Books , World

“The individual is fast disappearing as a business factor and in his stead is this new device, the modern corporation.”

Robert M. La Follette Sr. (1855–1925) American politician

“The Danger Threatening Representative Government” Speech (1897) http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/pdfs/lessons/EDU-SpeechTranscript-SpeechesLaFollette-DangerThreatening.pdf
Context: Since the birth of the Republic, indeed almost within the last generation, a new and powerful factor has taken its place in our business, financial and political world and is there exercising a tremendous influence. The existence of the corporation, as we have it with us today, was never dreamed of by the fathers…The corporation of today has invaded every department of business, and it’s powerful but invisible hand is felt in almost all activities of life. The effect of this change upon the American people is radical and rapid. The individual is fast disappearing as a business factor and in his stead is this new device, the modern corporation.

Business

“Machines which ape people are tending to encroach on every aspect of people's lives, and that such machines force people to behave like machines. The new electronic devices do indeed have the power to force people to "communicate" with them and with each other on the terms of the machine. Whatever structurally does not fit the logic of machines is effectively filtered from a culture dominated by their use.”

Ivan Illich (1926–2002) austrian philosopher and theologist

Silence is a Commons (1982)
Context: Machines which ape people are tending to encroach on every aspect of people's lives, and that such machines force people to behave like machines. The new electronic devices do indeed have the power to force people to "communicate" with them and with each other on the terms of the machine. Whatever structurally does not fit the logic of machines is effectively filtered from a culture dominated by their use.
The machine-like behaviour of people chained to electronics constitutes a degradation of their well-being and of their dignity which, for most people in the long run, becomes intolerable. Observations of the sickening effect of programmed environments show that people in them become indolent, impotent, narcissistic and apolitical. The political process breaks down, because people cease to be able to govern themselves; they demand to be managed.

People , Communication

“Such abundance of spoonmeat on the one hand, and such careful economy on the other of truths that may prove too strong for weak digestions! Such avowals of readiness to consider seriously any opinion, however obviously absurd, broached by a possible supporter! Such prompt denunciations of all the devices of an irreconcilable opponent!”

Leonard H. Courtney (1832–1918) British politician

To My Fellow-Disciples at Saratoga Springs (1895)
Context: What an education follows! It is really a fine comedy, though the players rarely know it. I am but a clumsy performer myself, and have to confess to incurable defects of training, so that I sometimes wonder I have not been hissed off the stage; still I have seen the performance through more than once or twice, and know something about it. Such tender and delicate adjustments and readjustments of convictions to keep the party balance sure! Such abundance of spoonmeat on the one hand, and such careful economy on the other of truths that may prove too strong for weak digestions! Such avowals of readiness to consider seriously any opinion, however obviously absurd, broached by a possible supporter! Such prompt denunciations of all the devices of an irreconcilable opponent!

Truth , Support , Strong

“Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and to coin one at random, memex will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.”

Vannevar Bush book As We May Think

As We May Think (1945)
Context: Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and to coin one at random, memex will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.
It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works. On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk.

Books , Communication , Memory , Future

“The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it.”

Vannevar Bush book As We May Think

As We May Think (1945)
Context: A spider web of metal, sealed in a thin glass container, a wire heated to brilliant glow, in short, the thermionic tube of radio sets, is made by the hundred million, tossed about in packages, plugged into sockets — and it works! Its gossamer parts, the precise location and alignment involved in its construction, would have occupied a master craftsman of the guild for months; now it is built for thirty cents. The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it.

Age , World

“Thou poisonest the fair design
Of nature, with unfair device.”

Lionel Johnson (1867–1902) English poet

The Dark Angel (1895)
Context: p>The ardour of red flame is thine,
And thine the steely soul of ice:
Thou poisonest the fair design
Of nature, with unfair device.Apples of ashes, golden bright;
Waters of bitterness, how sweet!
O banquet of a foul delight,
Prepared by thee, dark Paraclete!</p

Nature

“It is in silence, denial, evasion and suppression that danger really lies, not in open and free analysis and discussion … everywhere there seems to be a fear of reliance upon that ancient device so gloriously celebrated by John Milton three hundred years ago — the device of unlimited inquiry.”

Charles A. Beard (1874–1948) American historian

Address to the American Political Science Association at St. Louis, Missouri (29 December 1926), published as "Time, Technology, and the Creative Spirit in Political Science" in The American Political Science Review Vol. 21, Issue 1 (February 1927), p. 11
Context: What hope lies anywhere save in the widest freedom to inquire and expound — always with respect to the rights and opinions of others? As my friend, James Harvey Robinson, once remarked, the conservative who imagines that things will never change is always wrong; the radical is nearly always wrong too, but he does insure some slight risk of being right in his guess as to the direction of evolution. It is in silence, denial, evasion and suppression that danger really lies, not in open and free analysis and discussion … everywhere there seems to be a fear of reliance upon that ancient device so gloriously celebrated by John Milton three hundred years ago — the device of unlimited inquiry. Let us put aside resolutely that great fright, tenderly and without malice, daring to be wrong in something important rather than right in some meticulous banality, fearing no evil while the mind is free to search, imagine, and conclude, inviting our countrymen to try other instruments than coercion and suppression in the effort to meet destiny with triumph, genially suspecting that no creed yet calendared in the annals of politics mirrors the doomful possibilities of infinity.

Fear , Silence

“In a species as emotionally interdependent as man this view of marriage is nonsense. Pair-formation could never have entered anybody's head as a device deliberately designated to promote utility.”

Mary Midgley (1919–2018) British philosopher and ethicist

Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979).
Context: Speaking of an institution such as marriage as natural is, of course, paying it a compliment, the compliment of saying that it meets a fairly central human need. The fact that it is found in some form in every human society is in a way enough to show. But it might be thought that marriage became thus widespread only because it was, like adequate sanitation, a means to an end. This is pretty certainly what Hume thought, as evidenced by his very confused contrast of natural with artificial virtues. He regarded human sagacity simply as the power to calculate consequences, and counted chastity and fidelity, with justice, as artificial virtues, devices designed merely to produce safety and promote utility. In a species as emotionally interdependent as man this view of marriage is nonsense. Pair-formation could never have entered anybody's head as a device deliberately designated to promote utility.

Marriage

“The Theatre of the Absurd strives to express its sense of the senselessness of the human condition and the inadequacy of the rational approach by the open abandonment of rational devices and discursive thought.”

Martin Esslin (1918–2002) Playwright, theatre critic, scholar

Introduction : The absurdity of the Absurd
The Theatre of the Absurd (1961)
Context: The Theatre of the Absurd strives to express its sense of the senselessness of the human condition and the inadequacy of the rational approach by the open abandonment of rational devices and discursive thought. While Sartre or Camus express the new content in the old convention, the Theatre of the Absurd goes a step further in trying to achieve a unity between its basic assumptions and the form in which these are expressed. In some senses, the theatre of Sartre and Camus is less adequate as an expression of the philosophy of Sartre and Camus — in artistic, as distinct from philosophic, terms — than the Theatre of the Absurd.

Sense

“Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation”

Hans Arp (1886–1966) Alsatian, sculptor, painter, poet and abstract artist

quote in Arp on Arp: poems, essays, memories, Viking, 1972, p. 231
Attributed from posthumous publications
Context: Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation.... tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego. His anxiety subsides. His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a gray vegetation.

Life , Silence

“The rejection process is incorporated in the concept of the negative. The negative is a judgement device.”

Edward de Bono (1933) Maltese physician

Source: Lateral Thinking : Creativity Step by Step (1970), p. 159.
Context: The rejection process is incorporated in the concept of the negative. The negative is a judgement device. It is the means whereby one rejects certain arrangements of information. The negative is used to carry out judgement and to indicate rejection. The concept of the negative is crystallized into a definite language tool. This language tool consists of the words no and not. Once one learns the function and use of these words one has learned how to use logical thinking. The whole concept of logical thinking is concentrated in the use of this language tool. Logic could be said to be the management of NO.

“The remedy, it seems to me, is quite as absurd as all the other sure cures that Liberals advocate. When they argue for it, they simply argue, in words but little changed, that the remedy for prostitution is to fill the bawdyhouses with virgins. My impression is that this last device would accomplish very little: either the virgins would leap out of the windows, or they would cease to be virgins.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

1920s, Notes on Democracy (1926)
Context: Thus the ideal of democracy is reached at last: it has become a psychic impossibility for a gentleman to hold office under the Federal Union, save by a combination of miracles that must tax the resourcefulness even of God. The fact has been rammed home by a constitutional amendment: every office-holder, when he takes oath to support the Constitution, must swear on his honour that, summoned to the death-bed of his grandmother, he will not take the old lady a bottle of wine. He may say so and do it, which makes him a liar, or he may say so and not do it, which makes him a pig. But despite that grim dilemma there are still idealists, chiefly professional Liberals, who argue that it is the duty of a gentleman to go into politics—that there is a way out of the quagmire in that direction. The remedy, it seems to me, is quite as absurd as all the other sure cures that Liberals advocate. When they argue for it, they simply argue, in words but little changed, that the remedy for prostitution is to fill the bawdyhouses with virgins. My impression is that this last device would accomplish very little: either the virgins would leap out of the windows, or they would cease to be virgins.

Change

“This is a nightmare, which will pass away with the morning. For the resources of nature and men's devices are just as fertile and productive as they were. The rate of our progress towards solving the material problems of life is not less rapid.”

John Maynard Keynes book Essays in Persuasion

Referring to economics and the Great Depression
Essays in Persuasion (1931), The Great Slump of 1930 (1930)
Context: This is a nightmare, which will pass away with the morning. For the resources of nature and men's devices are just as fertile and productive as they were. The rate of our progress towards solving the material problems of life is not less rapid. We are as capable as before of affording for everyone a high standard of life … and will soon learn to afford a standard higher still. We were not previously deceived. But to-day we have involved ourselves in a colossal muddle, having blundered in the control of a delicate machine, the working of which we do not understand. The result is that our possibilities of wealth may run to waste for a time — perhaps for a long time.

Life , Men , Nature , Problem

“Metaphors in law are to be narrowly watched, for starting as devices to liberate thought, they end often by enslaving it.”

Benjamin N. Cardozo (1870–1938) United States federal judge

Berkey v. Third Avenue Railway, 244 N.Y. 84, 94, 155 N.E. 58, 61 (N.Y. 1926). Sometimes misquoted as referring to "figures of speech" rather than metaphors, or with other minor variations.
Judicial opinions
Context: The whole problem of the relation between parent and subsidiary corporations is one that is still enveloped in the mists of metaphor. Metaphors in law are to be narrowly watched, for starting as devices to liberate thought, they end often by enslaving it. We say at times that the corporate entity will be ignored when the parent corporation operates a business through a subsidiary which is characterized as an 'alias' or a 'dummy.'... Dominion may be so complete, interference so obtrusive, that by the general rules of agency the parent will be a principal and the subsidiary an agent.

Law

“Necessity when threatening is more powerful than device of man.”
Efficacior omni arte imminens necessitas.

Quintus Curtius Rufus Roman historian

IV, 3, 23.
Historiarum Alexandri Magni Macedonis Libri Qui Supersunt, Book IV

“It’s a perfect set of circumstances to give us the time Yeats foretold, with the best having lost all conviction and the worst full of passionate intensity. I’m an optimist. In order to be libertarian, you have to be an optimist. You have to have a benign view of human nature, to believe that human beings left to their own devices are basically good.”

John Perry Barlow (1947–2018) American poet and essayist

John Perry Barlow 2.0 (2004)
Context: It’s a perfect set of circumstances to give us the time Yeats foretold, with the best having lost all conviction and the worst full of passionate intensity. I’m an optimist. In order to be libertarian, you have to be an optimist. You have to have a benign view of human nature, to believe that human beings left to their own devices are basically good. But I’m not so sure about human institutions, and I think the real point of argument here is whether or not large corporations are human institutions or some other entity we need to be thinking about curtailing. Most libertarians are worried about government but not worried about business. I think we need to be worrying about business in exactly the same way we are worrying about government.

Nature , Passion , Time , Perfection

“And that’s why I don’t like putting on-off switches on Apple devices.”

Steve Jobs (1955–2011) American entrepreneur and co-founder of Apple Inc.

Quoted by his biographer, Walter Isaacson http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/steve-jobs-in-the-end-he-didnt-like-the-off-switch/61586?tag=nl.e589
2010s
Context: Sometimes I believe in God, sometimes I don’t. I think it’s 50-50 maybe. But ever since I’ve had cancer, I’ve been thinking about it more. And I find myself believing a bit more. I kind of – maybe it’s ’cause I want to believe in an afterlife. That when you die, it doesn’t just all disappear. The wisdom you’ve accumulated. Somehow it lives on, but sometimes I think it’s just like an on-off switch. Click and you’re gone. And that’s why I don’t like putting on-off switches on Apple devices.

“No bomb was set off, no missile was fired, no weapon (i.e., a device that was solely and specifically manufactured to kill humans) was used. A boxcutter! — I can't stop thinking about this. A thousand gun control laws would not have prevented this massacre.”

Michael Moore (1954) American filmmaker, author, social critic, and liberal activist

In response to the September 11 attacks on New York City
2001
Context: I can't even think about this movie. I don't WANT to think about it because if I think about it I will have to face an ugly truth that has been gnawing through my head...
This started out as a documentary on gun violence in America, but the largest mass murder in our history was just committed — without the use of a single gun! Not a single bullet fired! No bomb was set off, no missile was fired, no weapon (i. e., a device that was solely and specifically manufactured to kill humans) was used. A boxcutter! — I can't stop thinking about this. A thousand gun control laws would not have prevented this massacre. What am I doing?

Law , Thinking

“Modern philosophy, an element due to which the surrounding reality and even the psychology of people are changing. The first ray of light in the kingdom of darkness was the Internet, after a smartphone was proved that a small device the size of a palm can completely replace the TV and computer. All people in the older generation remained alive in television manipulations, not wanting to join in the innovations. 50 years ago, smartphones and the Internet were just sketches of dreamers, as 200 years ago dreamers dreamed of flying ships, which we now call planes, but dreams became reality and now a new dreamer with a Japanese name plans to destroy the main pillar of the monopoly of world-owned corporations by creating an alternative currency .”

Maxim Mernes (1996) Russian businessman, investor, blogger

About the state and technology
Source: Экономика Цифровой Эры, LiveLib, ru, 2019-11-21 https://www.livelib.ru/author/1229982-maksim-mernes,

Light , Dreams , People , Reality

“Characters, even though they’re minor, shouldn’t be a device. No person should be a device to move the plot along. That’s when you run into problems with stereotypes. I strive, in my journalism and my fiction, to make characters as complex and complicated as they are in real life…”

Vanessa Hua American journalist and writer

On how she writes characters in “Motherhood and Migration: An Interview with Vanessa Hua on ‘A River of Stars’” https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/motherhood-and-migration-an-interview-with-vanessa-hua-on-a-river-of-stars/ in Los Angeles Review of Books (2018 Sep 13)

Personality , Problem , Making love , Life

“As every minister knows, a prayer is a superb device for airing an opinion.”

Marion L. Starkey (1901–1991) American historian & writer

Source: The Devil in Massachusetts: A Modern Enquiry into the Salem Witch Trials (1949), Chapter 5, “Gospel Witch” (p. 72)