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“Your angel cannot protect you against that which neither god nor the devil had made”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Angel

“Time can play all sorts of tricks on you. In the blink of an eye, babies appear in carriages, coffins disappear into the ground, wars are won and lost, and children transform, like butterflies, into adults. That's what happened to me. Once upon a time, I was a boy named Hugo Cabret, and I desperately believed that a broken automaton would save my life. Now that my cocoon has fallen away and I have emerged as a magician named Professor Alcofrisbas, I can look back and see that I was right. The automaton my father discovered did save me. But now I have built a new automaton. I spent countless hours designing it. I made every gear myself, carefully cut every brass disk, and fashioned every bt of machinery with my own hands. When you wind it up, it can do something I'm sure no other automaton in the world can do. It can tel you the incredible story of Georges Melies, his wife, their goddaughter, and a beloved clock maker whose son grew up to be a magician. The complicated machinery inside my automaton can produce one-hundred and fifty-eight different pictures, and it can wrote, letter, by letter, an entire book, twenty-six thousand one hundred and fifty-nine words. These words.

THE END”
― Brian Selznick, The Invention of Hugo Cabret

“Casting a curious gaze down on planet Earth, extra-terrestrial beings could well be forgiven for assuming that we humans are programmed in every move we make, by a palm-sized, oblong, slab of glass. More perplexing than that, who on earth could convince them otherwise ?”
― Alex Morritt, Impromptu Scribe

“We are automata entirely controlled by the forces of the medium being tossed about like corks on the surface of the water, but mistaking the resultant of the impulses from the outside for free will. The movements and other actions we perform are always life preservative and tho seemingly quite independent from one another, we are connected by invisible links”
― Nikola Tesla, My Inventions

“Much, much later. when I am back home and being treated for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). I will be enabled to see what was going on in my mind immediately after 11 August.

I am still capable of operating mechanically as a soldier in these following days. But operating mechanically as a soldier is now all I am capable of.

Martin says he is worried about me. He says I have the thousand-yard stare'.

Of course, I cannot see this stare. But by now we both have more than an idea what it means.

So, among all the soldiers here, this is nothing to be ashamed of. But as it really does just go with the territory we find ourselves in. it is just as equally not a badge of honour.

Martin is seasoned enough to never even think this. but I know of young men back home, sitting in front of war films and war games, who idolise this condition as some kind of mark of a true warrior. But from where I sit, if indeed I do have this stare, this pathetically naive thinking is a crock of shit. Because only some pathetically naive soul who had never felt this nothingness would say something so fucking dumb.

You are no longer human, with all those depths and highs and nuances of emotion that define you as a person.
There is no feeling any more, because to feel any emotion would also be to beckon the overwhelming blackness from you. My mind has now locked all this down. And without any control of this self-defence mechanism my subconscious has operated. I do not feel any more.

But when I close my eyes. I see the dead Taliban looking into this blackness. And I see the Afghan soldier's face staring into it, singing gently as he slips into another world. And I see Dave Hicks's face. shaking gently as he tries to stay awake in this one.

With this, I lift myself up, sitting foetal and hugging my knees on my sleeping mat.”
― Jake Wood, Among You: The Extraordinary True Story of a Soldier Broken By War

“But the biggest clue seemed to be their expressions. They were hard to explain. Good-natured, friendly, easygoing...and uninvolved. They were like spectators. You had the feeling they had just wandered in there themselves and somebody had handed them a wrench. There was no identification with the job. No saying, "I am a mechanic." At 5 P.M. or whenever their eight hours were in, you knew they would cut it off and not have another thought about their work. They were already trying not to have any thoughts about their work on the job.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

“In totalitarian countries, where belief in Pavlovlian strategy has assumed grotesque proportions, the self-thinking, subjective man has disappeared. There is an utter rejection of any attempt at persuasion or discussion. Individual self-expression is taboo. Private affection is taboo.

Peaceful exchange of free thoughts in free conversation will disturb the conditioned reflexes and is therefore taboo. No longer are there any brains, only conditioned patters and educated muscles. In such a taming system neurotic compulsion is looked upon as a positive asset instead of something pathological. The mental automato becomes the ideal of education.”
― Joost A.M. Meerloo

“In telling a story one of the most successful devices for easily creating uncanny effects is to leave the reader in uncertainty whether a particular figure in the story is a human being or an automaton and to do it in such a way that his attention is not focused directly upon his uncertainty, so that he may not be led to go into the matter and clear it up immediately.”
― Ernst Jentsch, Zur Psychologie des Unheimlichen

“I can't get over the fact that Descartes compared the human body to a machine or an automaton."

"The comparison was based on the fact that people in his time were deeply fascinated by machines and the workings of clocks, which appeared to have the ability to function of their own accord. The word 'automaton' means precisely that -- something that moves of its own accord. It was obviously only an illusion that they moved of their own accord. An astronomical clock, for instance, is both constructed and wound up by human hands. Descartes made a point of the fact that ingenious inventions of that kind were actually assembled very simply from a relatively small number of parts compared with the vast number of bones, muscles, nerves, veins and arteries that the human and the animal body consists of. Why should God not be able to make an animal or a human body based on mechanical laws?"
"Nowadays there is a lot of talk about 'artificial intelligence'."
"Yes, that is the automaton of our time...”
― Jostein Gaarder, Sophie’s World

“If literature were nothing more than verbal algebra, anyone could produce any book by essaying variations. The lapidary formula 'Everything flows' abbreviates in two words the philosophy of Heraclitus: Raymond Lully would say that, with the first word given, it would be sufficient to essay the intransitive verbs to discover the second and obtain, thanks to methodical chance, that philosophy and many others. Here it is fitting to reply that the formula obtained by this process of elimination would lack all value and even meaning; for it to have some virtue we must conceive it in terms of Heraclitus, in terms of an experience of Heraclitus, even though 'Heraclitus is nothing more than the presumed subject of that experience. I have said that a book is a dialogue, a form of relationship; in a dialogue, an interlocutor is not the sum or average of what he says: he may not speak and still reveal that he is intelligent, he may emit intelligent observations and reveal his stupidity. The same happens with literature; d'Artagnan executes innumerable feats and Don Quixote is beaten and ridiculed, but one feels the valour of Don Quixote more.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings

“National and racial prejudices are acted out unwittingly. Group hatred often bursts out almost automatically when triggered by slogans and catchwords.”
― Joost A.M. Meerloo

“Dogs can be trained to be civilized & dutiful, but they can't be coerced into repressing their unique personalities, as can many human beings who will remake themselves into automatons & enchain their own souls in the name of one ideology or another.”
― Dean Koontz, The Forest of Lost Souls

“What was it like to live amidst such machines, to be familiar with them, to have them shape one's earliest intuitions about machinery: how it works, what it does, how it compares to living creatures?”
― Jessica Riskin, The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick

“I'm hardly looking to marry an automaton."
"But it would be convenient, wouldn't it?" Cassandra mused, coming to stand just a foot or two away from him. "A mechanical wife would never annoy or inconvenience you," she continued. "No love required on either side. And even with the expense of minor repairs and maintenance, she would be quite cost-effective.”
― Lisa Kleypas, Chasing Cassandra

“Lady Devanagari, with your beauty nothing can compare—not even the lotus bloom found in the outer clusters.â€� From behind his back, he presents one such flower to the giant automaton. With coy playfulness she waves her hand as if cooling her blushing face, having turned a Jovian red. Then, always in change, her exquisite complexion reverts to its natural sky blue...”
― J.L. Haynes, Zara Hanson & The Mystery of the Painted Symbol

“Port watched, fascinated as always by the sight of a human being brought down to the importance of an automaton or a caricature. By whatever circumstances and in whatever manner reduced, whether ludicrous or horrible, such persons delighted him.”
― Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky