A Quote by Yukio Mishima

a samurai is a total human being, whereas a man who is completely absorbed in his technical skill has degenerated into a ‘function’, one cog in a machine.

Yukio Mishima

Quote Topics

Being Cog Function His Human Human Being Machine Man Samurai Skill Technical Total Whereas

Quote Author

Yukio Mishima
Japanese - Author
January 14, 1925 - November 25, 1970

Alienation as we find it in modern society is almost total… Man has created a world of man-made things as it never existed before. He has constructed a complicated social machine to administer the technical machine he built. The more powerful and gigantic the forces are which he unleashes, the more powerless he feels himself as a human being. He is owned by his creations, and has lost ownership of himself.

Erich Fromm

The HMI (human-machine interface) function inside a Ferrari is probably the weakest link in the chain of technical know-how that's embodied in the car.

Sergio Marchionne

If we have a purpose in life beyond being a cog in the human machine, mine is to help inspire people and that's pretty cool. I would like to motivate the world.

Steve Gleason

Without writing, what would I have become? Nothing. In China the individual used to be treated as a screw or a small cog in the revolutionary machine. I wanted to be a human being with a voice.

Ha Jin

Mental bearing (calmness), not skill, is the sign of a matured samurai. A Samurai therefore should neither be pompous nor arrogant.

Tsukahara Bokuden

A man with a machine may murder or enslave millions, whereas it used to take at least thousands to murder millions. And the man behind the machine has nothing on his conscience.

Frank Lloyd Wright

Faith as ultimate concern is an act of the total personality. It happens in the center of the personal life and includes all its elements. Faith is the most centered act of the human mind. It is not a movement of a special section or a special function of man's total being. They all are united in the act of faith.

Paul Tillich

It is beneath human dignity to lose one's individuality and become a mere cog in the machine.

Mahatma Gandhi

In our profession someone can be very brilliant and acquire total technical mastery. Yet in the last resort, the only thing that really counts is his quality as a human being. For music is created by Man for Man. And if someone sees nothing more than notes in it, this can perhaps be very interesting, but it cannot enrich him. And music should exist for one purpose only; to enrich Man and give him something he has lost in most respects.

Herbert von Karajan

A man can add to his sexuality by being funny, whereas a woman can diminish hers. I don't know why that's the case: it's completely unfair.

Ronnie Corbett

He shook his head, absorbed in one of his feats of memory, those brief periods of scholastic rapture where he lost touch with the world around him, absorbed completely in conjuring up knowledge from all its sources.

Diana Gabaldon

If all individuals were conditioned to machine efficiency in the performance of their duties there would have to be at least one person outside the machine to give the necessary orders; if the machine absorbed or eliminated all those outside the machine, the machine will slow down and stop forever.

William S. Burroughs

The function of the machine is to liberate man from brute burdens, and release his energies to the building of his intellectual and spiritual powers for conquests in the fields of thought and higher action.

Henry Ford

Speed is the form of ecstasy the technical revolution has bestowed on man. As opposed to a motorcyclist, the runner is always present in his body, forever required to think about his blisters, his exhaustion; when he runs he feels his weight, his age, more conscious than ever of himself and of his time of life. This all changes when man delegates the faculty of speed to a machine: from then on, his own body is outside the process, and he gives over to a speed that is noncorporeal, nonmaterial, pure speed, speed itself, ecstasy speed.

Milan Kundera

In the future it's very possible you could have an artificial intelligence system that can run the country better than a human being. Because human beings are naturally selfish. Human beings are naturally after their own interests. We are geared towards pursuing our own desires, but oftentimes, those desires have contrasts to the benefit of society, at large, or against the benefit of the greater good. Whereas, if you have a machine, you will be able to program that machine to, hopefully, benefit the greatest good, and really go after that.