Clock Quotes

“I had a dream about you last night... if atomic clocks are synced up to a satellite to keep their time accurate, where does the satellite get its time? Is there a chain of atomic clocks setting time for other atomic clocks?”

“The Lord made no better clock than a child, and none more bitter. Oh, what beautiful clocks they are.”

“The Clock on the Morning Lenape BuildingMust Clocks be circles?Time is not a circle.Suppose the Mother of All Minutes startedright here, on the sidewalkin front of the Morning Lenape Building, and the paradeof minutes that followed--each of them, say, one inch long--headed out that way, down Bridge Street.Where would Now be? This minute?Out past the moon?Jupiter?The nearest star?Who came up with minutes, anyway?Who needs them?Name one good thing a minute's ever done.They shorten fun and measure misery.Get rid of them, I say.Down with minutes!And while you're at it--take hourswith you too. Don't get me startedon them.Clocks--that's the problem.Every clock is a nest of minutes and hours.Clocks strap us into their shape.Instead of heading for the nearest star, all we dois corkscrew.Clocks lock us into minutes, make Ferris wheel riders of us all, lug us round and roundfrom number to number,dice the time of our lives into tiny bitsuntil the bits are all we knowand the only question we care to ask is"What time is it?"As if minutes could tell.As if Arnold could look up at this clock onthe Lenape Building and read:15 Minutes till Found.As if Charlie's time is not forever stuckon Half Past Grace.As if a swarm of stinging minutes waits for Betty Lou to step outside.As if love does not tell all the time the Huffelmeyersneed to know.”

“The mechanical clock was self-contained, and once horologists learned to drive it by means of a coiled spring rather than a falling weight, it could be miniaturized so as to be portable, whether in the household or on the person. It was this possibility of widespread private use that laid the basis for 'time discipline,' as against 'time obedience.' One can ... use public clocks to simon people for one purpose or another; but that is not punctuality. Punctuality comes from within, not from without. It is the mechanical clock that made possible, for better or worse, a civilization attentive to the passage of time, hence to productivity and performance.”

“Mathematicians call it “the arithmetic of congruences.” You can think of it as clock arithmetic. Temporarily replace the 12 on a clock face with 0. The 12 hours of the clock now read 0, 1, 2, 3, … up to 11. If the time is eight o’clock, and you add 9 hours, what do you get? Well, you get five o’clock. So in this arithmetic, 8 + 9 = 5; or, as mathematicians say, 8 + 9 ≡ 5 (mod 12), pronounced “eight plus nine is congruent to five, modulo twelve.”

“I collect travel alarm clocks. I was in a flea market in France once, in 1994, and I opened up this beautiful Jaeger-LeCoultre folding eight-day winding clock folded into a beautiful case, and I went, 'Wow, man.' And I've been collecting travel alarm clocks since 1994.”

“The time would not pass. Somebody was playing with the clocks, and not only the electronic clocks but the wind-up kind too. The second hand on my watch would twitch once, and a year would pass, and then it would twitch again.There was nothing I could do about it. As an Earthling I had to believe whatever clocks said -and calendars.”

“The hours of folly are measured by the clock; but of wisdom, no clock can measure.”

“The invention of the mechanical clock was one of a number of major advances that turned Europe from a weak, peripheral, highly vulnerable outpost of Mediterranean civilization into a hegemonic aggressor.”

“Let us crush these so-called biological clocks that give us nothing but fear, and encourage us to make stupid decisions. Let us crush these biological clocks that hurt us and rob us of the fabulous lives that Jesus died to give us. These clocks that not only hurt us, but hurt many generations after us.It is time. We need you.”