Cog Quotes

“Humans are often credited with having real foresight, in distinction to the rest of biology which does not. For example, Dawkins compares the 'blind watchmaker' of natural selection with the real human one. 'A true watchmaker has foresight: he designs his cogs and springs, and plans their interconnections, with a future purpose in his mind's eye. Natural selection . . . has no purpose in mind'.I think this distinction is wrong. There is no denying that the human watchmaker is different from the natural one. We humans, by virtue of having memes, can think about cogs, and wheels, and keeping time, in a way that animals cannot. Memes are the mind tools with which we do it. But what memetics shows us is that the processes underlying the two kinds of design are essentially the same. They are both evolutionary processes that give rise to design through selection, and in the process they produce what looks like foresight.”

“You pretend to be more eccentric than you actually are because you fear you are an interchangeable cog.”

“Koji pulled Ruben onto the next cog. Together, they became part of the space between things.”

“The only thing of value on this earth is that each of us is an individual and not a cog in a machine. No man is better than another because of circumstance or fortune, but each important to his own.”

“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.”

“Man does not suffer so much from poverty today as he suffers from the fact that he has become a cog in a large machine, an automaton, that his life has become empty and lost its meaning.”

“Communication is a continual balancing act, juggling the conflicting needs for intimacy and independence. To survive in the world, we have to act in concert with others, but to survive as ourselves, rather than simply as cogs in a wheel, we have to act alone.”

“Communication is a continual balancing act juggling the conflicting needs for intimacy and independence. To survive in the world we have to act in concert with others but to survive as ourselves rather than simply as cogs in a wheel we have to act alone.”

“Most of us, at some time or other, get sucked into the lifeless vacuum of work; the cogs of the corporate machine that we keep turning until one day, when we depart this Earth, we may earn the word ‘lubricant’ on our headstone.”