"Machine-like" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... he was so near the town, that he was surprised to have come upon no inner line of sentries. Even as he wondered, he emerged from a copse into a field, and received the usual challenge—spoken this time in so quick, machine-like a manner, and accompanied by so prompt and precise a levelling of the musket, that he knew 'twas a British regular he had to ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... Centralization and freedom must everywhere coexist, and be equally operative. Conservatism is as important to society as progress. Conservatism overbalancing progress, destroys society by stagnation, blotting out the individuality of the person and moulding men into machine-like uniformity; progress preponderating over conservatism, destroys the community by disrupting bands of association before new methods are sufficiently understood, and giving reins to a liberty whose untutored use can end only in anarchy and unbridled license. Conservatism and progress, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... system of education we may greatly increase the difference in people—Socialism would not hinder it. A higher average level of income—which is what Socialism ensures, will give people a chance to differ more than they do now. Our machine-like educational system, long hours of labor, specialized monotony of mill work, and "the iron law of wages" do tend to reduce us to a ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... complicated movements so thoroughly automatic that they will be gone through with accurately and precisely, at the word of command. It means the sort of discipline that makes certain activities machine-like in their operation,—so that we do not have to think about which one comes next. Thus the mind is relieved of the burden of looking after the innumerable details and may use its precious energy for a ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... were excited. Kingozi passed them rapidly in review. But when Chake came forward, he paused in the machine-like regularity of ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... time in many years, his days were full of work and, asleep, awake, or at work, his hours were clock-like and steadied him into machine-like regularity. It was work of his hands, to be sure, and not even high work of that kind, but still it was work. And the measure of the self-respect that this fact alone brought him was worth it all. Already, his mind was taking character from ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... jackets. The outsiders, nervous and overeager, were making their bids for the purse, and making them too soon. The flurry toward the front brought about a momentary spurt in the pace followed immediately by the steady, machine-like advance of Regulator, but as the chestnut horse moved up the brown mare went with him, on ...
— Old Man Curry - Race Track Stories • Charles E. (Charles Emmett) Van Loan
... and could think of nothing to say. I was a little abashed, notwithstanding the tone of haughty indifference I took. I began to feel very young before this machine-like impersonation of ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott
... The machine-like accuracy of many of the frog's actions gives a basis for the belief that the animal is merely an automaton. Certain it is that one is safe in calling almost all the frog's actions reflex or instinctive. During months of study of the reaction-time of the frog I was constantly impressed with ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... his awkward squad. Under his influence privates learned how to obey and officers how to command; each individual merged the sense of individuality in that of homogeneousness and cohesion, until the original loose association of units became one grand unit endowed with the solidarity and machine-like quality of an efficient army. Patient labor produced a result so excellent that General Meade said long afterward: "Had there been no McClellan there could have been no Grant, for the army made no essential improvement ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... now ceased as suddenly as it had begun. There was a coming and going of officers and some consultation in an undertone. The judge left the room and the impassive-faced Javert began that machine-like writing. After a while ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... him with machine-like accuracy. "Yes, sir, I deceived you. But my business was urgent nevertheless. That ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... stood looking at her meekly. She leapt to him, and he shot off, as she arrived upon, the place where he had been. Perhaps she knew that only a genet, or a mongoose, could do that trick in a manner at once so machine-like and precise; and after that she merely sat, bent in a curve, with her lips up. But her spring had given her away, and he saw that she was lame. Perhaps he saw, too, the gleam of hunger, the wild, cruel gleam that forgets all else, in her eyes; but who ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... a mechanical device to wind up and set going, the artistic results of which it is capable never would have been obtained, and, I may add, this book never would have been written. The fact that artistic expression instead of machine-like precision has been its aim is what has caused its possibilities as a musical instrument to appeal to me. It cannot be sufficiently urged that in this country, as in every other, there is an immense amount of latent ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... poorly served, it was figured that it would be six weeks before the Russian army would be ready to fight anybody. Germany, on the other hand, with her wonderful system of government-owned railroads, and the machine-like organization of her army, could launch her forces across the frontier at two days' notice. As soon as the Germans began to hear that the Russians were mobilizing their troops against Austria, Germany set in motion the rapid machinery for gathering her own army. She sent a sharp message to Russia, ...
— The World War and What was Behind It - The Story of the Map of Europe • Louis P. Benezet
... again into the corral on blindfolded Charger. Again he dragged Silvermane out on the level and drove him up and down with remorseless, machine-like persistence. At noon he took him back, tied him up, and roped him fast. Silvermane tried to rear and kick, but the saddle went on, strapped with a flash of the dark-skinned hands. Then again Silvermane ran the level stretch beside ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... make one or two superficial changes and slightly increase the number of troops, while leaving the all-important matter of organisation almost untouched; and that, too, despite the vivid contrast which every one could see between the machine-like regularity of the German mobilisation and the chaos that reigned on ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... of the red squirrel are quick, sharp, jerky, machine-like. He does nothing slowly or gently; everything with a snap and a jerk. His progression is a series of interrupted sallies. When he pauses on the stone wall he faces this way and that with a sudden jerk; he turns round in two or three quick leaps. So abrupt and automatic ...
— The Wit of a Duck and Other Papers • John Burroughs
... were abroad that night. Faintly audible to the apothecary of the rue Royale through that deserted stillness which is yet the marked peculiarity of New Orleans streets by night, came from a neighboring slave-yard the monotonous chant and machine-like tune-beat of an African dance. There our lately met marchande (albeit she was but a guest, fortified against the street-watch with her master's written "pass") led the ancient Calinda dance with that well-known song of derision, in ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... checked. The results of the examination of each microscopic slide were carefully noted. They worked with machine-like precision. Jimmy could understand now why Matthews was rapidly attaining a reputation as a scientist second only to his beloved chief. Gone now was the habitual good humored grin with which Matthews treated most things and people. Neither ...
— Death Points a Finger • Will Levinrew
... East Anglians, this seems sheer nonsense. I have tried to understand how Germans arrive at it, and I believe it is by way of our cans of hot water brought at regular intervals every day in the year in every British household. I remember that their machine-like precision impressed M. Taine when he was in England, and certainly miss them sadly while we are abroad. Gretchen brings you no hot water unless you ask for it; but she will brush your clothes as a matter of course, though she does all the work of the ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... Pre-raphaelite School came into being the art of other lands as well as that of England was in need of an awakening impulse, and the Pre-raphaelite revolt against conventionality and the machine-like art of the period roused such interest, criticism, and opposition as to stimulate English art to new effort, and much of its progress in the last half-century is doubtless due to the discussions of the theories of this movement as well as ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... attention to the infantry, which, firing with machine-like precision and accuracy, dealt havoc to the ranks of the Russian horsemen ...
— The Boy Allies with the Cossacks - Or, A Wild Dash over the Carpathians • Clair W. Hayes
... small, and then suddenly starting asunder as if in astonished anger, with a portentous hiss, you might have taken him for an automaton moved by springs, and imitating human actions in a very wonderful manner—so regular and machine-like were his motions, and so little did he seem to think about what he was at. A little passing attention, a hint now and then from his head, was sufficient to keep his hands right, for they were so used to their work, and had been so well taught by his head, that they ...
— Gutta-Percha Willie • George MacDonald
... roostwards with machine-like synchronism of flight; geese wheel down in more or less regular formation; but these herons concentrated along straight lines, each describing its individual radius from the spot where it caught its last fish or shrimp to its nest or ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... give the prisoner a form shaped by his own fancy and a grief proportioned to his own power of suffering. How we long to pierce the thoughts and feel the heart-beats and watch the trickling tears behind that machine-like exterior, that impassible mask! Our imagination is powerfully excited by the dumbness of that fate borne by one whose words never reached the outward air, whose thoughts could never be read on the hidden features; by the isolation of forty ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... experience it most strongly when we are shown the soul TANTALISED by the needs of the body: on the one hand, the moral personality with its intelligently varied energy, and, on the other, the stupidly monotonous body, perpetually obstructing everything with its machine-like obstinacy. The more paltry and uniformly repeated these claims of the body, the more striking will be the result. But that is only a matter of degree, and the general law of these phenomena may be formulated ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... rise at the end of a stroke, and fall as they commenced delivery of another. Their action was quick, steady, machine-like; they gripped the water deep, and made no slips; with a thought of the exhilaration an eagle must feel when swooping from his eyrie, the Prince looked at the cloud defiantly as a challenger might. Each moment the donjon loomed up more ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... Barclay used to ask himself, and at other times, "When shall I wake?" for he often persuaded himself that this was the troubled dream of a bad attack of fever, from which he would awaken some day quite in his right mind. Meanwhile, growing every hour more machine-like, he worked on and on always as ...
— Begumbagh - A Tale of the Indian Mutiny • George Manville Fenn
... was surprised at his odd, machine-like accuracy, but Haviland only laughed a little chuckle and Chrysler's glance was drawn away towards a figure entering the gate, walking abstractedly, his hands in his hip pockets and eyes on the path. He was of slender but agile person, ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... a single flap and no quiver of wing the osprey rights itself and sails away (a methodic, unflurried flight) with fleeter white-belly in pursuit, which when within striking distance swoops again, to be faced by the grim, outstretched talons of the osprey, who has turned in flight with machine-like precision. So swift and sudden is the discreet upward swoop of the white-belly that it almost appears to be a rebound after contact with the bigger bird. So the scrimmage, or, to be exact, screamage, proceeds, for each party to it tells the whole Island of its valour, and business ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... new printer at the case in the Advance office the following morning, one of those who constantly drifted in and out of that exciting nowhere into which they so lightly disappeared by whim; a gaunt, silent man, almost wholly deaf, who stood in Dave Cowan's place and set type with machine-like accuracy or distributed it with loose-fingered nimbleness, seizing many types at a time and scattering them to their boxes with the apparent abandon of a sower strewing seed. He, too, was but a transient, wherever he might be found, but he had no talk of ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... end of the week came the regular check with a note from Garvey—less machine-like, more human. He apologized for not having called, said one thing and another had prevented, and now illness of a near relative compelled him to leave town for a few days, but as soon as he came back he would immediately call. It seemed to Susan that there could be but one reason why ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... the man. He said the words "I killed him," so quietly, in so matter of fact a way, that for the moment I was breathless. Like most other men, I had never sat face to face with one who had taken the life of another. Even soldiers, though they, we suppose, kill men, do it in a machine-like way. The killing is impersonal. The soldier handles the machine and it is the machine that kills. The individual soldier does not know whether he kills or not. That is why we are able to make much of the soldier, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... mile after mile with a steadiness that he had reduced to machine-like motion. He had timed himself, and the whole course was mentally charted for his guidance. If he reached the cut-off road at a certain time he would know things were moving just as swiftly as necessary. Those boys who ...
— The Chums of Scranton High on the Cinder Path • Donald Ferguson
... in such an atmosphere is bliss. One does not seem to breathe, as at home, machine-like, just what is necessary for the maintenance of life, but, exhilarated with the pureness and freshness, one drinks in long breaths of pleasure. It would be difficult to give an idea of the charm of our morning and evening rambles—the delicious shade, the beautiful light and shadow, the sweet wafts ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... in all England who, arriving at Crawshaws, would not have been gently but firmly enfolded by the machine-like order of its perfect administration and been led in and introduced with rites proper to the occasion. But that one person was the Reverend Cyril Boom Bagshaw, and he now strolled across the threshold and ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... authority remained, the last will and testament of Anthony Seagrave had provided a marvellous, man-created substitute for the dead: a vast, shadowy thing which ruled their lives with passionless precision; which ordered their waking hours even to the minutest particulars; which assumed machine-like charge of their persons, their personal expenses, their bringing-up, their schooling, the items of their ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... to the conditions of American life than that of the contemporary French philosopher Bergson. Bergson insists throughout his brilliant little book on Laughter that laughter is a social function. Life demands elasticity. Hence whatever is stiff, automatic, machine-like, excites a smile. We laugh when a person gives us the impression of being a thing,—a sort of mechanical toy. Every inadaptation of the individual to society is potentially comic. Thus laughter becomes a social initiation. It is a kind of hazing which we visit upon one another. But we do not ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... what life in the Departments is without my telling you. But to me it isn't monotonous or machine-like. I am awfully interested in the people. Of course my immediate work is with the nice old Chief. I'm glad he is old, and gray-haired. It makes me feel comfortable and chaperoned. Do you know that I believe the reason that most girls hate to go out to work is because of the loss of protection. You ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... nearly identical. The Jewish women and girls represent a formidable element to contend with, as they are now coming over in great numbers, and the question has so organized itself that each falls almost at once into her own place, and works with machine-like regularity and efficiency. ...
— Prisoners of Poverty Abroad • Helen Campbell
... and hastily framed bills for which no one is definitely responsible. It is supposed to be the duty of all legislators to weed out bills which are poorly framed, or which are designed to promote special interests. But in this case everybody's business becomes nobody's business. Such machine-like formalities as repeated readings of a bill, and a series of committee reports upon it, are generally substituted for individual scrutiny of ...
— Problems in American Democracy • Thames Ross Williamson
... wood is placed on two high tressels, and a couple of sawyers, one of whom stands aloft on the timber itself, while the other underneath is half blinded by the falling sawdust, work a large saw to and fro for hours together, with rigid machine-like regularity, as if they were wire-pulled puppets. The wood they saw is stacked, plank by plank, along the wall at the end, in carefully arranged piles six or eight feet high, which often remain there several seasons, and constitute one of the charms of the Aire Saint-Mittre. Between these ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... from talking himself over, she was secretly surprised at the patience, even the interest, with which he listened to her. She would have been still more surprised to know that his wonderful memory was nailing down every word with machine-like accuracy. ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... dreamed that it was possible for our troops to move with such machine-like precision as to hold every nek at our mercy. But whilst Rundle held the ground to the south, and kept the Boers for ever on the move by his restless activity, Clements and Paget moved on Slabbert's Nek, Hunter ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... thus compelled to recognize that within even the most social group there are many relations which are not as yet social. A large number of human relationships in any social group are still upon the machine-like plane. Individuals use one another so as to get desired results, without reference to the emotional and intellectual disposition and consent of those used. Such uses express physical superiority, or superiority of position, skill, technical ability, and command of tools, ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... ground. Is it true that they are losing courage? Of course, everyone knows that they are a gallant race, and that although the Germans, by their relentless science and unending attention to detail, are rated superior in machine-like warfare, they can never be quite like the brilliant conquerors of Jena, Austerlitz, and a hundred other battles; and yet no one expected the French were going to cling to the ruins of their Legation with the bulldog desperation ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... proud of him, and brought visitors to look at him. In ten hours three hundred dozen bottles passed through his hands. This meant that he had attained machine-like perfection. All waste movements were eliminated. Every motion of his thin arms, every movement of a muscle in the thin fingers, was swift and accurate. He worked at high tension, and the result was that he grew nervous. ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... ordered to gather the canvas and stretch it out on the lot so an inventory might be taken to determine in what shape the show had been left. Others were assigned to search the lot for show properties, costumes and the like, and in a very short time the big, machine-like organization was ...
— The Circus Boys In Dixie Land • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... to execute a kind of dance. Les Plantons rocked and applauded. Celina smiled beautifully at the men who were staring from every window of The Enormous Room and, with a supreme effort, went over and dragged Renee (who had neatly and accurately folded up with machine-like rapidity in the mud) through the doorway and into the house. Eventually Lena followed her example, capturing Lily en route. The scene must have consumed all of twenty minutes. The plantons were so mirth-stricken that they had to sit down and rest under ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... from the moral repressions that lie upon them and colour all their acts at home. It is the view of the English, so we hear upon equally reliable authority, that he is an earnest but extremely inefficient oaf, incapable of either the finer technic of war or of its machine-like discipline—another thumping error, for the American is actually extraordinarily adept and ingenious in the very arts that modern war chiefly makes use of, and there is, since the revolt of the Prussian, no other such rigidly regimented man in the world. He has, indeed, reached ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan
... building, that is lacking in far less ancient work, for oddly enough it is often the decaying features of the latest decorated style that impress the vulgar by their apparent age. The extreme care in the masonry has imparted a machine-like finish. As Professor Willis wrote: "The regularity of the size of the stones is astonishing. As soon as they had finished one part, they copied it exactly in the next, even though the additional expense was considerable. The masonry runs in even bands, and you may follow it from the south transept, ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Salisbury - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the See of Sarum • Gleeson White
... was tarred from the same stick and he proved it true, but there we sang together above the heads of venerable men who preached. They were good men, sometimes great scholars, but the ears they addressed were not always willing. A somewhat machine-like sermoniser who, it was irreverently declared, ran as if wound up but sometimes slipped a cog, had been known to pray "that the intemperate might become temperate, the intolerant tolerant, the industrious dustrious." ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... eleven as it took the field amid a riotous welcoming from the umbrella packed stands. Judd studied the blue jerseyed youths of Canton in comparison with the dark red clad boys of Trumbull. It seemed to him that the Canton team was better drilled, the players moved with more snap and machine-like precision. Judd ...
— Over the Line • Harold M. Sherman
... the arrival of the surgeon and his two nurses, who set to work with the machine-like rapidity and precision of their highly-specialized craft. After a few minutes, the work completed, the surgeon turned to the two men who had been watching him so intently, with a smile ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... whatever. Their scores were exactly even. With machine-like precision he took his turn, utterly ignoring the grumbling criticisms of his adversary's play that were being freely expressed around the room. With the utmost steadiness he made his stroke, scoring two points. Then there fell a tremendous silence. The choice of two strokes now lay before ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... off, because a new sound was coming from the speaker. It was a voice that was unhuman and queerly horrible and somehow machine-like. Hoots and howls and whistles came from the speaker. Wailing sounds. Ghostly noises, devoid of consonants but broadcast on a wave-length close to the G.C. band and therefore produced by intelligence, though unintelligible. The unhuman ...
— Invasion • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... must be only profound endurance. Discipline is indispensable for the multitude to be melted into a single army; and in spite of the vague kinship which is sometimes set up between you and your nearest chief, the machine-like order paralyzes you first, so that your body may be the better made to move in accordance with the rhythm of the rank and the regiment—into which, nullifying all that is yourself, you pass already as a ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... built merely by trade, built for the home of labor, of machines, and of engines, and for the dwelling-place (one cannot call it the home) of crowds of human beings, whose value is, for the most part, estimated according to the development of their machine-like qualities. Beauty is not consulted here. In those places in or near the city, where Nature, reluctant to be driven utterly away, still tries to keep a foothold, she is parched and scorched by the feverish breath of forges and furnaces. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... have been won. After the decorations had been presented, the men fell back to their battalions. The band struck up the strains of "D'ye ken John Peel?", and the whole Brigade marched past the General, the masses of men moving with machine-like precision. Even the rain which had begun to fall did not mar the ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... history of religion and philosophy and the political and social paths of human endeavor HAD been found absolutely correct and universally applicable—so that every human being would be compelled to pass through its machine-like maw, every personality to be crushed under its Juggernath wheels! No, thank Heaven! there is no theory or creed or system; and yet there is something—as Jefferies prophetically felt and with a great longing desired—that CAN satisfy; and ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... spirit in which the Roman always tended to play with the pawns of his business game, even when they were freemen and fellow-citizens. A man like Cato, who had sense and honesty enough to look after his own business, elaborated a machine-like system for governing his household, the aim of which was the maximum of profit with the minimum amount of humanity which is consistent with the attainment of such an end. The element of humanity is, however, accidental. There is no conscious appeal to such a feeling. The slaves seem ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... touched with gray, clipped twenty years from his appearance. His eye was one that was famous throughout the Alleghenia Guard,—an eye accustomed to control, not a single man, or two, or three, but a thousand, moving as one at his command; an eye enforcing obedience immediate, machine-like, and unquestioning. ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... aluminum cups. Temporary field post offices were established in advance, so that messages could be gathered in as the columns passed. Here and there were men to offer biscuits and handfuls of prunes. In methodical, machine-like progress came the ammunition wagons, commissariat carts, field kitchens, teams of heavy horses attached to pontoons, traction engines hauling enormous siege guns, motor plows for excavating trenches, aeroplanes, carriages containing surgeons, automobiles ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... ever dreamed of virile deeds, and vast, And then come back from dreams with wobbly knees, To find your way (the braver vision past), By picking meekly at typewriter keys; By bending o'er a ledger, day by day, By some machine-like drudging? No great woe To grapple with. Slow, painful is the way, And still, the bravest fight and ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... that of the bulk of the men of the C.I.D. It may be that sometimes they realise that a man's life or liberty depends on their scrutiny, but for the most part they do their work with cold deliberation and machine-like precision. Is one set of finger-marks identical with another? That is all they have to answer. It is the pride of the department that since it has been established it has never ...
— Scotland Yard - The methods and organisation of the Metropolitan Police • George Dilnot
... particular. Men as disparate as Schoenberg and Magnard and Igor Strawinsky have been seeking, in their own fashion, the one through a sort of mathematical harshness, the second through a Gothic severity, the third through a machine-like regularity, to give their work a new boldness, a new power and incisiveness of design. Something of the same sharpness and sheerness was attained by Berlioz, if not precisely by their means, at least to a degree no less remarkable than theirs. He attained it through the nakedness ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... coolly enthusiastic. They lifted their eyes every chance to the smoke-wreathed hillock from whence the hostile battery addressed them. The youth pitied them as he ran. Methodical idiots! Machine-like fools! The refined joy of planting shells in the midst of the other battery's formation would appear a little thing when the infantry came swooping out of ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... renders human activity machine-like is a form of experience that increases the probability that the possessor will be discarded and his work accomplished by the introduction of some new tool or some ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... was a marvel that the defenders kept on fighting as long as they did. Already the door, beneath Wade's machine-like shooting, had been completely riddled; the windows were almost bare of glass; and great splinters of wood had been torn from the log walls by the heavy rifle bullets on their way through to the interior. Soon the door sagged and crashed inward, and into the gaping ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony
... rural pupils will still be taught in the small, isolated, district school; there is danger that this district school may be neglected. Moreover, increased school machinery always invites undue reliance upon machine-like methods. Centralization permits, but does not guarantee, greater efficiency. A system like this one must be vitalized by constant and close touch with the life and needs and aspirations of the ...
— Chapters in Rural Progress • Kenyon L. Butterfield
... The grandest thing of all, however, was the change in the men. The uncouth, coarsely jesting, blackberry-picking fellows that lagged and straggled to the battle became soldiers in their instincts and rising excitement and courage, if not in machine-like discipline and coolness. As I rode here and there I could see that they were erect, eager, and that their eyes began to glow like coals from their dusty, sunburned visages. If there were occasional evidences of fear, there were ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... seemed to be in perfect accord with the habits and dispositions of the people. The honest old burghers pursued the even tenor of their way, paying but little heed to the whirl and excitement of the large cities, and plodding on with machine-like regularity in their daily pleasures, and their slow but sure acquirement of fortune. Children were born, much in the usual manner of such events—grew into man and womanhood—were married, and they—in their turn, raised families. Altogether, life in this old town ...
— Bucholz and the Detectives • Allan Pinkerton
... boat-drill twice a day, so that the crew of this man-of-war, as they saw Golden Gate ahead of them, were perhaps more expert at boat-drill than any that sailed. They could lower and raise a boat with a wonderful expertness in a bad sea, and they rowed with clock- like precision and machine-like force. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Stiffly upright, and with an almost painful primness in dress and figure, she sat knitting rapidly and with closed eyes. Her face was rigid as a mask; the motion in her fingers, as she plied her needles, was spasmodic and machine-like; the figure, though quiet, wore an air of iron repose that was most uneasy and unnatural. Still, through the mask and from the figure there stole the aspect and air of one who had within her deep wells of sweetness ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... society is able to suck in and destroy so many fellows of my sort! If I am tempted what must it mean to the ordinary man?" He noted with angry shame that he felt a swelling of pride because he, of so lowly an origin, born no better than the machine-like lackeys, had been able to push himself in upon—yes, up among—these people on terms of equality. And it was, for the moment, in vain that he reminded himself that most of them were of full as lowly origin as he; that few indeed could claim to be more than one generation removed from ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... remained as lifeless as ever, without a single guard to herd the apex claim. Then he fell to watching Jepson and talking to the miners and snooping for some hidden scheme, but Jepson went ahead with his machine-like efficiency until the Tecolote ...
— Rimrock Jones • Dane Coolidge
... something still so terrifying to me about his machine-like efficiency," she said, "that I can believe him capable of anything. His whole plan was so perfectly thought out, down to the smallest detail. It only broke down through the purely accidental. Once through my losing the needle—though that wasn't ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... fury, and he ordered me to do punishment drill with those dumb-bells for two hours without stopping. Of those hundred and twenty minutes he did not remit one. Long before their expiration I was ready to drop, but he came frequently to show that he had his eye upon me, and the horrible machine-like motion must continue. On other occasions I got punished for lying, when my only fault was the common childish inability to explain. "Why did you tear that piece of paper?" "Please, papa, I did not tear it; I pulled it, and it tore." ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... of a gang of men who are engaged in importing forged Treasury notes on a large scale and uttering them through skilfully organised agencies. The police and various civilians between them—there is no super-sleuth to weary us with his machine-like prowess—run the thing to earth, partly by skill and partly by good luck, and the civilians in particular have a stirring time doing it. Bombs, automatic pistols, even soldiers and a submarine, assist ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 1st, 1920 • Various
... of industry we must guard against that same tyranny of the majority that has marked democracy in the making of laws. There must, for instance, persist in this future economics a certain minimum of machine-like work and prompt obedience and submission. This necessity is a simple corollary from the hard facts of the physical world. It must be accepted with the comforting thought that its routine need not demand twelve hours a day or even eight. ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... poet to London! This downright earnestness of all things, this colossal uniformity, this machine-like movement, this troubled spirit in pleasure itself, this exaggerated London, smothers the imagination and rends the heart. And should you ever send a German poet thither—a dreamer, who stares at everything, even a ragged beggar-woman, or the shining wares of a goldsmith's ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... little warmer, they shake off their torpor, revive and start walking again. The circular procession begins anew, like that which I have already seen. There is nothing more and nothing less to be noted in their machine-like obstinacy. ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... steady-riding men on his left, he must submit to wretched defeat. So he strained himself harder and burst into fresh speed, finding himself surprised that he could. In the thrill of it he forgot his double load, forgot the close-pressing horses, forgot irritating dust. On he galloped, racing forward with machine-like evenness—on his left the paralleling horsemen, to his rear yelling and shooting, on his right his own men and horses, and for them he felt he must ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton
... the gloomy comfort of the room, a puppet in the power of great forces that cared nothing for family or class or creed, but moved, machine-like, with dread processes to inscrutable ends. This was how it struck young Jolyon, who had the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... interfering; but Bridget is Bridget, and I might as soon command her not to use her tongue, as to stop taking an interest in anything that concerns "Herself". As a matter of fact, I don't try. Servility, and decorum, and a machine-like respect are to be hired for cash at any registry office; but Bridget's red-hot devotion, her child-like, unshakable conviction that everything that Miss Evelyn does and says, or doesn't say and doesn't do, is absolutely right—ah, that is ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... to division and broadside to broadside. Training cruises and fleet manoeuvres were still things of a far-off future, and the ships of Monk's three divisions were all unequal in speed and handiness, so the manoeuvre was not executed with the machine-like regularity of a modern fleet. The van and centre came into action fairly together, but the rearward ships straggled into position, and Tromp was able to give some of the first comers a severe hammering before their consorts came into action and relieved them ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale
... for this, so many minutes for that. William, she now resolved, for the first time becoming really interested in him, should grow up to be a model young man, a splendid and wonderful piece of mechanism, a fine, practical, machine-like individual, moral, upright, religious. She was glad that he was young; she would begin his training on the morrow. She would teach him to sew, to sweep, to churn, to cook, and when he was older he should be ...
— Miss Minerva and William Green Hill • Frances Boyd Calhoun
... he saw a young lady seated at a desk, manipulating a typewriter. She had the ends of a forked rubber tube hung in her ears, and did not see Bradley. He observed that the tube connected with a sewing-machine-like table and a swiftly revolving little cylinder, which he recognized as a phonograph. At the window sat Radbourn, talking in a measured, monotonous voice into the mouthpiece of a large flexible tube, which ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... are different. Everything is orderly and moves with a machine-like regularity that seems totally foreign to an Eastern official's residence. There is not the democracy of other days; the man from the street, the merchant or the coolie with his burden on his shoulders, did not follow us into the courtyards to see what was being done, nor were there crowds of ...
— My Lady of the Chinese Courtyard • Elizabeth Cooper
... it, but he bore up well to the work, taking pride in it after the manner of Dave and Sol-leks, and seeing that his mates, whether they prided in it or not, did their fair share. It was a monotonous life, operating with machine-like regularity. One day was very like another. At a certain time each morning the cooks turned out, fires were built, and breakfast was eaten. Then, while some broke camp, others harnessed the dogs, and they were under way an hour or so before the darkness fell which ...
— The Call of the Wild • Jack London
... indomitable, unfailing, always fulfilling his duties with machine-like regularity, ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... the body becomes a habit. The feet, legs, arms and body gradually come under the sway of the mind. In the position of the soldier, for instance, the mind holds the body motionless. In marching, the mind drives the legs to machine-like regularity. In shooting, the mind assumes command of the arms, hands, fingers and eye, linking them up and making them ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... aside and gave a terse order. Delightedly, Pauline watched the brief, machine-like movements of the crew trimming the deck. Summers escorted her back to the conning tower. They descended. Within a few moments the wonderful craft ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... and immediately was subjected to a fierce assault that taxed the utmost powers of endurance to withstand it. The Jefferson team was fighting harder than ever and playing with machine-like smoothness. They carried the ball for twenty-five yards and then punted, and downed Neil Durant in his tracks. Ridgley fought hard to advance the ball and gained a first down, then, meeting with no further success, punted. And so the ball see-sawed back and forth ...
— The Mark of the Knife • Clayton H. Ernst
... perceive the position? Yes, of course you do!" For Cyrillon with one of the quick changes of mood habitual to him, smiled, as his temporary irritation passed like a cloud, and his eyes softened—"You see, I am a machine,—educated to be a machine; and I am set down to do certain machine-like duties,—and one of these duties is,—regardless of your fame, your eccentric theories, your special work which you have chosen to make for yourself in the world,—to put you in possession of the money ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... have human features, quick, responsive, mobile. Instead of the slow, long limbs creaking in stiff integuments, they have active members, for the most bare or moving freely in loose robes. Instead of a mumbled, monotonous, machine-like emission of sound they have real speech, vivacious, varied, musical. Their children are the loveliest in the world; so gay, so sturdy, so cheeky, yet never rude. It is a pure happiness merely to walk in the streets and look at them. It is a pure happiness, I might almost say, to look at ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... tried, the frequent changes in the regulations, had unsettled their ideas. In their reaction against the disagreeable rigor of German discipline, they protested that English officers alone, and not the machine-like soldiers of a despot, were the models for freemen. The common soldiers caught the spirit of insubordination from those who commanded them. Especially, the large regiment of French Guards, a highly privileged body, permanently quartered in Paris, was infected ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... of sleep, and showed a tendency to grumble in a half-incoherent way, but Jawn was as silent as at the start. To Harvey, who even in the excitement was afraid to sit down for fear of falling asleep, the engineer was a marvel in his machine-like self-control. ...
— The Short Line War • Merwin-Webster
... Yells, oaths, and vociferations are heard in front of us. Our Captain commands us to fire by volleys: "Aim! Fire!" "They must have felt something," drawls out some one of us in a nasal, Montmartre-like voice. Then again: "Aim! Fire!" What sport! Then comes the cric-crac-cric-crac, sewing machine-like hammering of our mitrailleuses. Our Captain passes the word: "Fire low! fire low! Aim! Fire!" Volley follows volley. The enemy's dash seems checked. Their fire slackens. We hear their officers swearing and yelling ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... Morvan," said my friend, "whereas few indeed, if they wished it, can go to the South of Africa to shoot elephants through the small ribs; neither is it probable that many of us would like to pass several years of their valuable lives shut up in a loose, rolling, sea-bathing-machine-like wagon, with their own beloved shadow alone for all Christian company. Let us have ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... the like—men who understood good stock—never failed to stop to watch the team go by, heads up, the check rein swinging loose, ears all alert, eyes all alight, the breath deep, strong, and slow, and the stride, machine-like, even as the swing of a metronome, thrown out from the shoulder to knee, snapped on from knee to fetlock, from fetlock to pastern, finishing squarely, beautifully, with the thrust of the hoof, planted an instant, ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... from the gloom and caught the gleam of an uplifted knife. There was no time for him to leap aside, no time for him to reach for the revolver which he carried in his pocket. In such a crisis one's actions are involuntary, machine-like, as if life, hovering by a thread, preserves itself in its own manner and without thought or reasoning on the part of the ...
— The Danger Trail • James Oliver Curwood
... Poor, struggling, machine-like Elspeth! Margot felt a pang of pity for her unappreciated efforts, and the determination to spare her one task at least brought ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... Dervishes at Firket watched in senseless apathy the deliberate, machine-like preparations for their destruction. They should have had good information, for although the Egyptian cavalry patrolled ceaselessly, and the outpost line was impassable to scouts, their spies, as camel-drivers, water-carriers, ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... Andover eleven. They were big, rangy fellows and their team worked with a precision and machine-like rush that the red and black ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... one the son of an English nobleman, one the brother of an eminent Canadian politician, one related to a celebrated English dramatist. He ran his eye along the line, then turned to Mab, raised his cap with machine-like precision, and said: "No, I suppose you do not understand that. Keep Aleck Windsor from Pretty Pierre ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... of Cleggett's line stood the three detectives shoulder to shoulder. Their three swords rose and fell as one. They cut and lunged and guarded with a machine-like regularity, advancing, giving ground, advancing again, with a rhythmic unanimity which ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... offices of the Skandinavia Corporation, in the heart of the city of Quebec, with their machine-like precision of life, their soulless method, their passionless progress towards the purpose of their organisation, meant the open road towards the fulfilment of her desires for independence ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... toward Valley City, Truxton's two foremen were directing their men with the same quick-eyed, steady competence which they had manifested under the eye of the older engineer. From them he turned to the men working under Ben and the Lark. There, too, was machine-like regularity; there, too, each man, each straining animal was in its place, putting forth its ...
— Under Handicap - A Novel • Jackson Gregory
... charity, in whose care he had previously been—the one human, alert, sympathizing—not loving sin, nor sinful men, but laboring for them, sacrificing for them, pardoning them as Christ does—the other working with machine-like accuracy, but with as little apparent emotion, showing none in fact beyond a prudish shrinking from these sufferers from the outer world, of which they know nothing but have only heard of its wickedness. The contrast ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... the story to the effect that the speed launch must have reached the schooner and was lying alongside with its intended cargo being delivered with no loss of time. Probably, if everything went with machine-like precision, the speed boat would soon be fully laden and started back toward some secret haven where big motor trucks would be waiting to transport the cargo to Tampa, St. Petersburg, or some other ...
— Eagles of the Sky - With Jack Ralston Along the Air Lanes • Ambrose Newcomb
... with plate, pictures, statues, ornaments heaped in wild confusion, crowds of people, in every variety of strange dishabille, gathered round; two long lines of them handing bucket after bucket, with machine-like regularity, from the fountain; others removing the furniture from the terrace; cushions, ormolu, fine china, handed out of the lower windows; the whole seen by the wild lurid light that flashed from the windows above, strangely illuminating ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... discharge developed by the laws of inner growth and independent of individual learning, there can be no doubt. This of course means that in the early days of a child's life, and later in so far as he is governed by these inborn tendencies, his conduct is machine-like and blind—with no purpose and no consciousness controlling or initiating the responses. Only after experience and learning have had an opportunity to influence these responses can the child be held responsible for his conduct, for only then does his conduct become conscious ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... unstrung, he gazed at that mighty, loathsome mass, listening to its snapping jaws as it took on the tons of nourishment needed for its machinelike ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst |
