"Machine-like" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... The men, squarely and firmly seated, bent their heavy shoulders with machine-like movements, and when they threw back their faces the rays of the moon glittered and flashed in their dilated eyes and on their bared teeth. The sailor at the tiller swayed in unison, and grunted encouragement, breaking every now and then into bitter speech, spoken as if in reverent accord ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... smarter and stronger than others. By a wiser 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 dead level. Socialism ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... 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 at their men in shrill, high-pitched, penetrating voices. Joyful exaltation ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... was relieved by 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 ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... 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 ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... 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 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... 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 ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... plate-armor emerged on the deck. In his gauntleted hand he carried a heavy steel mace. With this uplifted he moved toward his enemies, silent save for the ponderous clank of his footfall. It was an inhuman, machine-like figure, menacing and terrible, devoid of all expression, slow-moving, ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the gas and two lamps were lit. The company were still eating. The men, gorged with food, had unbuttoned their vests. McTeague's cheeks were distended, his eyes wide, his huge, salient jaw moved with a machine-like regularity; at intervals he drew a series of short breaths through his nose. Mrs. Sieppe wiped ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... universities of England a sad example of this error. What can be more deadening to the spirit, more foreign to religion, than the morning and evening prayers as they are carried on at Oxford and Cambridge with machine-like regularity! But also to England belongs the credit of the sad fact, that, according to Kohl's report, there live in Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, and London, thousands of men who have never enjoyed any teaching in religion, have never been baptized, who live absolutely without religion ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... 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, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... Muses 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 whose ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... sudden shifting of the coloured 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, ...
— Old Man Curry - Race Track Stories • Charles E. (Charles Emmett) Van Loan
... instance, or the Welsh and the 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 household. She will, ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... evening, may the presence of the night-jar be detected, except by its coarse call, while the sprightly little sun-bird flits hither and thither, prodigal of its vivid colours and joying with machine-like whirring. The sun-bird exemplifies the brightness of the day. All its activities are bold and conspicuous. Aptly named, it has nothing to hide, no deeds which will not withstand the scrutiny ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... gunners were 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
... 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 your father left ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... 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 stands ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... springs from familiarity, and from the cold practical 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 ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... goat, and if he once got his hands on the ball he never missed it. It was his encouragement that steadied Dalgren; his judgment of hitters that carried the young pitcher through dangerous places; his lightning swift grasp of points that directed the machine-like work ...
— The Redheaded Outfield and Other Baseball Stories • Zane Grey
... coming socialization 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 ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... voice broke 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 hoots and wails and whistles came through for nearly ...
— Invasion • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... hours, wages, and results being 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
... 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." Longfellow always came with his beautiful ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... only one person 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 into ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... distant gardens, women in orchards and at cottage-doors, shepherds on remote hills, turnip-hoers in blue-green enclosures miles away, captains with spy-glasses out at sea, were regarding the picture keenly. Those three or four thousand men of one machine-like movement, some of them swashbucklers by nature; others, doubtless, of a quiet shop-keeping disposition who had inadvertently got into uniform—all of them had arrived from nobody knew where, and hence were ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... were excited. Kingozi passed them rapidly in review. But when Chake came forward, he paused in the machine-like regularity of his inspection. ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... that position attempted 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 washing-shed. Of all the inhabitants ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... veils, which even the poorest allow to trail behind them, like the train of a court dress. In this bright land, with its rose-coloured distances, it is strange to see them, all so sombrely clothed, spots of mourning, as it were, in the gay fields and the flaring desert. Machine-like creatures, all untaught, they yet possess by instinct, as did once the daughters of Hellas, a sense of nobility in attitude and carriage. None of the women of Europe could wear these coarse black stuffs with ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... 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 ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... right to left of the shields; the sparkle of scales, buckles, and breastplates and helms, all perfectly burnished; the plumes nodding above the tall crests; the sway of ensigns and iron-shod spears; the bold, confident step, exactly timed and measured; the demeanor, so grave, yet so watchful; the machine-like unity of the whole moving mass—made an impression upon Judah, but as something felt rather than seen. Two objects fixed his attention—the eagle of the legion first—a gilded effigy perched on a tall shaft, with wings outspread ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... offer resistance, struggle or lie down on the ground—they will overpower him, lift him, bind him and carry him, bound, to the gallows. And the fact that this machine-like work will be performed over him by human beings like himself, lent to them a new, extraordinary and ominous aspect—they seemed to him like ghosts that came to him for this one purpose, or like automatic ...
— The Seven who were Hanged • Leonid Andreyev
... soldiers 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 ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... 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 as follows: ANY INCIDENT IS COMIC THAT CALLS OUR ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... however, before he came upon a group of officers, and saw that the military etiquette was no less strict, in their case, than in that of the soldiers, save that their collars were less high, and their stocks more easy. Their walk, too, was somewhat less automatic and machine-like, but they were certainly in strong contrast to the British officers he had seen, on the occasions of his one or two ...
— With Frederick the Great - A Story of the Seven Years' War • G. A. Henty
... mounted in line; handsome, dashing fellows; 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 and his ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... 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 ...
— Eagles of the Sky - With Jack Ralston Along the Air Lanes • Ambrose Newcomb
... 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 ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... arms. "People eat dogs, too. I adore dogs. But the worst thing is the frightful, endless shedding of blood which human meat-eaters deem necessary for their preservation. Think of all the butchers in the world, think of those immense slaughter-houses in Chicago and other places where the machine-like, wholesale murder of innocent animals is constantly going on. People can live without meat. It isn't indispensable to ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... 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 ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... Radbourn's office, 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 connected with another phonograph. ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... is to impose human law upon environment until it becomes machine-like in its regularity. The objectionable is eliminated, the inevitable is foreseen. One is not even made wet by the rain nor cold by the frost; while death, instead of stalking about grewsome and accidental, becomes a prearranged pageant, moving along a well-oiled groove to the ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London
... father was heard to exclaim: 'If only the first battles were fought and won!' Yet calm confidence prevailed from the very beginning. But the sight of the quiet, machine-like completion of the mobilization strengthened our trust, even though a justifiable indignation and rage filled our hearts at Europe's dastardly attack on the Central States. Hate flamed highest, however, when ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... that high, domelike butte 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 began ...
— Rimrock Jones • Dane Coolidge
... monotony of camp life began again. It wore on him, this machine-like existence, this blind, unquestioning obedience, days and nights of purposeless waiting, brightened by neither hope nor memory. He had hated it before; now he loathed it with the whole strength of his unrestful soul. But it did him good. Brought face to face with his life, he met the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... or class interests is necessary for the common good; and that which is imposed by a dominant class, upon a subjected and helpless people. The latter is Prussian discipline, the discipline of a harsh machine-like, logical organization, based on the rule of a military autocracy. It assumes that if you do not crush your opponent first, he will crush you. It is the discipline of a nation ruled by its General Staff, assuming war as the normal condition of peoples, and attempting with ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... 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 ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... Julien, be merciful to me! Remember that above all things I have always been respectable. Remind her that if I were too intelligent I should probably rob her of her secrets or money or something. I am really a most machine-like person. Nature meant me to be secretary to a clever woman, and my handwriting—don't forget my handwriting. Nothing so clear or so rapid ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... 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 ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton
... 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 swept ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... 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 the particular branch on which it will spend the night. With a ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... 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
... out,—control of 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 work ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... conspired to spoil the success of his manoeuvres. The experiments that had been 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, ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... 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 of ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... ship. Barely was she clear of the land when a string of small flags broke out from her mizzen rigging, and almost as if by magic, the yard arms of all three vessels were alive with men, and royals, top gallants, and mainsails with machine-like precision were dewed up and furled, and each ship, stripped of all but its topsails, rounded to, with its ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... 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 that, ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... judgment. A fraction of a second too long in the water and the fine and silken edge of the proper heat was lost, and Martin found time to marvel at the accuracy he developed—an automatic accuracy, founded upon criteria that were machine-like and unerring. ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... 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 a ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... He bent fairly low over his plate, resting an elbow on each side, and, putting in the whole shrimp with his left hand, almost immediately seemed to take out the head and tail with the other, working with machine-like regularity. It was an accomplishment that Barbara was sure would bring him in a lot of money at a show, and she began to picture to herself a large advertisement, "Instantaneous Shrimp-eater," and the ...
— Barbara in Brittany • E. A. Gillie
... 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. ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... 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 ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... is specialist work, totally different to 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
... 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 ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... 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
... seeming to move, and there he 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, ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... 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 ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale
... 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, ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... 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 ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... 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 ...
— Begumbagh - A Tale of the Indian Mutiny • George Manville Fenn
... fellow-laborers with that of the sisters of 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
... 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
... 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 strained themselves in that first seven miles would be apt to rue their ...
— The Chums of Scranton High on the Cinder Path • Donald Ferguson
... conferred, and planned. And the result was concrete practice. Kars was the guiding spirit, and Abe Dodds was the machine-like energy that drove the labor forward. Bill took no part in the work. His work lay in one direction only, and it was a work he carried out with a self-sacrifice only to be expected from him. His hospital was full to overflowing, and for all his skill, for all his devotion, ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... illuminating and more directly applicable 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. ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... a generation to come a large share, if not a major portion, of 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 ...
— Chapters in Rural Progress • Kenyon L. Butterfield
... 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 ...
— The Wit of a Duck and Other Papers • John Burroughs
... 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 him. ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... affectionate tattoo. Tawny ears turned backward in appreciative fellowship, but without any break in a plodding dog-trot. Though the rider's aspect might say with the desert that time was nothing, the pony's expressed a logical purpose. Thus the speed of their machine-like progress was entirely regulated by the prospect of a measure of oats ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... 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
... 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
... 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
... very 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. At night his muscles twitched in his sleep, and in the daytime he ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... 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, and the like, were in the camp. They ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... also, things 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, ...
— My Lady of the Chinese Courtyard • Elizabeth Cooper
... known. That there are very definite pathways of 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 ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... to 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 plainly. ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... aim. No odds could appall him. With his back set firm against a solid moral principle, it was his joy to strike out at a multitude of foes. They lost their heads as well as their tempers, but in the extremest moments of excitement and anger Mr. Adams's brain seemed to work with machine-like coolness and accuracy. With flushed face, streaming eyes, animated gesticulation, and cracking voice, he always retained perfect mastery of all his intellectual faculties. He thus became a terrible antagonist, whom all feared, yet fearing ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... purely 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 musical taste awaiting only the touchstone of hearing ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... certain which—had an opportunity of admiring the stern and iron discipline of this splendid army of savages. That of the Zulu troops under the rule of Cetywayo, or even under that of Tshaka, might have equalled it, but could not possibly have surpassed it. Each company fell into rank with machine-like precision and celerity. The dead were left as they fell; those who were too grievously wounded to move received death from the swift, sure spear-stroke of a comrade; then, marching in five columns, the great army set forth on its return, striking ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... of existence 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 partook very much ...
— Bucholz and the Detectives • Allan Pinkerton
... not prove to be an argument in favor of Socialism, but a terrible indictment of it. For the road the dictatorship is now taking, which indeed offers it the only possible hope of even a passable economic success, is the barren, heartless, unspiritual, materialistic tyranny of machine-like "industrialism" which the I. W. W. represents. In the two chapters immediately following, VIII and IX, the reader will learn something of the loss of all moral standards and the cruel, lawless violence to which the atheistic, anarchistic ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... the straight, martial form of Baldos pass the window near which she sat. He was patrolling the narrow piazza which fronted the house. Toward the close of the rather trying luncheon she was almost unable to control the impulse to rush out and compel him to relax that imposing, machine-like stride. She hungered for a few minutes of the old-time ...
— Beverly of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... moisture oozing from his forehead, stood there, hesitant, staring back at old Isaac, half in a fascinated gaze, half as though trying to read some sign of weakness in the bestial countenance that confronted him. And then, very slowly, in an automatic, machine-like way, his hand groped into the inside pocket of his vest—and old ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... "Pelleas et Melisande" in 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 ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... 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, perhaps, I have ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... soldiers dipped their 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 ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... Monck answered him with machine-like accuracy. "Yes, sir, I deceived you. But my business was urgent nevertheless. That is ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... presumptuous, familiar, 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 beyond price! No poor forms and ceremony shall ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... a few days before, five or six schoolboys had unobserved stolen in here, and amused themselves by going from step to step on these machine-like rocking stairs, in pitchy darkness, but at last they knew not rightly which way to go, up or down, and had then begun to shout and scream lustily. ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen
... 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
... methodical; she worked ever by the clock, so many hours 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 educated for ...
— Miss Minerva and William Green Hill • Frances Boyd Calhoun
... certain pleasure 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
... did this energy waste itself in flashes of isolated triumph. The Jesuit was a member of an efficient organization, skillfully guided by inspired leaders and carrying its extensive work of Christianization with machine-like thoroughness through the vastness of five continents. We are too apt to think only of the individual missionary's glowing spirit and rugged faith, his picturesque strivings against great odds, and to regard him ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro
... the kind of discipline that the recruit undergoes in the army,—the making of a series of 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 more ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... silence of steel reigns around you. Your thoughts 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 sort of ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... 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
... 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
... The warm mellow afternoon sunshine wrapped them about. The horses grazed with quiet unconcern. One of these hard-faced frontiersmen was chewing tobacco with machine-like regularity. Another was rolling a cigarette. There was nothing of dramatic effect. Not a man had raised his voice. But Neill knew there was no appeal. He had come to the end of the passage through a horrible mistake. ...
— A Texas Ranger • William MacLeod Raine
... accent of hospitality, in the priest's actions, Gordon, accepting them in such spirit, might have been at ease. But not the faintest spark of interest, of curiosity, the most perfunctory communion of sympathy, was evident on Merlier's immobile countenance; his movements were machine-like, he seemed infinitely removed from his charitable ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... 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 was ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... must be rendered habitual. Consideration, the mark of the second stage, disappears in the third. We cannot count a person honest so long as he has to decide on each occasion whether to take advantage of his neighbor. Long ago he should have disciplined himself into machine-like action as regards these matters, so that the dishonest opportunity would be instinctively and instantly dismissed, the honest deed appearing spontaneously. That man has not an amiable character who is obliged to restrain his irritation, and through all ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer
... a little communicant, with his bow on his arm and his taper in his hand, all combed and curled, goes to assist a poor old man lying on his wretched pallet with the whites of his eyes turned up to the sky? These charitable visits had the same conventional stage-setting and accent. The machine-like gestures of the little preachers with arms too short for the work, were answered by words learned by rote, so false as to set one's teeth on edge. The comical words of encouragement, the "consolation lavishly poured forth" ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... 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, ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony
... transportation of that important necessary up into the city from a stream that flows near the base of the hill. These unhappy animals do nothing from one end of their working lives to the other but toil, with almost machine-like regularity and uneventfulness, up the crooked, stony streets with a dozen large earthen-ware jars of water, and down again with the empty jars. The donkey is sandwiched between two long wooden troughs suspended to a rude pack-saddle, and each trough accommodates six jars, each ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... Tityrus,' 'I that loved thee since my day began.' It has been suggested that he owed to a clever farce-comedy of the early eighties the caption of the widely-read column of journalistic epigram and persiflage, which he filled with machine-like regularity and the versatility of the brightest French journalism for ten years. I prefer to think that he took it, or his cue for it, from a line of Dr. Phillips Francis's translation of the eighth of the first book of ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... 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. ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... antique carvings, sat his wife. 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 and love which only strong training or power of education had thus covered ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... Committee. Poor girl! My heart bled for her. And yet, after all, Fate had been kind in removing her from the scene, even in custody, for she could hardly have borne to watch the proceedings. Vincent Jopp made rings round his antagonist. Hole after hole he won in his remorseless, machine-like way, until when lunch-time came at the end of the eighteenth he was ten up. All the ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... speak, been turning all your front-head into back-head, giving to your cerebral powers the characters of preappointed, automatic action, which are proper to the cerebellum. It cannot be denied that you have thus acquired a remarkable, machine-like simplicity, force, and constancy of mental action,—your brain-wheels spinning away with such a steam-engine whirr as one cannot but admire; but, on the other hand, as was inevitable, you have become astonishingly insensitive to all truths, save those ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... chums did not make very rapid progress, and for many reasons. In the first place their horses objected to putting forth any unusual exertion, and seemed to consider that they were doing their full duty by merely working their four weary legs in a machine-like fashion. ...
— The Boy Scouts on Belgian Battlefields • Lieut. Howard Payson
... 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." Here is a child attempting ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... Even the most machine-like of the sere and withered book-keepers held their pens in suspense as Haldane passed hastily toward Mr. Arnot's private office, followed by the reporter, whose alert manner and observant, questioning eye suggested an ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... to drill men who know, by years of experience, what movements one wishes to perform, and who will (D.V.) perform them with machinelike precision despite ...
— From the St. Lawrence to the Yser with the 1st Canadian brigade • Frederic C. Curry |
