“Minds are not bits of clockwork, they are just bits of not-clockwork. As thus represented, minds are not merely ghosts harnessed to machines, they are themselves just spectral machines. . . . Now the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine does just this. It maintains that there exist both bodies and minds; that there occur physical processes and mental processes; that there are mechanical causes of corporeal movements and mental causes of corporeal movements. I shall argue that these and other analogous conjunctions are absurd.”

“Incredible shame is associated with mental illness. People will confide the most intimate details of their love life before they'll mention a relative who had a serious mental breakdown. But the brain is just another organ. It's just a machine, and a machine can go wrong.”

“Before being a mental state of the schizophrenic who has made himself into an artificial person through autism, schizophrenia is the process of the production of desire and desiring-machines.”

“Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch....”

“So, in the interests of survival, they trained themselves to be agreeing machines instead of thinking machines. All their minds had to do was to discover what other people were thinking, and then they thought that, too.”

“I wanted the syrupy taste of this small rebellion. And this stupid machine was denying that bit of freedom to me . . . just like everyone else.”