Date: 1949

"And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp."

— Orwell, George (1903-1950)

Date: 1964

"Its productivity and efficiency, its capacity to increase and spread comforts, to turn waste into need, and destruction into construction, the extent to which this civilization transforms the object world into an extension of man's mind and body makes the very notion of alienation questionable. ...

— Marcuse, Herbert (1898-1979)

Date: 1965

"The younger machines occupy miles of dark benches, / Enjoying self-induced vacations of the mind, / Eating textbook rinds, spitting culture seeds, / Dreaming an exotic name to give their latest defeat, / Computing the hours on computer minds."

— Kaufman, Bob (1925-1986)

Date: 1966

"In the jungles of kid-dom, the mind switches gears rapidly."

— Shepherd, Jean; Bob Clark, Leigh Brown

Date: 1966

"A fuse blew and I had gone out of my skull."

— Shepherd, Jean; Bob Clark, Leigh Brown

Date: 1968

In one's head is "a button on a control panel. The button is marked 'take the left free end of a shoelace in the left hand'. When depressed, it activates a series of wheels, cogs, levers, and hydraulic mechanisms."

— Fodor, Jerry (b. 1935)

Date: 1971

"Everything spun around him; then his mind blanked, like a TV suddenly switched off."

— Jerzy N. Kosinski (1933-1991)

Date: 1984

"Case felt as though his brain were jammed."

— Gibson, William (b. 1948)

Date: 1984

"Sandstorms raged across the scoured floor of his skull, generating waves of high thin static that broke behind his eyes, spheres of purest crystal, expanding."

— Gibson, William (b. 1948)

Date: 1985

"In the dark the mind runs on like a devouring machine, the only thing awake in the universe."

— Delillo, Don (b. 1936)