Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.
—Alan Watts (1915–73) British-American Philosopher, Author
Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today’s jobs with yesterday’s tools.
—Marshall Mcluhan (1911–80) Canadian Writer, Thinker, Educator
If we had a reliable way to label our toys good and bad, it would be easy to regulate technology wisely. But we can rarely see far enough ahead to know which road leads to damnation. Whoever concerns himself with big technology, either to push it forward or to stop it, is gambling in human lives.
—Freeman Dyson (1923–2020) American Theoretical Physicist, Author
Technology…is a queer thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other.
—C. P. Snow (1905–1980) British Novelist, Chemist
Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.
—J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) English Novelist, Short Story Writer
Technology is a gift of God. After the gift of life it is perhaps the greatest of God’s gifts. It is the mother of civilizations, of arts and of sciences.
—Freeman Dyson (1923–2020) American Theoretical Physicist, Author
The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple. A good example of a simple technology with profound historical consequences is hay. Nobody knows who invented hay, the idea of cutting grass in the autumn and storing it in large enough quantities to keep horses and cows alive through the winter. All we know is that the technology of hay was unknown to the Roman Empire but was known to every village of medieval Europe. Like many other crucially important technologies, hay emerged anonymously during the so-called Dark Ages. According to the Hay Theory of History, the invention of hay was the decisive event which moved the center of gravity of urban civilization from the Mediterranean basin to Northern and Western Europe. The Roman Empire did not need hay because in a Mediterranean climate the grass grows well enough in winter for animals to graze. North of the Alps, great cities dependent on horses and oxen for motive power could not exist without hay. So it was hay that allowed populations to grow and civilizations to flourish among the forests of Northern Europe. Hay moved the greatness of Rome to Paris and London, and later to Berlin and Moscow and New York.
—Freeman Dyson (1923–2020) American Theoretical Physicist, Author
All technology should be assumed guilty until proven innocent.
—David Brower (1912–2000) American Environmental Campaigner
Space-ships and time machines are no escape from the human condition. Let Othello subject Desdemona to a lie-detector test; his jealousy will still blind him to the evidence. Let Oedipus triumph over gravity; he won’t triumph over his fate.
—Arthur Koestler (1905–83) British Writer, Journalist, Political Refugee
Transport of the mails, transport of the human voice, transport of flickering pictures—in this century as in others our highest accomplishments still have the single aim of bringing men together.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery (1900–44) French Novelist, Aviator
When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.
—J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–67) American Nuclear Physicist
Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. If we continue to develop our technology without wisdom or prudence, our servant may prove to be our executioner.
—Omar Bradley (1893–1981) American Military Leader
The number one benefit of information technology is that it empowers people to do what they want to do. It lets people be creative. It lets people be productive. It lets people learn things they didn’t think they could learn before, and so in a sense it is all about potential.
—Steve Ballmer (b.1956) American Businessperson, Philantropist
Persons grouped around a fire or candle for warmth or light are less able to pursue independent thoughts, or even tasks, than people supplied with electric light. In the same way, the social and educational patterns latent in automation are those of self-employment and artistic autonomy.
—Marshall Mcluhan (1911–80) Canadian Writer, Thinker, Educator
We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.
—Carl Sagan (1934–96) American Astronomer
Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage, and those who manage what they do not understand.
—Unknown
If there is technological advance without social advance, there is, almost automatically, an increase in human misery, in impoverishment.
—Michael Harrington (1928–89) American Political Activist
I have no doubt that it is possible to give a new direction to technological development, a direction that shall lead it back to the real needs of man, and that also means: to the actual size of man. Man is small, and, therefore, small is beautiful. To go for giantism is to go for self-destruction.
—E. F. Schumacher (1911–77) British Economist, Statistician
If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger.
—Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) American Architect
Once a new technology rolls over you, if you’re not part of the steamroller, you’re part of the road.
—Stewart Brand (b.1938) American Writer, Counterculture Figure
The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty, and all forms of human life.
—John F. Kennedy (1917–63) American Head of State, Journalist
As industrial technology advances and enlarges, and in the process assumes greater social, economic, and political force, it carries people away from where they belong by history, culture, deeds, association and affection.
—Wendell Berry (b.1934) American Poet, Novelist, Environmentalist
Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.
—Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) American Inventor, Philosopher
Technology is so much fun but we can drown in our technology. The fog of information can drive out knowledge.
—Daniel J. Boorstin (1914–2004) American Historian, Academic, Attorney
We’ve arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.
—Carl Sagan (1934–96) American Astronomer
Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
—Richard Feynman (1918–88) American Physicist
If I were required to guess off-hand, and without collusion with higher minds, what is the bottom cause of the amazing material and intellectual advancement of the last fifty years, I should guess that it was the modern-born and previously non-existent disposition on the part of men to believe that a new idea can have value.
—Mark Twain (1835–1910) American Humorist
One of the universal rules of happiness is: always be wary of any helpful item that weighs less than its operating manual.
—Terry Pratchett (1948–2015) English Fantasy Writer
Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–62) American Philosopher
The press, the machine, the railway, the telegraph are premises whose thousand-year conclusion no one has yet dared to draw.
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German Philosopher, Scholar, Writer
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