It is the framework which changes with each new technology and not just the picture within the frame.
—Marshall Mcluhan (1911–80) Canadian Writer, Thinker, Educator
The drive toward complex technical achievement offers a clue to why the U.S. is good at space gadgetry and bad at slum problems.
—John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) Canadian-Born American Economist
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
The difference between a professional person and a technician is that a technician knows everything about his job except its ultimate purpose and his place in the scheme of things.
—Richard Livingstone (1880–1960) British Scholar, Educator, Academic
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
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
A new world is not made simply by trying to forget the old. A new world is made with a new spirit, with new values. Our world may have begun that way, but today it is caricatural. Our world is a world of things…. What we dread most, in the face of the impending d.
—Henry Miller (1891–1980) American Novelist
Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
—Richard Feynman (1918–88) American Physicist
Where there is the necessary technical skill to move mountains, there is no need for the faith that moves mountains.
—Eric Hoffer (1902–83) American Philosopher, Author
Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.
—Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) American Inventor, Philosopher
There will still be things that machines cannot do. They will not produce great art or great literature or great philosophy; they will not be able to discover the secret springs of happiness in the human heart; they will know nothing of love and friendship.
—Bertrand A. Russell (1872–1970) British Philosopher, Mathematician, Social Critic
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
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
Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius—and a lot of courage—to move in the opposite direction.
—E. F. Schumacher (1911–77) British Economist, Statistician
Most people who sneer at technology would starve to death if the engineering infrastructure were removed.
—Robert A. Heinlein (1907–88) American Science Fiction Writer
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
If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger.
—Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) American Architect
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
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
This is perhaps the most beautiful time in human history; it is really pregnant with all kinds of creative possibilities made possible by science and technology which now constitute the slave of man – if man is not enslaved by it.
—Jonas Salk (1914–95) American Microbiologist
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
The wireless telegraph is not difficult to understand. The ordinary telegraph is like a very long cat. You pull the tail in New York, and it meows in Los Angeles. The wireless is the same, only without the cat.
—Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born Physicist
Theory: when you have ideas. Ideology: when ideas have you.
—Anonymous
There are three roads to ruin; women, gambling and technicians. The most pleasant is with women, the quickest is with gambling, but the surest is with technicians.
—Georges Pompidou (1911–74) French Statesman
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
In health of mind and body, men should see with their own eyes, hear and speak without trumpets, walk on their feet, not on wheels, and work and war with their arms, not with engine-beams, nor rifles warranted to kill twenty men at a shot before you can see them.
—John Ruskin (1819–1900) English Writer, Art Critic
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
Technology is not an image of the world but a way of operating on reality. The nihilism of technology lies not only in the fact that it is the most perfect expression of the will to power… but also in the fact that it lacks meaning.
—Octavio Paz (1914–98) Mexican Poet, Diplomat
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
Leave a Reply