Learn Through Quotations

“I like my new telephone, my computer works just fine, my calculator is perfect, but Lord, I miss my mind!”

“For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.”

“The most important and urgent problems of the technology of today are no longer the satisfactions of the primary needs or of archetypal wishes, but the reparation of the evils and damages by the technology of yesterday.”

“I'm struck by the insidious, computer-driven tendency to take things out of the domain of muscular activity and put them into the domain of mental activity. The transfer is not paying off. Sure, muscles are unreliable, but they represent several million years of accumulated finesse.”

“Inventor: A person who makes an ingenious arrangement of wheels, levers and springs, and believes it civilization.”

“It is difficult not to wonder whether that combination of elements which produces a machine for labor does not create also a soul of sorts, a dull resentful metallic will, which can rebel at times.”

“High-tech tomatoes. Mysterious milk. Supersquash. Are we supposed to eat this stuff? Or is it going to eat us?”

“I think I should not go far wrong if I asserted that the amount of genuine leisure available in a society is generally in inverse proportion to the amount of labor-saving machinery it employs.”

“If it were not for Thomas Edison, we would all be watching television in the dark.”

“Technology presumes there's just one right way to do things and there never is.”

“It is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.”

“We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.”

“Technology is nothing. What's important is that you have a faith in people, that they're basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they'll do wonderful things with them.”

“You cannot endow even the best machine with initiative; the jolliest steam-roller will not plant flowers.”

“Where there is the necessary technical skill to move mountains, there is no need for the faith that moves mountains.”

“Some people worry that artificial intelligence will make us feel inferior, but then, anybody in his right mind should have an inferiority complex every time he looks at a flower.”

“Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.”

“All men have become the tools of their tools.”

“Use of advanced messaging technology does not imply an endorsement of western industrial civilization.”

“Technology... is a queer thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other.”

“Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation...tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego. His anxiety subsides. His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a gray vegetation.”

“The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.”

“The drive toward complex technical achievement offers a clue to why the U.S. is good at space gadgetry and bad at slum problems.”

“Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain.”