All of the biggest technological
inventions created by man - the airplane, the automobile, the computer - says little about his intelligence, but speaks volumes
about his laziness.
~Mark Kennedy
Modern technology
Owes
ecology
An apology.
~Alan M. Eddison
It has become appallingly
obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.
~Albert Einstein
One machine can do the work
of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.
~Elbert Hubbard, The Roycroft
Dictionary and Book of Epigrams, 1923
If it keeps up, man will
atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger. ~Frank Lloyd Wright
For a successful technology,
reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.
~Richard P. Feynman
Technological progress has
merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
~Aldous Huxley
Technology... the knack
of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it.
~Max Frisch
Do you realize if it weren't
for Edison we'd be watching TV by candlelight? ~Al Boliska
Western society has accepted
as unquestionable a technological imperative that is quite as arbitrary as the most primitive taboo: not merely the
duty to foster invention and constantly to create technological novelties, but equally the duty to surrender to these novelties
unconditionally, just because they are offered, without respect to their human consequences. ~Lewis Mumford
God never made his work
for man to mend.
~John Dryden
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.
~T.S. Eliot, about radio
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
The
system of nature, of which man is a part, tends to be self-balancing, self-adjusting, self-cleansing. Not so with technology.
~E.F. Schumacher, Small
is Beautiful, 1973
I am sorry to say that there is too much point to the wisecrack that life is extinct on other
planets because their scientists were more advanced than ours.
~John F. Kennedy
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. ~Dennis Gabor, Innovations: Scientific, Technological and Social, 1970
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
I
like my new telephone, my computer works just fine, my calculator is perfect, but Lord, I miss my mind!
~Author Unknown
The
production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.
~Karl Marx
The
saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.
~Isaac Asimov, Isaac Asimov's
Book of Science and Nature Quotations, 1988
When a machine begins to run without human aid, it is time to scrap
it - whether it be a factory or a government.
~Alexander Chase, Perspectives,
1966
We are becoming the servants in thought, as in action, of the machine we have created to serve
us.
~John Kenneth Galbraith
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.
~Brian Eno, Wired, January
1999
Use of advanced messaging technology does not imply an endorsement of western industrial civilization.
~Anonymous email sig line
Once
upon a time we were just plain people. But that was before we began having relationships with mechanical systems.
Get involved with a machine and sooner or later you are reduced to a factor.
~Ellen Goodman, "The Human
Factor," The Washington Post, January 1987
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.
~E.F. Schumacher
Technology presumes there's just one right way to do things and there never is.
~Robert M. Pirsig
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.
~Pearl S. Buck
The
real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.
~B.F. Skinner, Contingencies
of Reinforcement, 1969
The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges
him more deeply into them.
~Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand,
and Stars, 1939
What the country needs are a few labor-making inventions.
~Arnold Glasow
Humanity
is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.
~R. Buckminster Fuller
The
greatest task before civilization at present is to make machines what they ought to be, the slaves, instead of the masters
of men.
~Havelock Ellis
The
factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The
dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment.
~Warren G. Bennis
It
is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being.
~John Stuart Mill
Any
sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
~Arthur C. Clarke
You
cannot endow even the best machine with initiative; the jolliest steam-roller will not plant flowers.
~Walter Lippmann
We
live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and
technology.
~Carl Sagan
Where
there is the necessary technical skill to move mountains, there is no need for the faith that moves mountains.
~Eric Hoffer
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
Civilization
advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.
~Alfred North Whitehead
Education
makes machines which act like men and produces men who act like machines.
~Erich Fromm
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.
~Alan C. Kay
Lo!
Men have become the tools of their tools.
~Henry David Thoreau
For
a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of life, please press three.
~Alice Kahn
The
real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers.
~Sydney
J. Harris
