Technology Quotes

It is up to us to decide what human means, and exactly how it is different from machine, and what tasks ought and ought not to be trusted to either species of symbol-processing system. But some decisions must be made soon, while the technology is still young. And the deciding must be shared by as many citizens as possible, not just the experts. In that sense, the most important factor in whether we will all see the dawn of a humane, sustainable world in the twenty-first century will be how we deal with these machines a few of us thought up and a lot of us will be using.

~ Howard Rheingold

My wish simply is to live my life as fully as I can. In both our work and our leisure, I think, we should be so employed. And in our time this means that we must save ourselves from the products that we are asked to buy in order, ultimately, to replace ourselves.

~ Wendell Berry

With today’s technology, social attitudes and appetite for self-actualisation, we’d ideally look upon our work with a sense of pride, involvement and accomplishment. But we’re rarely given the chance. Instead, we pretend to love our jobs with an almost idiotic zeal, while being secretly exhausted and insulted by them.

~ Robert Wringham

Nobody that has seen a baby born can believe in god for a second. When you see your child born, and the panic, and the amount of technology that is saving the life of the two people you love most in the world, when you see how much stainless steel and money it takes to fight off the fact that god wants both those people dead, no one, no one can look into the eyes of a newborn baby and say there's a god, because I'll tell ya, if we were squatting in the woods, the two people I love most would be dead. There's just no way around that. If I were in charge, no way. We need technology to fight against nature; nature so wants us dead. Nature is trying to kill us.

~ Penn Jillette

The paramount doctrine of the economic and technological euphoria of recent decades has been that everything depends on innovation. It was understood as desirable, and even necessary, that we should go on and on from one technological innovation to the next, which would cause the economy to grow and make everything better and better. This of course implied at every point a hatred of the past, of all things inherited and free. All things superceded in our progress of innovations, whatever their value might have been, were discounted as of no value at all.

~ Wendell Berry

I've heard my teacher say, where there are machines, there are bound to be machine worries; where there are machine worries, there are bound to be machine hearts. With a machine heart in your breast, you've spoiled what was pure and simple; and without the pure and simple, the life of the spirit knows no rest.

~ Zhuangzi

The socioeconomic impact of such a minor outburst is due to our technological development (air travel)—a century ago, such an eruption would have passed unnoticed. Technological development makes us more independent from nature. At the same time, at a different level, it makes us more dependent on nature’s whims.

~ Slavoj Žižek

Many of our problems in US maternity care stem from the fact that we leave no room for recognizing when nature is smarter than we are.

~ Ina May Gaskin

For thousands of years, it had been nature--and its supposed creator--that had had a monopoly on awe. It had been the icecaps, the deserts, the volcanoes and the glaciers that had given us a sense of finitude and limitation and had elicited a feeling in which fear and respect coagulated into a strangely pleasing feeling of humility, a feeling which the philosophers of the eighteenth century had famously termed the sublime.But then had come a transformation to which we were still the heirs.... Over the course of the nineteenth century, the dominant catalyst for that feeling of the sublime had ceased to be nature. We were now deep in the era of the technological sublime, when awe could most powerfully be invoked not by forests or icebergs but by supercomputers, rockets and particle accelerators. We were now almost exclusively amazed by ourselves.

~ Alain De Botton

As technology accumulates and people in more parts of the planet become interdependent, the hatred between them tends to decrease, for the simple reason that you can't kill someone and trade with him too.

~ Steven Pinker

[The modern age] knows nothing about isolation and nothing about silence. In our quietest and loneliest hour the automatic ice-maker in the refrigerator will cluck and drop an ice cube, the automatic dishwasher will sigh through its changes, a plane will drone over, the nearest freeway will vibrate the air. Red and white lights will pass in the sky, lights will shine along highways and glance off windows. There is always a radio that can be turned to some all-night station, or a television set to turn artificial moonlight into the flickering images of the late show. We can put on a turntable whatever consolation we most respond to, Mozart or Copland or the Grateful Dead.

~ Wallace Stegner

Technology is a means, not an end, no matter how brilliant it appears. How we use digital technology, exploit it and benefit from it depends on old-fashioned political concepts of how we treat each other: how we approach class, race, gender and war and peace. Nothing has changed in that regard. At present, we are ruled by an extreme version of capitalism called 'neoliberalism'. Technology in the service of any extremism has a catastrophic history.

~ Johnpilger

Cell phones are certainly not necessary, and but I'm from the digital age, this is what everyone in my generation is doing! isn't a very good excuse for being hooked on a glowing screen 24/7. In the 1960's every teen of the times was tripping on acid and running off to find themselves in communes and love buses. It was a fad, there was no excuse for it and it passed, just like I think that this generation's cell phones are necessary for socialization fad will eventually pass. What will it bring afterwards? I don't even want to know, but I'll keep my fingers crossed and hope that it isn't anything else digital.

~ Rebecca Mcnutt

I looked up and she said, You have to believe I did everything a reasonable person would do. Maybe I didn't reach my hands into toilet water, but I did everything else I could.

~ Charlie Close

The iPod completely changed the way people approach music.

~ Karl Lagerfeld

By the way, this tells you why Auto-Tuned vocals on many contemporary records sound so shallow and lifeless. It’s almost as if everything we learned from African American music during the twentieth century was thrown out the window by technologies in the twenty-first century. The goal should not be to sing every note dead center in the middle of the pitch---we escaped from that musical prison a hundred years ago. Why go back? In an odd sort of way, much of contemporary pop music resembles opera, with all the subtle shadings of bent notes and microtonal alterations abandoned in the quest for mathematically pure tones.

~ Ted Gioia

We have every piece of data on 200 million people,” he said, ticking off his fingers. “We have their bank accounts. We know how much they make and how much they spend and where. We have their social media. We know what they talk about, who they influence and how much. We know exactly how important each and everyone one of them is.

~ Yudhanjaya Wijeratne

The future will be different from how they have told us

~ John Nexdar

In the age of technology there is constant access to vast amounts of information. The basket overflows; people get overwhelmed; the eye of the storm is not so much what goes on in the world, it is the confusion of how to think, feel, digest, and react to what goes on.

~ Criss Jami

The externalization of memory [via the use of external symbolic storage systems] has altered the actual memory architecture within which humans think, which is changing the role of biological memory, the way in which the human brain deploys its resources, and the form of modern culture.

~ Merlin Donald

Advanced technology does not always promise a more intelligent civilization. On the contrary, the more the common people rely on technology to do their thinking and solving for them, the less practice there is left for their own brains.

~ Criss Jami

Scientific advancement carries risk,” Kohler argued. “It always has. Space programs, genetic research, medicine—they all make mistakes. Science needs to survive its own blunders, at any cost. For everyone’s sake.”Vittoria was amazed at Kohler’s ability to weigh moral issues with scientific detachment. His intellect seemed to be the product of an icy divorce from his inner spirit. “You think CERN is so critical to the earth’s future that we should be immune from moral responsibility?

~ Dan Brown

Technology causes problems as well as solves problems. Nobody has figured out a way to ensure that, as of tomorrow, technology won't create problems. Technology simply means increased power, which is why we have the global problems we face t

~ Jared Diamond

But what help is it to us to look into the constellation of truth? We look into the danger and see the growth of the saving power.Through this we are not yet saved. But we are thereupon summoned to hope in the growing light of the saving power. How can this happen? Here and now and in little things, that we may foster the saving power in its increase. This includes holding always before our eyes the extreme danger.

~ Martin Heidegger

Knowledge is power and at the end of the day, our health, the health of our children, the health of our community, and the health of Mother Earth is our responsibility. Therefore, it is imperative that we understand the human and environmental affects of the products that we buy.

~ Obiora Embry

Doesn’t that feel safe: a whole world protected by $1 safety-switches.

~ Danny Mekić

The sea in all its vastness is its own, real world. Man is nature's sci-fi.

~ Criss Jami

With every innovation comes a new abuse.

~ David V. Kimball

That’s sad. How plastic and artificial life has become. It gets harder and harder to find something…real.” Nin interlocked his fingers, and stretched out his arms. “Real love, real friends, real body parts…

~ Jess C. Scott

By any measure, we live in an extraordinary and extreme time. Language can no longer describe the world in which we live. With antique ideas and old formulas, we continue to describe a world that is no longer present. In this loss of language, the word gives way to the image as the 'language' of exchange, in which critical thought disappears to a diabolic regime of conformity - the hyper-real, the omnipresent image. Language, real place gives way to numerical code, the real virtual; metaphor to metamorphosis; body to disembodiment; natural to supernatural; many to one. Mystery disappears, replaced by the illusion of certainty in technological perfection.

~ Godfrey Reggio

It is inevitable that machines will one day become the ultimate enemies of mankind. We are not evolving or progressing with our technology, only regressing. Technology is our friend today, but will be our enemy in the future.

~ Suzy Kassem

They say instant communication is not communication at all but merely a frantic, trivial, nerve-wracking bombardment of clichés, threats, fads, fashions, gibberish and advertising. However, who has not hung on a scripture, a quote, a statement, only to stumble upon the key phrase that brought all things to a turning point? The greatest sermons and speeches were pieced together by illuminating thoughts that powered men to surpass their own commonness. It is the sparkling magic of letters forming words, and those words colliding with passion, that makes statements into wisdom.

~ Shannon L. Alder

Sex × Technology = the Future.

~ J.g. Ballard

Man kept control over the machines he created, I wish God would have done the same with the man he created.

~ Amit Kalantri

Remember when only a few people had mobile phones. Generally regarded as an object of derision, you would occasionally see business types clutching those ridiculous grey bricks to their faces and mutter to yourself 'what a prick.' Nowadays, an eyebrow hardly even flutters when we see a ten-year-old child happily texting away. You probably wouldn't notice anyway; you'd be too busy downloading an app that could definitively pinpoint who it was that had just farted in your tube carriage.

~ Simon Pegg

That’s what children eventually were for their aging parents: custodians of technology, free personal IT departments keeping them from disappearing forever from the universal cloud.

~ Christopher Bollen

What is childhood without stories? And how will children fall in love with stories without bookstores? You can't get that from a computer.

~ Sarah Jio

Everyone will be tracked, cradle to grave, with no possibility of escape.

~ Dave Eggers

The Internet is the Petri dish of humanity. We can't control what grows in it, but we don't have to watch either.

~ Tiffany Madison

We have too much technological progress, life is too hectic, and our society has only one goal: to invent still more technological marvels to make life even easier and better. The craving for every new scientific discovery breeds a hunger for greater comfort and the constant struggle to achieve it. All that kills the soul, kills compassion, understanding, nobility. It leaves no time for caring what happens to other people, least of all criminals. Even the officials in Venezuela's remote areas are better for they're also concerned with public peace. It gives them many headaches, but they seem to believe that bringing about a man's salvation is worth the effort. I find that magnificent.

~ Henri Charrière