17 quotes
This growing consumption is a sign not of abundance but of poverty; it is bound up with worry, want, and toil.
The Failure of Technology (1956)
No doubt the wise thing to do is to eat the apple itself rather than swallow the vitamins which may be extracted from it.
The Failure of Technology (1956)
The difference is fundamental, for in the first instance I am acting like a sick person, in the second like a healthy one.
The Failure of Technology (1956)
Without mechanical laws, that exactitude could not be achieved which in itself is nothing but the mechanical certainty that identical causes always produce identical effects.
The Failure of Technology (1956)
Man becomes organizable to the extent to which he practices mechanical activities.
The Failure of Technology (1956)
The machine gives a hungry impression. And this sensation of a growing, gnawing hunger, a hunger that becomes unbearable, emanates from everything in our entire technical arsenal.
The Failure of Technology (1956)
Leisure is the prerequisite of every free thought, every free activity. And this is why only the few are capable of it, since the many, when they have gained time, only kill it.
The Failure of Technology (1956)
The intellectual fascination which machines have held for man from the earliest times is coupled with a presentiment of the uncanny, an almost unaccountable feeling of horror.
The Failure of Technology (1956)
The growing specialization of the sciences, which creates artificial isolation and departmental walls, has its counterpart in technology as it breaks down and cuts up human work.
The Failure of Technology (1956)
Technology can be expected to solve all problems which can be mastered by technical means, but we must expect nothing from it which lies beyond technical possibilities.
The Failure of Technology (1956)
Universities decline in the degree that technical progress spreads into them from the secondary schools. The university becomes a technical training center and servant of technical progress.
The Failure of Technology (1956)
The technological organization of work no longer permits leisure; it grants to the tired laborer only the meager measure of vacation and spare time that is absolutely necessary to maintain his efficiency.
The Failure of Technology (1956)
How clockwork-like is not the whole order of modern civilization, how relentlessly does not technical progress strive to subject everything to this clocklike precision: man's sleep, his work, his rest, and his pleasures!
The Failure of Technology (1956)
The radical consumption of oil, coal, and ore cannot be called economy, however rational the methods of drilling and mining. Underlying strict rationality of technical working methods, we find a way of thinking which cares nothing for the preservation and saving of the substance.
The Failure of Technology (1956)
Obviously, the discovery of ferments, hormones, and vitamins is not only a scientific but also a technical advance. [...] This whole pharmaceutical arsenal is the product of technical specialists who think of the human body as a machine.
The Failure of Technology (1956)
If the universe were to be conceived as a big clock and every movement in it as mechanically measurable and predictable, then the high goal of scientific-technical thinking would be the comprehension of this central mechanism. And the application of that knowledge would mean the complete mechanization of man.
The Failure of Technology (1956)
The natural scientist will always exhibit a tendency to delimit his science as sharply and as narrowly as possible, to make it completely methodical, to systematize it. Natural science thus limits itself to what can be proved mathematically, or to that to which the law of causality applies, or to the purely functional.
The Failure of Technology (1956)