17 quotes
A principal characteristic of technique … is its refusal to tolerate moral judgments. It is absolutely independent of them and eliminates them from its domain.
The Technological Society (1954)
Technique is totally irrelevant to this notion and pursues no end, professed or unprofessed.
The Technological Society (1954)
It tends on the contrary, to create a completely independent technical morality.
The Technological Society (1954)
Science brings to the light of day everything man had believed sacred. Technique takes possession of it and enslaves it.
The Technological Society (1954)
Journalistic content is a technical complex expressly intended to adapt man to the machine.
The Technological Society (1954)
The invasion of technique desacralizes the world in which man is called upon to live. For technique nothing is sacred, there is no mystery, no taboo.
The Technological Society (1964)
Our civilization is first and foremost a civilization of means; in the reality of modern life, the means, it would seem, are more important than the ends.
The Technological Society (1954)
Freedom is completely without meaning unless it is related to necessity, unless it represents victory over necessity.
The Technological Society (1954)
The search for justice before God, the measuring of technique by other criteria than those of technique itself—these were the great obstacles that Christianity opposed to technical progress.
The Technological Society (1964)
The individual who is the servant of technique must be completely unconscious of himself.
The Technological Society (1954)
True technique will know how to maintain the illusion of liberty, choice, and individuality; but these will have been carefully calculated so that they will be integrated into the mathematical reality merely as appearances!
The Technological Society (1954)
No technique is possible when men are free. … Technique requires predictability and, no less, exactness of prediction. It is necessary, then, that technique prevail over the human being. … The individual must be fashioned by techniques … in order to wipe out the blots his personal determination introduces into the perfect design of the organization.
The Technological Society (1954)
We may quote here Jacques Soustelle’s well-known remark of May, 1960, in reference to the atomic bomb. ... “Since it was possible, it was necessary.” Really a master phrase for all technical evolution.
The Technological Society (1964)
It is not true that the perfection of police power is the result of the state’s Machiavellianism or of some transitory influence. The whole structure of society of society implies it, of necessity. The more we mobilize the forces of nature, the more must we mobilize men and the more do we require order.
The Technological Society (1954)
But if technique demands the participation of everybody, this means that the individual is reduced to a few essential functions which make him a mass man. He remains 'free', but he can no longer escape being a part of the mass. Technical expansion requires the widest possible domain. In the near future not even the whole earth may be sufficient.
The Technological Society (1954)
Sport is linked with the technical world because sport itself is a technique. The enormous contrast between the athletes of Greece and those of Rome is well known. For the Greeks, physical exercise was an ethic for developing freely and harmoniously the form and strength of the human body. For the Romans, it was a technique for increasing the legionnaire’s efficiency. The Roman conception prevails today.
The Technological Society (1954)
Sport carries on without deviation the mechanical tradition of furnishing relief and distraction to the worker after he has finished his work proper so that he is at no time independent of one technique or another. In sport the citizen of the technical society finds the same spirit, criteria, morality, actions and objectives—in short, all the technical laws and customs—which he encounters in office or factory.
The Technological Society (1954)