18 quotes
Above all, at some point, everybody is involved in the business of change, not just the so-called "great men."
Connections (1979)
Never before have so many people understood so little about so much.
Connections (1979)
And as it spreads, will it spread the ability to use machines, as we do, without understanding them?
Connections (1979)
The trouble is, that's not easy when you have been taught as I was, for example, that things in the past happened in straight-forward lines.
Connections (1979)
Some things, this ritual says, must be permanent.
The Day the Universe Changed (1985)
A ritual wouldn't be much of a ritual if you didn't feel like you've been put through the wringer, would it?
The Day the Universe Changed (1985)
This makes you think in straight lines. And if today doesn't happen in straight lines -- think of your own experience -- why should the past have?
Connections (1979)
And at the same time, tied us for good, to the things that we invent so that tomorrow will be better than today.
Connections (1979)
None of these guys did anything by themselves; they borrowed from other people's work.
Connections (1979)
You can only know where you're going if you know where you've been.
Connections (1979)
If something becomes common enough to turn into a ritual, and then starts to involve really large numbers of people, that's when the ritual becomes something else.
The Day the Universe Changed (1985)
Today, the nuclear bomb is like a Sword of Damocles hanging over us. Will it fall again?
Connections (1979)
Does the cycle that goes, interest in something, involvement in it, tiring of it, and rejection of it, looking into something else, get shorter every decade?
Connections (1979)
This bomber stands for the interdependent world we have made for ourselves; where the rate of change accelerates every second because every one of man's inventions acts like a trigger to cause change.
Connections (1979)
You see how increasingly the only way we in the advanced industrial nations, with our bewildering technology network, can survive, is by selling bewilderment and dependence on technology to the rest of the world.
Connections (1979)
Following the trail of events from some point in the past to a piece of modern technology is rather like a detective story, with you as the detective, knowing only as much as the people in the past do, and like them having to guess at what was likely to happen next.
Connections (1979)
The name of the game here, and in all the institutions that run your life, is keeping order, because if the institutions didn't do that, it would be the end of civilization as we know it, wouldn't it? So, the institutions are usually old-fashioned; don't like change.
The Day the Universe Changed (1985)
If you believe that science and technology have given us the highest standard of living in history or that they have trapped us inside of a machine we can't escape from, we live in a situation we inherited, as a result of a long and complex series of events through history.
Connections (1979)