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Technology Quotes

The top names on this page are sociologists and engineers, among them Charles Perrow, W. Brian Arthur and Tim Berners-Lee, with the novelist John Brunner. Aldous Huxley, in Ends and Means (1937), says technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards. Freeman Dyson, in Infinite in All Directions (1988), says the technologies with the deepest effects on human life are usually simple. Eric Hoffer, in 1973, wondered about a generation that demands instant satisfaction of all its needs.

The one flagged entry is “Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology,” credited to Larry Niven and marked misattributed.

Random quote on Technology

Most quoted on technology:

If a sleep monitor has electrodes and wires that look like something from Frankenstein's lab, you might not wear it consistently, and the information it gathers and reports may be compromised.

Philippe Kahn

There are some people who imagine that older adults don't know how to use the internet. My immediate reaction is, "I've got news for you, we invented it."

Vint Cerf Your Life: Vinton Cerf (2016)

The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That’s why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system.

Arthur C. Clarke

One wonders whether a generation that demands instant satisfaction of all its needs and instant solution of the world's problems will produce anything of lasting value.

Eric Hoffer Reflections on the Human Condition (1973)

There is nothing that is truly free nor democratic enough. Make no mistake, the internet did not come to save the world.

José Saramago

I yearned for that future. I wanted to live in the illusion that persuades us that true-life experience can be obtained on the Internet.

Lucius Shepard

I don’t think there is, or ever again can be, a cure for unemployment. Unemployment is not a disease, but the natural, healthy functioning of an advanced technological society.

Robert Anton Wilson

Technology [is] the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it.

Max Frisch Homo Faber (1957)

All technologies should be assumed guilty until proven innocent.

Jerry Mander

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.

Carl Sagan

All the free stuff that you take for granted online is only free because you are the product.

John Oliver

The Internet has made me very casual with a level of omniscience that was unthinkable a decade ago. I now wonder if God gets bored knowing the answer to everything.

Douglas Coupland

Technology is so much fun but we can drown in our technology. The fog of information can drive out knowledge.

Daniel J. Boorstin

They can't ignore us, and they can't put us down. Thank God for the Internet, or we wouldn't know anything, and we would already be a fascist state.

Cindy Sheehan

I don't believe in evolution, like people believe in God ... Science and technology are not advanced by people who believe, but by people who don't know but are doing their best to find out.

Terry Pratchett

For perhaps the first time in history, we have the resources, the know-how and the technology to make starvation and dependency relics of the past. But do we have the will?

Desmond Tutu

There is a demon in technology. It was put there by man and man will have to exorcise it before technological civilization can achieve the eighteenth-century ideal of humane civilized life.

René Dubos A God Within (1972)

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)

A fundamental rule in technology says that whatever can be done will be done.

Andrew Grove to Andy Grove in: Ciarán Parker (2006)

I think that the online world has actually brought books back. People are reading because they're reading the damn screen. That's more reading than people used to do.

Bill Murray

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