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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:

The Internet has given atheists, agnostics, skeptics, the people who like to destroy everything that you and I believe, the almost equal access to your kids as your youth pastor and you have... whether you like it or not.

Josh McDowell

The most important and urgent problems of the technology of today are no longer the satisfactions of the primary needs or of archetypal wishes, but the reparation of the evils and damages by the technology of yesterday.

Dennis Gabor

Technology and production can be great benefactors of man, but they are mindless instruments, and if undirected they careen along with a momentum of their own. In our country, they pulverize everything in their path—the landscape, the natural environment

Charles A. Reich The Greening of America (1970)

It troubles me that we are so easily pressured by purveyors of technology into permitting so-called "progress" to alter our lives without attempting to control it—as if technology were an irrepressible force of nature to which we must meekly submit.

Hyman G. Rickover The American Land (1979)

While technology can be instrumental in closing gaps and reducing social inequality, not everyone feels invited to the party. Religious extremists, fundamentalists and racists of all sorts, find an easy foothold for spreading hatred and anger among youngsters who feel they’re missing out on the spoils of technology.

Yoel Esteron

Imagine Aristotle revivified and visiting Manhattan. Nothing in our social, political, economic, artistic, sexual or religious life would mystify him, but he would be staggered by our technology. Its products—skyscrapers, cars, airplanes, television, pocket calculators—would have been impossible without calculus.

Martin Gardner

We have acquired technical skills on a scale undreamed of even a generation ago. We can do dramatic things and we can do them quickly; by the time damaging side effects are apparent it is often too late, or impossible, to reverse our actions.

Rachel Carson Environmental Hazards: Control of Pesticides and Other Chemical Poisons (1963)

The machine is a slave which serves to make other slaves. Such a domineering and enslaving drive may go together with the quest for human freedom. But it is difficult to liberate oneself by transferring slavery to other beings, men, animals, or machines; to rule over a population of machines subjecting the whole world means still to rule, and all rule implies acceptance of schemata of subjection.

Gilbert Simondon Du mode d'existence des object technique (1958)

This is an age that has produced floods of how-to-do-it books, and it is also an age of how-to-do-it science. It is, in other words, the age of technology, in which if we know how to do something, we do it without pausing to inquire whether we should.

Rachel Carson Speech at Scripps College (1962)

The "hard" science-fiction writers are the ones who try to write specific stories about all that technology may do for us. More and more, these writers felt an opaque wall across the future. Once, they could put such fantasies millions of years in the future. Now they saw that their most diligent extrapolations resulted in the unknowable ... soon.

Vernor Vinge The Coming Technological Singularity (1993)

I’ve heard it said that technology makes a good person better, and it makes a bad person worse. That’s okay with me. I say we keep building new versions of ourselves, keep exploring the unknown, and keep growing.
We’re gonna be fine. Different, but fine.
Because most people are good. Right?

Daniel H. Wilson Amped (2012)

The nature of technology depends very much upon what the public can be induced to put up with.

Joan Robinson Economic Heresies (1971)

Never believe that technology alone will allow America to prevail as a superpower.

Margaret Thatcher

Anyone who has wasted hours surfing the Internet knows that technology can encourage bad habits.

Ted Chiang Exhalation: Stories (2019)

For belligerent purposes, the 14th century, like the 20th, commanded a technology more sophisticated than the mental and moral capacity that guided its use.

Barbara Tuchman A Distant Mirror (1978)

The old truths still hold: without a sustaining civilization, no isolated collection of ships and humans can rebuild the core of technology.

Vernor Vinge A Deepness in the Sky (1999)

Technology has deprived the family of almost all its functions.

Charles A. Reich The Greening of America (1970)

Technology has been defined, perhaps a little ungenerously, as "a long Greek name for a bag of tools".

Vincent Massey Speaking Of Canada (1959)

There are certain truths that, in themselves, are as dangerous as any advanced technology.

Alastair Reynolds Pushing Ice (2005)

Technology is a technique or complex of techniques employed to alter “materials” (human or nonhuman, mental or physical) in an anticipated manner.

Charles Perrow

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