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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 foundation of all technology is fire.

Isaac Asimov Asimov's Chronology of the World (1991)

Only a thoughtless observer can deny that correspondences come into play between the world of modern technology and the archaic symbol-world of mythology.

Walter Benjamin Arcades Project (1927)

Successful innovators focused on technology as a driver of value, not just as a tool for operational efficiency.

Constantinos C. Markides

For many purposes of organizational analysis technology might not be an independent variable but a dependent one.

Charles Perrow Charles Perrow (1967)

Technology is built and used within certain social and historical circumstances and its form and functioning will bear the imprint of those conditions.

Wanda Orlikowski

Tech companies must do more to stop his messages being broadcast.

Sajid Javid

Don’t overestimate your familiarity with technologies you barely understand. It could be your undoing.

Alastair Reynolds Redemption Ark (2002)

Technology is in its essence something which man cannot master by himself.

Martin Heidegger Only a God Can Save Us (1966)

More than anything else technology creates our world. It creates our wealth, our economy, our very way of being.

W. Brian Arthur The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves (2009)

Inactivated virus vaccines have the advantage of being a tried-and-true technology that can be scaled up in many countries. Those manufacturing plants are out there, and they can be used.

Florian Krammer Florian Krammer (2020)

A technology that by chance gains an early lead in adoption may eventually 'corner the market' of potential adopters, with the other technologies becoming locked out.

W. Brian Arthur Competing Technologies, Increasing Returns and Lock-in by Historical Events (1989)

Technology...has become the prime source of material change and so determines the pattern of the total social fabric.

Robert Jacobus Forbes

Science vs. Technology: We should know why things must act as they do, to make them act as we want them to.

Saul Gorn

We know from experience that technology can be changed. We have learned in the quality-of-working-life enterprise not to accept the technological imperative.

Eric Trist Eric Trist cited in: Alternatives. Vol 8 (1980)

We have depended on donor countries for scientific development for so long. It's time we commit more resources in our national budget to advance science and technology.

Bingu wa Mutharika Bingu wa Mutharika (2007)

[ Technology is] the instrumentality for accessing and using free energies in human societies for human and social purposes.

Ervin László Laszlo (1992)

Technology is anything that wasn't around when you were born.

Alan Kay

I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.

Kurt Vonnegut A Man Without a Country (2005)

This is why I loved technology: if you used it right, it could give you power and privacy.

Cory Doctorow Little Brother (2008)

The bureaucrat was sensitive to this kind of friction. It arose wherever the moving edge of technology control touched on local pride.

Michael Swanwick Stations of the Tide (1991)

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