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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:

Technology discloses the active relation of man towards nature, as well as the direct process of production of his very life, and thereby the process of production of his basic societal relations, of his own mentality, and his images of society, too.

Karl Marx Das Kapital (Buch I) (1867)

Making... an art out of your technological life is the way to solve the problem of technology.

Robert M. Pirsig NPR Interview (1974)

Technology is both a tool for helping humans and for destroying them. This is the paradox of our times which we're compelled to face.

Frank Herbert

We are always influenced by the work that we do. Having worked in manufacturing you are always inspired by it, whether it’s the design that goes into products, the production, the science, the technology.

Gavin Williamson

New technologies bring with them new responsibilities for adults.

Paolo Crepet

Piecemeal social engineering resembles physical engineering in regarding the ends as beyond the province of technology. (All that technology may say about ends is whether they are compatible with each other or realizable.)

Karl Popper The Poverty of Historicism (1957)

We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.

Douglas Adams The Salmon of Doubt (2002)

Clarke's Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Arthur C. Clarke Clarke's Three Laws, et al (1962)

Literacy, the visual technology, dissolved the tribal magic by means of its stress on fragmentation and specialization and created the individual.

Marshall McLuhan The Agenbite of Outwit (1998)

Technology happens, it's not good, it's not bad. Is steel good or bad?

Andrew Grove

The way to advance the nation's prosperity and achieve higher standards of living for all is through science and technology, taking advantage of better tools, methods and organization, and substituting machines and power for human backs.

Charles Erwin Wilson Michigan Business Review (1949)

Technology frightens me to death. It's designed by engineers to impress other engineers, and they always come with instruction booklets that are written by engineers for other engineers — which is why almost no technology ever works.

John Cleese

From one point of view, structure is a part of technology; for example the spread of the bureaucratic form of organization might be said to be the most profound technological innovation in the last 3 or 4 centuries.

Charles Perrow

Where we observe the predominance of one technology or one economic outcome over its competitors we should thus be cautious of any exercise that seeks the means by which the winner's innate 'superiority' came to be translated into adoption.

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

Quantum computation is … nothing less than a distinctly new way of harnessing nature … It will be the first technology that allows useful tasks to be performed in collaboration between parallel universes, and then sharing the results.

David Deutsch The Fabric of Reality (1997)

9) Ethics change with technology.

Larry Niven

Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.

Larry Niven Misattributed

We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know that is not true.

Robert Wilensky Attributed

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