Technology Quotes

“Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim gun, and they have not.”
― Hilaire Belloc

“Technology is anything invented after you were born.”
― Alan Kay

“I have sought to offer humanists a detailed analysis of a technology sufficiently magnificent and spiritual to convince them that the machines by which they are surrounded are cultural artifacts worthy of their attention and respect.”
― Bruno Latour, Aramis, or The Love of Technology

“To the Technocrats: Have mercy on us. Relax a bit, take time out for simple pleasures. For example, the luxuries of electricity, indoor plumbing, central heating, instant electronic communication and such, have taught me to relearn and enjoy the basic human satisfactions of dipping water from a cold clear mountain stream; of building a wood fire in a cast-iron stove; of using long winter nights for making music, making things, making love; of writing long letters, in longhand with a fountain pen, to the few people on this earth I truly care about.”
― Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast

“I'm not sure he's wrong about automobiles," he said. "With all their speed forward they may be a step backward in civilization -- that is, in spiritual civilization. It may be that they will not add to the beauty of the world, nor to the life of men's souls.”
― Booth Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons

“Many aspects of our screen-bound lives are bad for our social skills simply because we get accustomed to controlling the information that comes in, managing our relationships electronically, deleting stuff that doesn't interest us. We edit the world; we select from menus; we pick and choose; our social 'group' focuses on us and disintegrates without us. This makes it rather confusing for us when we step outdoors and discover that other people's behaviour can't be deleted with a simple one-stroke command or dragged to the trash icon.”
― Lynne Truss, Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door

“Alas, our technology has marched ahead of our spiritual and social evolution, making us, frankly, a dangerous people.”
― Steven M. Greer

“Witchcraft had once been widely used before cursed by the society.
I see today the society presumes technology will have a different treatment.”
― Toba Beta [Betelgeuse Incident], Betelgeuse Incident: Insiden Bait Al-Jauza

“I can't blame modern technology for my predilection for distraction, not after all the hours I've spent watching lost balloons disappear into the clouds. I did it before the Internet, and I'll do it after the apocalypse, assuming we still have helium and weak-gripped children.”
― Colson Whitehead

“If Paul Revere had been a modern day citizen, he wouldn't have ridden down Main Street. He would have tweeted.”
― Alec Ross

“Twittering just seemed to be people telling other people what they were doing--getting in the shower, making coffee. Who on earth wanted to know these things?...Babble and twitter. Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
― Kate Atkinson, Started Early, Took My Dog

“Because you can text while doing something else, texting does not seem to take time but to give you time. This is more than welcome; it is magical.”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“Computers are heaven-sent when they work and hell-spawn when they don't.
There's just not much middle ground when it comes to technology.”
― Dani Harper

“It bears emphasizing: our traditional ways of thinking have ignored - and virtually made invisible - the relationship between people and technology.”
― Kim J. Vicente

“[N]ew technology enables new kinds of group-forming.”
― Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

“People addicted with technology.
Technology has indulged mankind.
Beware of technology dependency!”
― Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity

“Once upon a time in the land of Shinar, God came down to see the city and the tower. People were united and spoke in one language. Then God confound their language and caused them scattered all over the planet earth. I believe, because of our technology, there will be one computer-based language on earth. Then God will come back again and make us all scattered all over the stars constellation.”
― Toba Beta

“What was achieved under Nazi-fascism through bloody terror against the organized workers’ movement and the people is to be achieved again today in West Europe through the “information society”
― Red Army Faction

“How do you explain plastic to a medieval forest bard?”
― Jefferson Smith, Strange Places

“A citizen at his home in Rockford, Illinois, or Boulder, Colorado, could read a newspaper, listen to a radio, or watch the round-the-clock coverage on television, but he had no way of connecting with those who shared his views. Nor was there a quick, readily available tool for an ordinary citizen to gather information on his own. In 1960, communication was a one-way street, and information was fundamentally inaccessible. The whole idea of summoning up data or reaching thousands of individuals with the touch of a finger was a science-fiction fantasy.”
― Jeff Greenfield, Then Everything Changed: Stunning Alternate Histories of American Politics: JFK, RFK, Carter, Ford, Reagan

“Within this new work of art a creature from beyond the reach of Humanity has insinuated herself and now lurks there at the heart of the mystery, a power unimagined before our time.”
― Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Tomorrow's Eve

“Size does matter.
Nano even better.”
― Toba Beta [Betelgeuse Incident], Betelgeuse Incident: Insiden Bait Al-Jauza

“Technology is a goddamn bully.”
― Scott Cherney, Red Asphalt

“In terms of technological progress,
the public is slower than focus group.”
― Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity

“[B]ecause the minimum costs of being an organization in the first place are relatively high, certain activities may have some value but not enough to make them worth pursuing in any organized way. New social tools are altering this equation by lowering the costs of coordinating group action.”
― Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

“It wasn't science and technology that cause a slow progress,
but collective knowledge of the society and market demands.”
― Toba Beta, Betelgeuse Incident: Insiden Bait Al-Jauza

“From the perspective of deep time, we are extracting Earth's geological history to serve a split second of contemporary technological time, building devices like the Amazon Echo and iPhone that are often designed to last for only a few years.”
― Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence

“Controlling time — whether via the clocks for churches, trains or data centers — has always been a function of controlling the political order.”
― Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence

“It is a common practice of life to focus on the world immediately before us, the one we see and smell and touch every day. It grounds us where we are, with our communities and our known corners and concerns. But to see the full supply chains of Al requires looking for patterns in a global sweep, a sensitivity to the ways in which the histories and specific harms are different from place to place and yet are deeply interconnected by the multiple forces of extraction.”
― Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence