SCEN103 Quotations Page
Quotations Relevant to Technology
After reviewing the following quotations, find
an additional quotation relevant to technology.
This quote should either mention technology directly
or be open to reinterpretation in light of technology.
Use any available resources that you have, which may include Internet resources,
library references, current magazines, lyrics...
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The Good?
-
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
ARTHUR C. CLARKE,
The Lost Worlds of 2001.
(Dutton)
-
Men are only so good as their technical developments allows them to be.
GEORGE ORWELL,
Inside the Whale and Other Essays, "Charles Dickens," 1940.
(Columbia)
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However far modern science and technics have fallen short of their inherent
possibilities, they have taught mankind at least one lesson:
Nothing is impossible.
LEWIS MUMFORD,
Technics and Civilization, 1934.
(Columbia)
-
Science can amuse and fascinate us all,
but it is engineering that changes the world.
ISAAC ASIMOV,
Isaac Asimov's Book of Science and Nature Quotations,
1988.
(S&S)
-
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public
relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.
RICHARD P. FEYNMAN,
What Do You Care What Other People Think?
(Dutton)
Photo
of Feynman lecturing, from
PhotoNet,
CalTech's archive.
-
There are, as we have seen, a number of different
modes of technological innovation. Before the seventeenth
century inventions (empirical or scientific) were
diffused by imitation and adaption while improvement
was established by the survival of the fittest. Now,
technology has become a complex but consciously
directed group of social activities involving a wide
range of skills, exemplified by scientific research,
managerial expertise, and practical and inventive
abilities. The powers of technology appear to be
unlimited. If some of the dangers may be great, the
potential rewards are greater still. This is not simply
a matter of material benefits for, as we have seen, major
changes in thought have, in the past, occurred as
consequences of technological advances.
D. S. L. CARDWELL,
Concluding paragraph of "Technology," in
Dictionary of the History of Ideas, 1973.
-
I'm not sure what solutions we'll find to deal with all our environmental
problems, but I'm sure of this:
They will be provided by industry; they will be products of technology.
Where else can they come from?
GEORGE M. KELLER,
Nation's Business,
12 June 1988.
(S&S)
-
Technology, when misused, poisons air, soil, water and lives.
But a world without technology would be prey to something worse:
the impersonal ruthlessness of the natural order,
in which the health of a species depends on
relentless sacrifice of the weak.
New York Times,
editorial,
29 August 1986.
(S&S)
-
Technology... is a queer thing.
It brings you great gifts with one hand, and
it stabs you in the back with the other.
C.P. SNOW,
New York Times, 15 March 1971.
(S&S)
-
People are the quintessential element in all technology... Once we recognize
the inescapable human nexus of all technology our attitude toward the
reliability problem is fundamentally changed.
GARRETT HARDIN,
Skeptic, July-August 1976.
(S&S)
-
Technology was developed to prevent exhausting labor.
It is now dedicated to trivial conveniences.
B.F. SKINNER.
(Citadel)
Back to Index
The Bad!
-
Why does this magnificent applied science which saves work and makes life
easier bring us so little happiness?
The simple answer runs:
Because we have not yet learned to make sensible use of it.
ALBERT EINSTEIN,
in an address at Cal Tech, 1931.
(Harper)
Photo
of Einstein lecturing at Mt. Wilson, from
PhotoNet,
CalTech's archive.
-
We have become a people unable to comprehend the technology we invent.
ASSOCIATION OF AMERICAN COLLEGES,
Report, "Integrity in the College Curriculum,"
February 1985.
(S&S)
-
If we had a reliable way to label our toys good and bad, it would be easy to
regulate technology wisely. But we can rarely see far enough ahead to know
which road leads to damnation. Whoever concerns himself with big technology,
either to push it forward or to stop it, is gambling in human
lives.
FREEMAN DYSON,
Disturbing the Universe, 1979.
(Columbia)
-
Despite the dazzling successes of modern technology and the unprecedented
power of modern military systems, they suffer from a common and catastrophic
fault.
While providing us with a bountiful supply of food, with great industrial
plants, with high-speed transportation, and with military weapons
of unprecedented power, they threaten our very survival.
BARRY COMMONER,
Science and Survival, 1966.
(Harper, S&S)
-
It is not enought that you should understand about applied science in order
that your work may increase man's blessings.
Concern for man himself and his fate must always form the chief interest
of all technical endeavors, concern fo the great unsolved problems of
organization of labor and the distribution of goods --
in order that the creations of our mind shall be a blessing and not a
curse to mankind.
Never forget this in the midst of your diagrams and equations.
ALBERT EINSTEIN,
in an address at Cal Tech, 1931.
(Harper)
Portrait
of younger Einstein (~1908), from
PhotoNet,
CalTech's archive.
-
America's technology has turned in upon itself; its corporate form makes it
the servant of profits, not the servant of human needs.
ALICE EMBREE,
quoted in Robin Morgan, Sisterhood is Powerful, 1970.
(Harper, S&S)
-
Technology, while adding daily to our physical ease,
throws daily another loop of fine wire around our souls.
It contributes hugely to our mobility,
which we must not confuse with freedom.
The extensions of our senses, which we find so fascinating,
are not adding to the discrimination of our minds,
since we need increasingly to take the reading of a needle on a dial to
discover whether we think something is good or bad, or right or wrong.
ADLAI E. STEVENSON,
"My Faith in Democratic Capitalism,"
in Fortune magazine, October, 1955.
(Harper, S&S)
-
Technology... the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to
experience it.
MAX FRISCH,
Quoted in Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image.
(Dutton, Columbia)
-
If there is technological advance without social advance, there is, almost
automatically, an increase in human misery, in impoverishment.
MICHAEL HARRINGTON,
The Other America, 1962.
(Columbia)
-
By his very success in inventing labor-saving devices,
modern man has manufactured an abyss of boredom that only the
privileged classes in earlier civilizations have ever fathomed.
LEWIS MUMFORD,
The Conduct of Life, "The Challenge of Renewal," 1951.
(Columbia)
-
Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from
serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU,
Walden, "Economy," 1854.
(Columbia)
-
The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but
plunges him more deeply into them.
ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPERY,
Wind, Sand, and Stars, 1939.
(Dutton, S&S)
-
Our contemporary culture, primed by population growth and driven by
technology, has created problems of environmental degradation that directly
affect all of our senses: noise, odors and toxins which bring physical pain
and suffering, and ugliness, barrenness, and homogeneity of experience which
bring emotional and psychological suffering and emptiness.
In short, we are jeopardizing our human qualities by pursuing technology as
an end rather than a means.
Too often we have failed to ask two necessary questions:
First, what human purpose will a given technology or development serve?
Second, what human and environmental effects will it have?
U.S. SENATE PUBLIC WORKS COMMITTEE,
report on water pollution bill, 7 August 1969.
(S&S)
-
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 technology of yesterday.
DENNIS GABOR,
Innovations: Scientific Technological and Social, 1970.
(S&S)
-
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, history and tradition, the amenities
and civilities, the privacy and spaciousness of life, much beauty, and the
fragile, slow-growing social structures that bind us together.
CHARLES A. REICH,
The Greening of America, 1970.
(S&S)
-
The supersonic transport (SST) summarizes, in one project, our society's
demented priorities. It is a virtual catalog of the reasons why the United
States is ailing in the midst of its affluence -- nationalistic vanity,
pandering to corporate profit, the worship of technology, and the
deteriorating human environment.
BRENN STILLEY,
in Garrett De Bell, ed., The Environmental Handbook, 1970.
(S&S)
-
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.
RENE DUBOS,
A God Within, 1972.
(S&S)
-
Technology can relieve the symptoms of a problem without affecting the
underlying causes. Faith in technology as the ultimate solution to all
problems can thus divert our attention from the most fundamental problem --
the problem of growth in a finite system --
and prevent us from taking effective action to solve it.
DONELLA A MEADOWS et al.,
The Limits to Growth, 1972.
(S&S)
-
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.
(S&S)
-
Even bigger machines, entailing even bigger concentrations of economic power
and exerting ever greater violence against the environment, do not represent
progress: they are a denial of wisdom. Wisdom demands a new orientation of
science and technology towards the organic, the gentle, the nonviolent, the
elegant and beautiful.
E.F. SCHUMACHER,
Small is Beautiful, 1973.
(S&S)
-
Any demanding high technology tends to develop influential and dedicated
constituencies of those who link its commercial success with both the public
welfare and their own. Such sincerely held beliefs, peer pressures, and the
harsh demands that the work itself places on time and energy all tend to
discourage such people from acquiring a similarly thorough knowledge of
alternative policies and the need to discuss them.
AMORY B. LOVINS,
Foreign Affairs, October 1976.
(S&S)
-
Presumably, technology has made man increasingly independent of his
environment. But, in fact, technology has merely substituted nonrenewable
resources for renewables, which is more an increase than a decrease in
dependence.
HERMAN E. DALY,
Steady-State Economics,
1977.
(S&S)
-
We must ask whether our machine technology makes us proof against all those
destructive forces which plagued Roman society and ultimately wrecked Roman
civilization. Our reliance -- an almost religious reliance -- upon the power
of science and technology to forever ensure the progress of our society, might
blind us to some very real problems which cannot be solved by science and
technology.
ROBERT STRAUSZ-HUPE,
Philadelphia Inquirer,
1978.
(S&S)
-
There is unquestionably a contradiction between an efficient technological
machine and the flowering of human nature, of the human personality.
ARTHUR MILLER.
(Citadel)
Back to Index
The Inevitable.
-
That great, growling engine of change -- technology.
ALVIN TOFFLER,
Future Shock, 1970.
(Harper, S&S)
-
Technology feeds on itself. Technology makes more technology possible.
ALVIN TOFFLER,
Future Shock, 1970.
(Harper, S&S)
-
Each new machine or technique, in a sense, changes all existing machines and
techniques, by permitting us to put them together into new combinations.
The number of possible combinations rises exponentially as the number of new
machines or techniques rises arithmetically.
Indeed, each new combination may, itself,
be regarded as a new super-machine.
ALVIN TOFFLER,
Future Shock, 1970.
(Harper)
-
The advance of technology, like the growth of population and industry, has
also been proceeding exponentially.
CARL KAYSEN,
Foreign Affairs, Summer 1972.
(S&S)
-
Science and technology multiply around us.
To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak
and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.
J.G. BALLARD,
Introduction, 1974, to the French edition of Crash, 1973.
(Columbia)
-
To appeal to contemporary man to revert, in this twentieth century,
to a pagan-like nature worship in order to restrain technology from further
encroachment and devastation of the resources of nature,
is a piece of atavistic nonsense.
NORMAN LAMM,
Faith and Doubt, 1971.
(S&S)
-
What we are finding out now is that there are not only limits to growth
but also to technology and that we cannot allow technology to go on
without public consent.
DAVID R. BROWER,
Skeptic, July-August 1976.
(S&S)
-
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,
quoted in The American Land,
1979.
(S&S)
-
Technology shapes society and society shapes technology.
ROBERT W. WHITE,
Environmental Science and Technology, 1990.
(S&S)
Back to Index
The Future
-
The choice of technology, whether for a rich or a poor country, is probably
the most important decision to be made.
GEORGE McROBIE,
quoted in Conservation Foundation Letter,
October 1976.
(S&S)
-
The question is not whether "big is ugly," "small is beautiful," or
technology is "appropriate."
It is whether technologists will be ready for the demanding,
often frustrating task of working with critical laypeople to develop
what is needed or whether they will try to remain isolated,
a luxury I doubt society will allow any longer.
ROBERT C. COWAN,
Technology Review,
February 1980.
(S&S)
-
Our way of life has been influenced by the way technology has developed.
In future, it seems to me, we ought to try to reverse this and so develop
our technology that it meets the needs of the sort of life we wish to
lead.
PRINCE PHILIP,
Men, Machines and Sacred Cows,
1984.
(S&S)
-
I have no doubt that it is possible to give a new direction to technological
development, a direction that shall lead it back to the real needs of man,
and that also means: to the actual size of man. Man is small, and, therefore,
small is beautiful. To go for giantism is to go for self-destruction.
E.F. SCHUMACHER,
Small is Beautiful, 1973.
(Columbia)
Back to Index
The Internet
-
Is it a fact, or have I dreamt it -- that, by means of electricity, the
world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles
in a breathless point of time?
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE,
The House of the Seven Gables.
(Dutton)
-
Since we have no choice but to be swept along by [this] vast technological
surge, we might as well learn to surf.
MICHAEL SOULE,
in David Western and Mary C. Pearl,
Conservation for the 21st Century,
1989.
(S&S)
-
The electric age ... established a global network that has much the
character of our central nervous system.
MARSHALL McLUHAN,
Understanding Media.
(Dutton)
-
The open society, the unrestricted access to knowledge, the unplanned
and uninhibited association of men for its furtherance --
these are what may make a vast, complex, ever growing, ever changing,
ever more specialized and expert technological world, nevertheless a
world of human community.
J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER,
Science and the Common Understanding, 1953.
(Bartlett)
Photo
of Oppenheimer, from
PhotoNet,
CalTech's archive.
-
When I took office, only high energy physicists had ever heard of
what is called the Worldwide Web.... Now even my cat has its own
page.
President WM. CLINTON,
during announcement of Next Generation
Internet initiative, 1996.
Back to Index
My Philosophy
-
Damn the torpedoes -- full speed ahead!
Admiral DAVID GLASGOW FARRAGUT,
At the Battle of Mobile Bay, August 5, 1864.
(Bartlett)
-
If it wasn't for the last minute panic, nothing would ever get done.
ANONYMOUS?
Back to Index
Harper = The Harper Book of American Quotations
Columbia = The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations
S&S = A Dictionary of Environmental Quotations, Simon & Schuster
Citadel = Quotations for the New Age, The CitadelPress
Dutton = The New International Dictionary of Quotations
Bartlett = Familiar Quotations
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.
It is the source of all true art and all science.
He to whom this emotion is a stranger,
who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe,
is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
(From Steve Spanoudi's
Quotations Page)
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Last updated Sept. 29, 1996.
Copyright George Watson, Univ. of Delaware, 1996.