Technology Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

The bullying powers use different excuses to prevent transfer of science and technology and progress of the nations of our region.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

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

W. Brian Arthur

Science that abdicates its cultural values risks being perceived as an extension of technology, an instrument in the hands of political or economic power. Humanity that disavows science risks falling into the hands of superstition.

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

Constantinos C. Markides

Ronald Reagan…is attempting a great breakthrough in political technology—he has been perfecting the Teflon-coated Presidency. He sees to it that nothing sticks to him.

Patricia Schroeder

With the indiscriminate nature of modern military technology (no such thing as a "smart bomb," it turns out) all wars are wars against civilians, and are therefore inherently immoral. This is true even when a war is considered "just," because it is fought against a tyrant, against an aggressor, to correct a stolen boundary.

It is sheer nonsense to expect that any human being has yet been able to attain such insight into the problems of society that he can really identify the central problems and determine how they should be solved. The systems in which we live are far too complicated as yet for our intellectual powers and technology to understand.

C. West Churchman

I have traveled many times outside Iran, and have discussed the issue [of the Iranian nuclear project]. I have been asked for my opinion and that of the Iranian Jewish community, and I have always emphasized that the Iranian people has the right to obtain nuclear technology and energy for peaceful purposes. The Iranian people must not give up this right under any circumstances - and indeed, it will not.

Maurice Motamed

The results of Socrates' martyrdom and Plato's unexcelled prose that followed are nothing less than the whole world of Western man as we know it. If the idea of truth had been allowed to perish unrediscovered by the Renaissance it's unlikely that we would be much beyond the level of prehistoric man today. The ideas of science and technology and other systematically organized efforts of man are dead-centered on it. It is the nucleus of it all.

Robert M. Pirsig

Soil is not usually lost in slabs or heaps of magnificent tonnage. It is lost a little at a time over millions of acres by the careless acts of millions of people. It cannot be saved by heroic feats of gigantic technology, but only by millions of small acts and restraints, conditioned by small fidelities, skills, and desires. Soil loss is ultimately a cultural problem; it will be corrected only by cultural solutions.

Unless the world is substantially altered for the worst, the logical outcome of technology's influence on art before the end of this century should be a series of art forms that manifest true intelligence, but perhaps more meaningfully, with a capacity for reciprocal relationships with human beings.

Technology paces industry, but there's a long lag in the process. Industry paces economics. It changes the tools, a great ecological change. And in that manner we come finally to everyday life.
The politician is someone who deals in man's problems of adjustment. To ask a politician to lead us is to ask the tail of a dog to lead the dog.

Buckminster Fuller

Law and technology produce, together, a kind of regulation of creativity we've not seen before.

Lawrence Lessig

In every case do the opposite to whatever technology does today. Then you will always be on the right track.

Viktor Schauberger

Industrialism implies technology and the cutting of time into precise fragments suited to the needs of the engineer and the accountant.

It isn't pleasant to surrender to the hegemony of a nation which is still wild and primitive, and to concede the absolute superiority of its customs and institutions, science and technology, literature and art. Must one sacrifice so much in the name of the unity of mankind?

Czesław Miłosz

I doubt that pornography has been good for the advancement of society, but I suspect it's done wonders for the advancement of computer technology.

Chuck Klosterman

We are ready to expand the friendly people-to-people exchanges and enhance exchanges and cooperation in science, technology, culture, education, and other areas.

Commercial jazz, soap opera, pulp fiction, comic strips, the movies set the images, mannerisms, standards, and aims of the urban masses. In one way or another, everyone is equal before these cultural machines; like technology itself, the mass media are nearly universal in their incidence and appeal. They are a kind of common denominator, a kind of scheme for pre-scheduled, mass emotions.

C. Wright Mills

BASIC is to computation what QWERTY is to typing. Many teachers have learned BASIC, many books have been written about it, many computers have been built in such a way that BASIC is "hardwired" into them. In the case of the typewriter, we noted how people invent "rationalizations" to justify the status quo. In the case of BASIC, the phenomenon has gone much further, to the point where it resembles ideology formation. Complex arguments are invented to justify features of BASIC that were originally included because the primitive technology demanded them or because alternatives were not well enough known at the time the language was designed.

Today, for the mass of humanity, science and technology embody 'miracle, mystery, and authority'. Science promises that the most ancient human fantasies will at last be realized. Sickness and ageing will be abolished; scarcity and poverty will be no more; the species will become immortal. Like Christianity in the past, the modern cult of science lives on the hope of miracles. But to think that science can transform the human lot is to believe in magic. Time retorts to the illusions of humanism with the reality: frail, deranged, undelivered humanity. Even as it enables poverty to be diminished and sickness to be alleviated, science will be used to refine tyranny and perfect the art of war.

The emergence of computer technology in World War II and its rapidly growing power in the second half of this century made it possible to deal with increasingly complex problems, some of which began to resemble the notion of organized complexity. Initially, it was the common belief of many scientists that the level of complexity we can handle is basically a matter of the level of computational power at our disposal. Later, in the early 1960s, this naive belief was replaced with a more realistic outlook.

The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs.

If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would've come off the whole enterprise, I'd say it was the sitcom. [...] For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before—free time.

And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV. [...]

And it's only now, as we're waking up from that collective bender, that we're starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We're seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody's basement.

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.