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On technology
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Published Wednesday, May 22, 2013 @ 6:10 AM EDT
May 22 2013

A linear projection into the future of any science or technology is like a form of propaganda- often persuasive, almost always wrong.
-Pamela McCorduck

A lot of what appears to be progress is just so much technological rococo.
-Bill Gray

A successful technology creates problems that only it can solve.
-Alan Kay

All scientifically possible technology and social change predicted in science fiction will come to pass, but none of it will work properly.
-Neil Gaiman

All technology should be assumed guilty until proven innocent.
-David Ross Brower

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
-Arthur C. Clarke

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.
-James Klass

Cheese in an aerosol can is the greatest advance in technology since fire.
-James Angove

Each fall at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, football fans cheer for their favorite irrational number: "Cosine, secant, tangent, sine, three point one four one five nine!"
-Bruce Watson

Engineers are always honest in matters of technology and human relationships. That's why it's a good idea to keep engineers away from customers, romantic interests, and other people who can't handle the truth. (From Engineers Explained)
-Unattributed

Even though today's technology provides us with mountains of data, it is useless without judgment.
-Felix G. Rohatyn

Every thinking person fears nuclear war and every technological nation plans for it. Everyone knows it's madness, and every country has an excuse.
-Carl Sagan

Everyone has a right to a university degree in America, even if it's in Hamburger Technology.
-Clive James

For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of life, please press three.
-Alice Kahn

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.
-Richard P. Feynman

Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.
-Buckminster Fuller

I may be just an empty flesh terminal relying on technology for all my ideas, memories and relationships, but I am confident that all of that, everything that makes me a unique human being, is still out there, somewhere, safe in the theoretical storage space owned by giant multi-national corporations.
-Stephen Colbert

If the Catholic church couldn't stop Galileo, then governments won't be able to stop things now. (re: regulation of information technology.)
-Carlo de Benedetti

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

If we had had the right technology back then, you would have seen Eva Braun on the Donahue show and Adolf Hitler on Meet the Press.
-Ed Turner

In the long run, everything is a toaster. (on innovative technologies)
-Bruce Greenwald

In the old days, writers used to sit in front of a typewriter and stare out of the window. Nowadays, because of the marvels of convergent technology, the thing you type on and the window you stare out of are now the same thing.
-Douglas Adams

[Information Technology] people are so hypnotized by the technology they don't look for real results.
-Peter Drucker

It's a truism in technological development that no silver lining comes without its cloud.
-Bruce Sterling

Let's be frank, the Italians' technological contribution to humankind stopped with the pizza oven.
-Bill Bryson

Levitt's First Law of Information Technology: If it's free, adopt it.
-Unattributed

Misuse of reason might yet return the world to pre-technological night; plenty of religious zealots hunger for just such a result, and are happy to use the latest technology to effect it.
-A.C. Grayling

[N]either technology nor efficiency can acquire more time for you, because time is not a thing you have lost. It is not a thing you ever had.
-James Gleick

Once a new technology rolls over you, if you're not part of the steamroller, you're part of the road.
-Stewart Brand

Our entire much-praised technological progress, and civilization generally, could be compared to an axe in the hand of a pathological criminal.
-Albert Einstein

Some technologies do their job perfectly and tend to stick around. The spoon is one example, the lawn-roller another. Paper may well be a third. (From The Economist)
-Unattributed

Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
-Aldous Huxley

Technology [is] the knack of so arranging the world that we need not experience it.
-Max Frisch

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

Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage, and those who manage what they do not understand.
-Unattributed

Technology is really civilization, let's face it.
-Arthur C. Clarke

Technology makes it possible for people to gain control over everything, except over technology.
-John Tudor

Technology today is the campfire around which we tell our stories. There's this attraction to light and to this kind of power, which is both warm and destructive.
-Laurie Anderson

The fault lies not with our technologies but with our systems.
-Roger Levian

The human race has today the means for annihilating itself-either in a fit of complete lunacy, i.e., in a big war, by a brief fit of destruction, or by careless handling of atomic technology, through a slow process of poisoning and of deterioration in its genetic structure.
-Max Born

The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.
-E.O. Wilson

There is an evil tendency underlying all our technology- the tendency to do what is reasonable even when it isn't any good.
-Robert Pirsig

There is no escaping from ourselves. The human dilemma is as it has always been, and we solve nothing fundamental by cloaking ourselves in technological glory.
-Neil Postman

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

We have lots of information technology. We just don't have any information. (New Yorker cartoon caption)
-Sydney J. Harris

We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.
-Carl Sagan

While modern technology has given people powerful new communication tools, it apparently can do nothing to alter the fact that many people have nothing useful to say.
-Lee Gomes

You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say may be used against you in a court of law, newspapers, periodicals, radio, television, all electronic media, and technologies yet to be developed. (Cartoon caption in The New Yorker)
-Unattributed


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