You cannot endow even the best machine with initiative; the jolliest steamroller will not plant flowers.
—Walter Lippmann, 1913When poets don’t know what to say and have completely given up on the play, just like a finger, they lift the machine and the spectators are satisfied.
—Antiphanes, c. 350 BCThe civilized man has built a coach but has lost the use of his feet.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1841Machines do not run in order to enable men to live, but we resign ourselves to feeding men in order that they may serve the machines.
—Simone Weil, 1934Technology is so much fun, but we can drown in our technology. The fog of information can drive out knowledge.
—Daniel Boorstin, 1978The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.
—B.F. Skinner, 1969Whatever the pace of this technological revolution may be, the direction is clear: the lower rungs of the economic ladder are being lopped off.
—Bayard Rustin, 1965Most people who sneer at technology would starve to death if the engineering infrastructure were removed.
—Robert A. Heinlein, 1984You can steal a lot more with a computer than with a gun.
—Gina Smith, 1997I have always found it in mine own experience an easier matter to devise many and profitable inventions than to dispose of one of them to the good of the author himself.
—Hugh Plat, 1595Whenever there is excess, an ax remedies it.
—Sumerian proverbIf the human race wants to go to hell in a basket, technology can help it get there by jet.
—Charles M. Allen, 1967Industrialism is the religion with “the machine” as the god going to answer all the prayers. Communism and capitalism were just competing sects.
—Dora Russell, 1983Technology feeds on itself. Technology makes more technology possible.
—Alvin Toffler, 1970Civilization, a much-abused word, stands for a high matter quite apart from telephones and electric lights.
—Edith Hamilton, 1930What can you conceive more silly and extravagant than to suppose a man racking his brains and studying night and day how to fly?
—William Law, 1728Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of these two has the grander view?
—Victor Hugo, 1862When man wanted to make a machine that would walk, he created the wheel, which does not resemble a leg.
—Guillaume Apollinaire, 1917’Tis the sport to have the engineer / Hoist with his own petard.
—William Shakespeare, c. 1600Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
—Arthur C. Clarke, 1973Great inventors and discoverers seem to have made their discoveries and inventions, as it were, by the way, in the course of their everyday life.
—Elizabeth Charles, 1862If there is a technological advance without a social advance, there is, almost automatically, an increase in human misery.
—Michael Harrington, 1962A machine is a slave that neither brings nor bears degradation.
—Benjamin Disraeli, 1844Refrigerators and television sets, or even rockets sent to the moon, do not change man into God.
—Czesław Miłosz, 1960Inventor, n. A person who makes an ingenious arrangement of wheels, levers, and springs and believes it civilization.
—Ambrose Bierce, 1911The belly is the teacher of the arts and bestower of invention.
—Persius, c. 55Doing research on the web is like using a library assembled piecemeal by pack rats and vandalized nightly.
—Roger Ebert, 1998The art of invention grows young with the things invented.
—Francis Bacon, 1605One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.
—Elbert Hubbard, 1911All technologies should be assumed guilty until proven innocent.
—David Brower, 1992For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
—Richard Feynman, 1986All attempts to adapt our ethical code to our situation in the technological age have failed.
—Max Born, 1968Inventions that are not made, like babies that are not born, are rarely missed.
—John Kenneth Galbraith, 1958The ability to store our data externally helps us imagine that our time is limitless, our space infinite.
—Carina Chocano, 2012The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.
—Edward O. Wilson, 2009The mere existence of nuclear weapons by the thousands is an incontrovertible sign of human insanity.
—Isaac Asimov, 1988Lo, this only have I found, that God hath made man upright; but they have sought out many inventions.
—Ecclesiastes, c. 250 BCAs usual, what we call “progress” is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance.
—Havelock Ellis, 1914We want a lot of engineers in the modern world, but we do not want a world of engineers.
—Winston Churchill, 1948I have seen the science I worshipped, and the aircraft I loved, destroying the civilization I expected them to serve.
—Charles Lindbergh, 1948We don’t have the option of turning away from the future. No one gets to vote on whether technology is going to change our lives.
—Bill Gates, 1995Machines seem to sense that I am afraid of them. It makes them hostile.
—Sharyn McCrumb, 1990I’d like to be a machine, wouldn’t you?
—Andy Warhol, 1963