A Technological World Quotes & Sayings

In a world facing the revolt of ragged and hungry masses of God's children; in a world torn between the tensions of East and West, white and colored, individuals and collectivists; in a world whose cultural and spiritual power lags so far behind her technological capabilities that we live each day on the verge of nuclear co-annihilation; in this world, nonviolence is no longer an option for intellectual analysis, it is an imperative for action — Martin Luther King Jr.

The preservation of our free society in the years and decades to come will depend ultimately on whether we succeed or fail in directing the enormous power of human knowledge to the enrichment of our own lives and the shaping of a rational and civilized world order ... It is the task of education, more than any other instrument of foreign policy to help close the dangerous gap between the economic and technological interdependence of the people of the world and their psychological, political and spiritual alienation. — J. William Fulbright

Rational order in the technological world can be as fascinating as the fetishes of a Congo witch-doctor - scientific phenomena become significant images. — Eduardo Paolozzi

Soon the majority of the world's people will be living in cities. We are now obliged to think of so many people demanding the means of life from the land, to which they will no longer have a practical connection, and of which they will have little knowledge. We are obliged also to think of the consequences of any attempt to meet this demand by large-scale, expensive, petroleum-dependent technological schemes that will ignore local conditions and local needs. — Wendell Berry

The ideology of liberal humanism found expression in the earliest reviews of Hardy's writing and remained a dominant force until the explosion of literary theory in the 1980s. It is a broad and still influential category. It endorses the moral value of the individual, and the strength of the human spirit. It prefers the integrity of an organic rural society to the anonymity and materialism of an urbanised and technological world. Applied to fiction, this ideology involves the naturalisation of the novel's world and its values, and the recognition of fictional character as presenting a unified subject. — Geoffrey Harvey

I'm first and foremost a biological explorer. I've looked all over the world for answers. Secondly, I'm an ecological designer, and by that I mean I attempt to work with constellations of nature to create technological forms. So I'm part engineer, part ecologist, part inventor, really. — John Todd

Marxist Man could not have come upon the earth at a more illogical time. In an age when technological advances have finally made it feasible to adequately feed, clothe and house the entire human race, Marxist Man stands as a military threat to this peaceful achievement. His sense of insecurity drives him to demand exclusive control of human affairs in a day when nearly all other peoples would like to create a genuine United nations dedicated to world peace and world-wide prosperity. Although man can travel faster than sound and potentially provide frequent, intimate contacts between all cultures and all peoples, Marxist Man insists on creating iron barriers behind which he can secretly work. — W. Cleon Skousen

When I speak at my local church, which I try to do 35 to 40 times a year, I try in every lesson to take the Old Testament text or New Testament text and apply them to what is happening to me or how that applies to the audience that I'm teaching in a modern, fast-changing, technological world. I use headlines, interfaith and that sort of thing. — Jimmy Carter

How such incredibly powerful creatures could be so vulnerable was a crime against the universe. The tragic futility of it all was what really got me. The rhino's brilliant million-year evolutionary effort to build up three tons of muscle, bone and horn to defend itself meant nothing in a modern technological world that didn't care a fig about them. The fact that our grandchildren may never see a rhino in the wild again was a pivotal reason to continue to try and save them. — Lawrence Anthony

A world without radio is a deaf world.A world without television is a blind world. A a world without telephone is a dumb world. A world without communication is indeed a crippled world. — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

In the end, the fate of children depends on our ability to use technology constructively and carefully. The connection of childrenand technology is not simply a matter of seat belts, safe toys, safe air, water and food, additive-free baby foods, or improved television programming. These are all important issues, but to stop here is to forget that today's children will soon be adults. Technological decisions made today will determine, perhaps irrevocably, the kind of physical and social world we bequeath them and the kind of people they become. — Kenneth Keniston

To be a poet in today's technological age means to be underrated and at times, ignored. In a world where the noise of industry reigns supreme, the poet's voice is being drowned out, but it is a voice that is desperately needed. Our words ring out into the atmosphere and calls the masses back to their senses. We must seize this opportunity and remain true to our purpose in society. Ours is a most noble duty, here to represent the misunderstood and underrepresented, and one day, one person will heed the call of our words and the world will be set ablaze! — Dara Reidyr

Poverty and injustice are evils, but they are endurable evils in a world where other problems are greater. They are not endurable in a complex, technological society where cooperation is essential, where violence and rioting can destroy a city, even civilization itself. — James Edwin Gunn

We are contemporary citizens living in a technological world. Swimming in crosscultural waters can be dangerous, and if you are honest you can't stay there very long. Sooner or later you have to look at your own reflection and decide what to do with yourself.
We are urban people. We make periodic pilgrimages to the country ... If we align ourselves with the spirit of place we will find humility fused with joy.
The land holds stories. — Terry Tempest Williams

I think it's very easy for people who are not deep in the technology itself to make generalizations, which may be a little dangerous. And we've certainly seen that recently with Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking, all saying AI is just taking off and it's going to take over the world very quickly. And the thing that they share is none of them work in this technological field. — Rodney Brooks

College education is the great Filipino dream. But in a world of rapid technological change, getting a job or keeping it depends as much on how well one reasons as how well one uses his hands. — Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo

The human species does not necessarily move in stages from progress to progress ... history and civilization do not advance in tandem. From the stagnation of Medieval Europe to the decline and chaos in recent times on the mainland of Asia and to the catastrophes of two world wars in the twentieth century, the methods of killing people became increasingly sophisticated. Scientific and technological progress certainly does not imply that humankind as a result becomes more civilized. — Gao Xingjian

What distinguishes a technological world is that the terms of nature are obscured; one need not live quite in the present or the local. — Rebecca Solnit

[Huxley's Perennial Philosophy is concerned with] the need to love the earth and respect nature instead of following the example of those who 'chopped down vast forests to provide the newsprint demanded by that universal literacy which was to make the world safe for intelligence and democracy, and got wholesale erosion, pulp magazines, and organs of Fascist, Communist, capitalist, and nationalist propaganda.' He attacked 'technological imperialism' and the mechanisation which was 'increasing the power of a minority to exercise a co-ersive control over the lives of their fellows' and 'the popular philosophy of life ... now moulded by advertising copy whose one idea is to persuade everybody to be as extroverted and uninhibitedly greedy as possible, since of course it is only the possessive, the restless, the distracted, who spend money on the things that advertisers want to sell. — Nicholas Murray

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

Howard Zinn wrote in 1988, in what now seems like a lost world before so many political upheavals and technological changes arrived, "As this century draws to a close, a century packed with history, what leaps out from that history is its utter unpredictability. — Rebecca Solnit

We live in an extraordinary time. We are caught up in a pace of social and technological change that makes our work, our business and education, sources of anxiety and unfulfillment. Thinking about our thinking and observing our observations can bring us a new world in which work becomes a place for innovation, and in which peace, wisdom, friendship, companionship and community can exist. Let us design this world together. — Fernando Flores

Nuclear terrorism is still often treated as science fiction. I wish it were. But unfortunately we live in a world of excess hazardous materials and abundant technological know-how, in which some terrorists clearly state their intention to inflict catastrophic casualties. Were such an attack to occur, it would not only cause widespread death and destruction, but would stagger the world economy ... [creating] a second death toll throughout the developing world. — Kofi Annan

A peek-a-boo world, where now this event, now that, pops into view for a moment, then vanishes again. It is an improbable world. It is a world in which the idea of human progress, as Bacon expressed it, has been replaced by the idea of technological progress. The aim is not to reduce ignorance, superstition, and suffering but to accommodate ourselves to the requirements of new technologies. We tell ourselves, of course, that such accommodations will lead to a better life, but that is only the rhetorical residue of a vanishing technocracy. We are a culture consuming itself with information, and many of us do not even wonder how to control the process. We proceed under the assumption that information is our friend, believing that cultures may suffer grievously from a lack of information, which, of course, they do. It is only now beginning to be understood that cultures may also suffer grievously from information glut, information without meaning, information without control mechanisms. — Neil Postman

The Internet, like the steam engine, is a technological breakthrough that changed the world. — Peter Singer

To native peoples, there is no such thing as the first, second, and third worlds; there is only an exploiting world ... whether its technological system is capitalist or communist ... and a host world. Native peoples, who occupy more land, make up the host world. — Winona LaDuke

The concerns and methods vary, but there is to it all, at bottom, a message that is unmistakably Luddistic: beware the technological juggernaut, reckon the terrible costs, understand the worlds being lost in the world being gained, reflect on the price of the machine and its systems on your life, pay attention to the natural world and its increasing destruction, resist the seductive catastrophe of industrialism. — Kirkpatrick Sale

In the half-century of his life, a tick on the Doomsday clock, he had borne witness to the most unbelievable technological advances. He had started off listening to an old Bush radio in the corner of the living room and now he had a phone in his hand on which he could pretend to throw a scrunched-up piece of paper into a waste bin. The world had waited a long time for that. — Kate Atkinson

With the more endowed nations constrained by their own higher technological capacity for self-destruction as well as by self interest, war may have become a luxury that only the poor peoples of this world can afford. — Zbigniew Brzezinski

The Singularity denotes an event that will take place in the material world, the inevitable next step in the evolutionary process that started with biological evolution and has extended through human-directed technological evolution. however, it is precisely in the world of matter and energy that we encounter transcendence, a principal connotation of what people refer to as spirituality. — Ray Kurzweil

Toynbee emphasized the difference between technological-material progress and true progress, which he defined as spiritualization. He recognized that the Western world was indeed undergoing a crisis, which he attributed to the abandonment of religion for the cult of technology, nationalism, and militarism. For him this crisis had a name: secularism. If you know the cause of an illness, you can also find a cure: The religious heritage in all its forms had to be reintroduced, especially the "heritage of Western Christianity." Rather than a biologistic vision, he offered a voluntaristic one focused on the energy of creative minorities and exceptional individuals. — Pope Benedict XVI

Part of me wanted to disappear into a cave in India, and I did end up going on retreats there, but, don't ask me why, I always felt very strongly that the point for me was to find a way to live a truly spiritual life in the modern day world and be able to work with all the positive aspects of our cultural and technological advancements. — Linus Roache

I believe we are going to have to prepare ourselves for the difficult and patient task of outgrowing rigid and intransigent nationalism, and work slowly towards a world federation of peaceful nations. How will this be possible? Don't ask me. I don't know. But unless we develop a moral, spiritual, and political wisdom that is proportionate to our technological skill, our skill may end us. — Thomas Merton

But in the West today, we see a free world that has achieved a level of prosperity and well-being unprecedented in all human history. In the Communist world, we see failure, technological backwardness, declining standards of health, even want of the most basic kind - too little food. Even today, the Soviet Union still cannot feed itself. After these four decades, then, there stands before the entire world one great and inescapable conclusion: Freedom leads to prosperity. Freedom replaces the ancient hatreds among the nations with comity and peace. Freedom is the victor. — Bill O'Reilly

It was just a temporary technological mutation designed to do the same thing music always does, which is allow emotionally warped people to communicate by bombarding each other with pitiful cultural artifacts that in a saner world would be forgotten before they even happened. — Rob Sheffield

The more the mind dominates, the more the ego comes into play, and the further people depart from their true inner self. So all the technological advances in the world mean nothing if people feel a spiritual void inside of them. — Stuart Wilde

230Our Internet debates ... tend to be dominated by a form of openness fundamentalism, whereby "openness" is seen as a fail-safe solution to virtually any problem. Instead of debating how openness may be fostering of harming innovation, promoting or demoting justice, facilitating or complicating deliberation - the kinds of debates we are likely to have about the uses of openness in the messy world that we live in - "openness" in networks and technological systems is presumed to be always good and its opposite ... is always bad. — Evgeny Morozov

Again I want to emphasize that the study of propaganda must be conducted within the context of a technological society. Propaganda is called upon to solve problems created by technology, to play on maladjustments, and to integrate the individual into a technological world. — Jacques Ellul

School has become the world religion of a modernized proletariat, and makes futile promises of salvation to the poor of the technological age. — Ivan Illich

I think we're heading towards a world of what I call 'technological socialism.' Where technology - not the government or the state - will begin to take care of us. Technology will provide our healthcare for free. The best education in the world - for free. — Peter Diamandis

The modern technological world appears overwhelming to many people. It drives some to pessimism and despair. It makes others doubt the future of mankind unless we retreat to simpler lives and even to the ways of our ancestors. What these people fail to realize is that we cannot go back to those ways and those days. Furthermore, for all our difficulties, life today is far better for more people and the possibilities for the future can be brighter than ever if we develop not only new knowledge, but a greater faith and confidence in the human mind and spirit. — Glenn T. Seaborg

Right now, the technological world plus God or spirituality is evolving. I think America has become a little bit too corrupt, government's a little too corrupt, too greedy. Many corporations are too greedy. The labor unions are too greedy. That effects charities and religious organizations. I just think it's greed. That's why, in 1985, I had to figure out how to give before I received. The more I focus on giving, for less and less, the more and more I make. — Robert Kiyosaki

In the technological world...it is no longer a question of dominating nature or society in order to be more free or more happy, but of mastery for mastery's sake, of domination for the sake of domination. Why? For no end, precisely, or rather: because it is quite simply impossible to do otherwise, given the nature of societies entirely governed by competition, by the absolute imperative to 'advance or perish'. — Luc Ferry

Those activities of an earlier day, furthermore, provided opportunities for cooperative action toward a common goal and for a sense of accomplishment that was not readily available to a modern technological society. For the 'city-bred child of today' (p. 21), such opportunities were no longer present, and the educational problem then became one of recreating in the school something of the occupations that in former times not only provided a sense of real purpose, but linked intelligence and cooperative action to what the work of the world required. — Herbert M. Kliebard

Wars between states and people seem to have existed under all historical systems for as long as we have some recorded evidence. War is quite clearly not a phenomenon particular to the modern world-system. On the other hand, once again the technological achievements of capitalist civilization serve as much ill as good. One bomb in Hiroshima killed more people than whole wars in pre-modern times. Alexander the Great in his whole sweep of the Middle East could not compare in destructiveness to the impact of the Gulf War on Iraq and Kuwait. — Immanuel Wallerstein

The partisanship surrounding space exploration and the retrenching of U.S. space policy are part of a more general trend: the decline of science in the United States. As its interest in science wanes, the country loses ground to the rest of the industrialized world in every measure of technological proficiency. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

We need myths that will help us to identify with all our fellow-beings, not simply with those who belong to our ethnic, national or ideological tribe. We need myths that help us to realize the importance of compassion, which is not always regarded as sufficiently productive or efficient in our pragmatic, rational world. We need myths that help us to create a spiritual attitude, to see beyond our immediate requirements, and enable us to experience a transcendent value that challenges our solipsistic selfishness. We need myths that help us to venerate the earth as sacred once again, instead of merely using it as a 'resource.' This is crucial, because unless there is some kind of spiritual revolution that is able to keep abreast of our technological genius, we will not save our planet. — Karen Armstrong

The term railway was to Victorian England what atomic or aerodynamic were to be after World War II, and network and virtual are today. When it came to investments, the romantic appeal of being a party to this technological revolution often dominated profit considerations. — Richard Bookstaber

The most common definition of [the word information] is: the action of informing; formation or molding of the mind or character, training, instruction, teaching; communication of instructive knowledge.
This definition remained fairly constant until the years immediately following World War II, when it came in vogue to use 'information' as a technological term to define anything that was sent over an electric or mechanical channel. 'Information' became part of the vocabulary of the science of messages. And, suddenly, the appellation could be applied to something that didn't necessarily have to inform. This definition was extrapolated to general usage as something told or communicated, whether or not it made sense to the receiver. Now, the freedom engendered by such an amorphous definition has, as you might expect, encouraged its liberal deployment. It has become the single most important word of our decade, the suspense of our lives and our work. — Richard Saul Wurman

Education in a technological world of replaceable and expendable parts is neuter. — Marshall McLuhan

The fact is that all the recording science and technology in the world is no substitute for a good song or for real feeling. Music is about feeling and if there isn't any genuine feeling, if the song isn't about anything that anyone gives a damn about, there's nothing you can do. All the technique that exists won't make it any good; it'll just make it technological. All the production values you add won't do anything except make it glossy. — David Crosby

Those societies in which seriousness, tradition, conformity and adherence to long-established - often god-prescribed - ways of doing things are the strictly enforced rule, have always been the majority across time and throughout the world. Such people are not known for their sense of humour and lightness of touch; they rarely break a smile. To them, change is always suspect and usually damnable, and they hardly ever contribute to human development. By contrast, social, artistic and scientific progress as well as technological advance are most evident where the ruling culture and ideology give men and women permission to play, whether with ideas, beliefs, principles or materials. And where playful science changes people's understanding of the way the physical world works, political change, even revolution, is rarely far behind. — Paul Kriwaczek

Almost every time I speak to teenagers, particularly young female students who want to talk to me about feminism, I find myself staggered by how much they have read, how creatively they think and how curiously bullshit-resistant they are. Because of the subjects I write about, I am often contacted by young people and I see it as a part of my job to reply to all of them - and doing so has confirmed a suspicions I've had for some time. I think that the generation about to hit adulthood is going to be rather brilliant.
Young people getting older is not, in itself, a fascinating new cultural trend. Nonetheless the encroaching adulthood and the people who grew up in a world where expanding technological access collided with the collapse of the neoliberal economic consensus is worth paying attention to. Because these kids are smart, cynical and resilient, and I don't mind saying that they scare me a little. — Laurie Penny

To every Old World belief, habit, or tradition, there was and still is a technological alternative. To prayer, the alternative is penicillin; to family roots, the alternative is mobility; to reading, the alternative is television; to restraint, the alternative is immediate gratification; to sin, the alternative is psychotherapy; to political ideology, the alternative is popular appeal established through scientific polling. There is even an alternative to the painful riddle of death, as Freud called it. The riddle may be postponed through longer life, and then perhaps solved altogether by cryogenics. — Neil Postman

During this period (of technological confinement / [and language]) the human mind has been placed in its narrowest confines it has experienced since consciousness emerged from its Paleolithic phase. Even the most primitive tribes have a larger vision of the universe, of our place and functioning within it, a vision that extends to celestial regions of space and to interior depths of the human in a manner far exceeding the parameters of our world of technological confinement. — Thomas Berry

To visit a modern Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) is to enter a world that for all its technological sophistication is still designed on seventeenth-century Cartesian principles: Animals are treated as machines - "production units" - incapable of feeling pain. Since no thinking person can possibly believe this anymore, industrial animal agriculture depends on a suspension of disbelief on the part of the people who operate it and a willingness to avert one's eyes on the part of everyone else. — Michael Pollan

If you're too young to remember the Time Before Pong, then you probably can't appreciate the momentousness of its arrival. Bear in mind the game emerged in a very different world. It was a time before home computers, cable television, cell phones, game consoles, the Internet--everything we take for granted today. For many of my formative years, we still watched TV in black and white, and had to get up to change the channel. This was the technological Dark Ages. Had we been less culturally enlightened, we would have denounced Pong as witchcraft and burned its inventors at the stake. For those of us who were there--who had never played, let alone seen, a video game--we knew we were witnessing something extraordinary, a groundbreaking achievement in home entertainment. However, none of us knew that we were participating in the birth of a revolution. — Devin C. Griffiths

Marxism criticizes the world's dominant economic system, which allows people to amass as much wealth as they can and to spend it as they wish. Should we be surprised that this critique generates backlash? To acquire things and to use them selfishly is a big part of human nature. Technological advances - the new smartphone, the new app, the new car - make each new toy more enticing and addictive. Today technology, more than religion, has become the opium of the people. In developed and developing countries alike, people long to acquire more and consume more. — Philip Clayton

In a technological world facing many global problems, everyone needs to have a basic understanding of science. And knowing where we came from and helps us to make decisions about the future. — Wyken Seagrave

As a consequence of the enormous social and technological changes of the last few centuries, the world is not working well. We do not live in traditional and static societies. But our government, in resisting change, act as if we did. Unless we destroy ourselves utterly, the future belongs to those societies that, while not ignoring the reptilian and mammalian parts of our being, enable the characteristically human components of our nature to flourish; to those societies that encourage diversity rather than conformity; to those societies willing to invest resources in a variety of social, political, economic and cultural experiments, and prepared to sacrifice short-term advantage for long-term benefit; to those societies that treat new ideas as delicate, fragile and immensely valuable pathways to the future. — Carl Sagan

Long distances used to be a moat that both insulated and isolated people from workers on the other side of the world. But every day, technology narrows that moat inch by inch. Every person in the world is on the verge of becoming both a coworker and a competitor to every one of us ... Technological change is going to reach out and sooner or later change something fundamental in your business world. — Andy Grove

An exploration of the challenges Korea faces in transforming its economy from a government-directed, low-cost producer to an innovative world economic power based on its own scientific and technological development. — Lewis M. Branscomb

I'm a technological optimist in that I do believe that technology will provide solutions that will allow the world in 2050 to support 9 billion people at an acceptable standard of living. But I'm a political pessimist in that I am concerned about whether the science will be appropriately applied. — Martin Rees

We must have tranquillity." "In a technological world," MacDonald said, "change is inevitable. What you must have for tranquillity is reasonable change, manageable change. — James Edwin Gunn

At this most crucial time in the course of evolution we are all faced with the appalling fact that we may, at any moment, destroy our precious material lives and our wonderful little earth through advanced technological means. With the advance of civilization has developed the ghastly power to destroy all of humanity at the push of a button. We are now on the verge of destroying ourselves utterly from the face of the earth! We have become mere slaves to subhuman types of destructive thinking and action! We are out of control in every direction! More than any other time on earth we are all faced with the potential dangers of political anarchy and ruin, and we are all exposed to the terrific possibility of a Third World War, more hideous than any other war in the history of our planet. What we do at this most crucial time will determine the destinies of humanity for many generations, even centuries, to come. — David Cherubim

If an AI possessed any one of these skills - social abilities, technological development, economic ability - at a superhuman level, it is quite likely that it would quickly come to dominate our world in one way or another. And as we've seen, if it ever developed these abilities to the human level, then it would likely soon develop them to a superhuman level. So we can assume that if even one of these skills gets programmed into a computer, then our world will come to be dominated by AIs or AI-empowered humans. — Stuart Armstrong

This is not a new world - it is simply an extension of what began in the old one. It has patterned itself after every dictator who has ever planted the ripping imprint of a boot on the pages of history since the beginning of time. It has refinements ... technological advances ... and a more sophisticated approach to the destruction of human freedom. But like everyone of the super-states that preceded it - it has one iron rule: logic is an enemy and truth is a menace. — Rod Serling

Geneva has a long history of hosting international organizations, which is part of the reason why CERN is here. CERN has signed agreements with the ITU, WIPO and the WMO. At first sight, there may not seem to be much common ground between CERN and, say, the World Meteorological Organization, but scratch the surface, and you'll soon find a common thread. All of these organizations have a vocation to stimulate technological innovation, and together we're stronger. — Rolf-Dieter Heuer

Science fiction [is] the kind of writing that prepares us for the necessary mutations brought about in society from an ever changing technological world and as a result. The mainstream hasn't excluded SF; the mainstream has excluded itself. No one told Jules Verne he was a science fiction writer, but he invented the 20th century. — Walter Mosley

Human beings have fabricated the illusion that in the 21st century they have the technological prowess to be independent of nature. Bees underline the reality that we are more, not less, dependent on nature's services in a world of close to 7 billion people — Achim Steiner

I learned a lot of different things from different schools. MIT is a very good place ... . It has developed for itself a spirit, so that every member of the whole place thinks that it's the most wonderful place in the world - it's the center, somehow, of scientific and technological development in the United States, if not the world ... and while you don't get a good sense of proportion there, you do get an excellent sense of being with it and in it, and having motivation and desire to keep on — Richard P. Feynman

I find that because of modern technological evolution and our global economy, and as a result of the great increase in population, our world has greatly changed: it has become much smaller. However, our perceptions have not evolved at the same pace; we continue to cling to old national demarcations and the old feelings of "us" and "them. — Dalai Lama XIV

Through our scientific and technological genius we've made of this world a neighborhood. And now through our moral and ethical commitment we must make of it a brotherhood. We must all learn to live together as brothers - or we will all perish together as fools. — Martin Luther King Jr.

While it is often said that necessity is the father of invention, it is indeed an irony that some of mankind's greatest technological advancements were born out of the human race's propensity for power, greed, violence and destruction. October 24, 1945 saw the birth of a global power called the United Nations in a bid to prevent yet another devastating world war. The world could ill afford a third global conflict which could wipe out the human race forever. — Yusuf R. Shaik

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

The lost self: With the passing of the cosmological myths and the fading of Christianity as a guarantor of identity of the self, the self becomes dislocated, Jefferson or no Jefferson, is both cut loose and imprisoned by its own freedom, yet imprisoned by a curious and paradoxical bondage like a Chinese handcuff, so that the very attempts to free itself, e.g., by ever more refined techniques for the pursuit of happiness, only tighten the bondage and distance the self ever farther from the very world is wishes to inhabit as its homeland. The rational Jeffersonian pursuit of happiness embarked upon in the American Revolution translates into the flaky euphoria of the late twentieth century. Every advance in an objective understanding of the Cosmos and in its technological control further distances the self from the Cosmos precisely in the degree of the advance - so that in the end the self becomes a space-bound ghost which roams the very Cosmos it understands perfectly. — Walker Percy

The Turks who live here in Germany don't get their information from German media. They read Turkish newspapers and watch Turkish television. A sort of parallel media world has developed in Germany, especially as a result of technological advances like satellite TV and the internet. — Fatih Akin

The fundamental problem is that every technology embeds the ideologies of its creators! Who made the Internet? The military! The Internet is the product of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency! We call it DARPA for short! Who worked for DARPA? DARPA was a bunch of men! Not a single woman worked on the underlying technologies that fuel our digital universe! Men are the shit of the world and all of our political systems and philosophies were created and devised without the input of women! Half of the world's population lives beneath systems of government and technological innovation into which their gender had zero input! Democracy is a bullshit ideology that a bunch of slaveholding Greek men constructed between rounds of beating their wives! All the presumed ideologies of men were taken for inescapable actualities and designed into the Internet! Packet switching is an incredible evil! — Jarett Kobek

Man's civility is lagging behind his technological ability. It could mean disaster and catastrophe for the whole world. We're all sinners, everyone of us, and a radical change is needed for all of us. — Billy Graham

Third, it can mean deep, wondering reverence, or "awe" at something immeasurably superior. This is an emotion that is much rarer today than ever before in the history of the world, probably because modern life is so full of scientific knowledge and technological power over nature that we live in a dream of arrogant cleverness and a cocoon of predictable comforts. — Peter Kreeft

What does interest me is how difficult my culture seems to find it to look the dark side of life directly in the eye. It seems to me that if we look back at mediaeval culture, for example, we see a society which faces the reality of death and pain and limitation, because it has to. Our society, which is progressive and technological and seems to have a slightly fanatical utopian edge to it, gets very uncomfortable when anybody highlights the dark side of humanity, or the world we have built, or what we are doing to the rest of life on Earth. — Paul Kingsnorth

We have this extraordinary conceit in the West that while we've been hard at work in the creation of technological wizardry and innovation, somehow the other cultures of the world have been intellectually idle. Nothing could be further from the truth. Nor is this difference due to some sort of inherent Western superiority. We now know to be true biologically what we've always dreamed to be true philosophically, and that is that we are all brothers and sisters. We are all, by definition, cut from the same genetic cloth. That means every single human society and culture, by definition, shares the same raw mental activity, the same intellectual capacity. And whether that raw genius is placed in service of technological wizardry or unraveling the complex thread of memory inherent in a myth is simply a matter of choice and cultural orientation. — Wade Davis

Today, on a per capita basis, Israel far leads the world in research and technological creativity. — George Gilder

Fracking exemplifies the technological wager, by which I mean a gamble or even a faith that we can transform the world in the pursuit of narrowly defined goals and successfully manage the broader unintended consequences that result. In many ways, we are gambling on present innovations. I think that if we are to live with high technology we cannot avoid this wager. The question is whether we can establish conditions to make it a fair and reasonable bet. In the case of fracking, I will argue, these conditions are largely not in place (3). — Adam Briggle

The stories themselves aren't what moves him now ... What moves him are the shadowy people behind the stories, the workers weary from their days, gathering at night in front of a comforting bit of fire ... The world then was no less terrifying than it is now, with our nightmares of bombs and disease and technological warfare. Anything held the ability to set of fear ... a nail dropped in a the hay, wolves circling at the edge of the woods ... — Lauren Groff

I believe that Silicon Valley is truly a place of excellence and the impact of this tiny community on the world is completely disproportionate to its size. We are the undisputed leaders of technological change. But with our abundance of talent and resources, we also have the opportunity to be the pioneers of social change and, ultimately, this may be our greatest contribution. — Jeffrey Skoll

Forgotten phone numbers and birthdays represent minor erosions of our everyday memory, but they are part of a much larger story of how we've supplanted our own natural memory with a vast superstructure of technological crutches - from the alphabet to the BlackBerry. These technologies of storing information outside our minds have helped make our modern world possible, but they've also changed how we think and how we use our brains. — Joshua Foer

In a sense, scattered dots are exactly what one would expect to see in a pre-Enlightenment, pre-mechanized world. There were disbelievers in Greek antiquity just as there were everywhere, but there was no obvious role for mass-movement atheism in a culture where ensuring the stability of the state - which depended on the favor of the gods - was prized above all else. Atheism has prospered in the West since the eighteenth century because society has a role for it: in an advanced capitalist economy based on technological innovation, it has been necessary to claw intellectual and moral authority away from the clergy and reallocate it to the secular specialists in science and engineering. It is this social function that has allowed atheism to emerge as a movement composed of individual atheists. — Tim Whitmarsh

The technologists claim that if everything works [in a nuclear fission reactor] according to their blueprints, fission energy will be a safe and very attractive solution to the energy needs of the world ... The real issue is whether their blueprints will work in the real world and not only in a "technological paradise." ... Opponents of fission energy point out a number of differences between the real world and the "technological paradise." ... No acts of God can be permitted. — Hannes Alfven

The world is shrinking into a kind of technological funnel. I think people are drawn into their technological devices, and this becomes a kind of subjective universe, into which much of the rest of the world simply does not enter. — Don DeLillo

Today we have access to highly advanced technologies. But our social and economic system has not kept up with our technological capabilities that could easily create a world of abundance, free of servitude and debt. — Jacque Fresco

I want to live in a world free of air talkers and technological affairs. Is that too much to ask? My — Lindsey Leavitt

Let us make recommendations to ensure that NASA officials deal in a world of reality, understanding technological weaknesses and imperfections well enough to be actively trying to eliminate them. They must live in a world of reality in comparing the costs and utility of the shuttle to other methods of entering space. And they must be realistic in making contracts and in estimating the costs and difficulties of each project. Only realistic flight schedules should be proposed -- schedules that have a reasonable chance of being met. If in this way the government would not support NASA, the so be it. NASA owes it to the citizens from whom it asks support to be frank, honest, and informative, so that these citizens can make the wisest decisions for the use of their limited resources. — Richard Feynman

I believe deeply in a common humanity. The black man belongs to the family of man. One part of that family is out of control - like a virus or cancer - and that is the white man. He and his technological society are bent on destroying the world. Everywhere the white man has gone with his empire, he has destroyed people, races, societies, cultures, and in the course of it, has sterilized himself. He is completely the mechanical man: without heart, without soul. He is the Tin Man of The Wizard of Oz. But I don't believe that all the white people in the world are no good. — Margaret Walker

There are no defenders of man's mind - in the world's greatest scientific-technological civilization. All that is left is a battle between the mystics of spirit and the mystics of muscle - between men guided by their feelings and men guided by their reflexes. — Ayn Rand

It is a world completely rotten with wealth, power, senility, indifference, puritanism and mental hygiene, poverty and waste, technological futility and aimless violence, and yet I cannot help but feel it has about it something of the dawning of the universe. Perhaps because the entire world continues to dream of New York, even as New York dominates and exploits it. — Jean Baudrillard

In the developed world, technological progress means that you can have a situation where there's growth, where there's a way in which everybody can be better off over time. — Peter Thiel

Brynjolfsson and McAfee take us on a whirlwind tour of innovators and innovations around the world. But this isn't just casual sightseeing. Along the way, they describe how these technological wonders came to be, why they are important, and where they are headed. — Hal Varian

Climate change is a moral challenge, not simply an economic or technological problem. It is linked to social justice, because it is the poor citizens of the world who will suffer the most from our excesses. — Alison Hawthorne Deming

So the modern world may be increasing in technological knowledge, but, paradoxically, it is making things a lot more unpredictable. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb