Computers And Society Quotes & Sayings

My distaste for computers has an almost-political fervor: they're changing our society, I say, and for the worse. Let's act human. Converse. Use our handwriting. I — Lena Dunham

Now, 75 years [after To Kill a Mockingbird], in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books.
[Open Letter, O Magazine, July 2006] — Harper Lee

An eternal question about children is, how should we educate them? Politicians and educators consider more school days in a year, more science and math, the use of computers and other technology in the classroom, more exams and tests, more certification for teachers, and less money for art. All of these responses come from the place where we want to make the child into the best adult possible, not in the ancient Greek sense of virtuous and wise, but in the sense of one who is an efficient part of the machinery of society. But on all these counts, soul is neglected. — Thomas Moore

Well, I'm sorry my telling the truth about the stupid things you do is inconvenient for you, — John Scalzi

A lot of journalists like to suck up to celebrities, and then as soon as they're a safe distance away at their computers, they take shots. But that's the way society has become, especially in pop culture. — Scott Weiland

What about the contacts your mum had?" his dad asked.
"I rang and spoke to four very polite computers who gave me all these options and then cut out on me. Then I tried the post office, because they were advertising, and I spoke to another computer. Very rude, that one. Don't think it recognized 'Are you shitting me?' as an option."
"You know why that is?"
"Why is that, Dominic?" Tom had asked drolly, because he knew he was going to be told why.
"Because we don't live in a society anymore, Tom. We live in an economy. We're not citizens. We're customers. That's what this government's done to us. — Melina Marchetta

In the United States we think we have at our disposal virtually everything - and I emphasize the word "think." We have big houses and cars, good medical treatment, jets, trains and monorails; we have computers, good communications, many comforts and conveniences. But where have they gotten us? We have an abundance of material things, but a successful society produces happy people, and I think we produce more miserable people than almost anyplace on earth. I've traveled all over the world, and I've never seen people who are quite as unhappy as they are in the United States. We have plenty, but we have nothing, and we always want more. In the pursuit of material success as our culture measures it, we have given up everything. We have lost the capacity to produce people who are joyful. The pursuit of the material has become our reason for living, not enjoyment of living itself. — Marlon Brando

We live in a cluttered culture, a culture of information in which even our computers can't tell us what's worth knowing and what is merely cultural scrap. In such a society, we don't have the experience of contemplative space, of the time or mood to engage a book of poetry or even read a novel. Who can achieve the unconscious-conscious state of the reader when everything is stimulation, everything is movement and information? — T.C. Boyle

Ironically, I wouldn't say I'm a massive horror fan. I love thrillers. — Carlton Cuse

We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. — Martin Luther King Jr.

In a Society becoming steadily more privatized with private homes, cars, computers, offices and shopping centers, the public component of our lives is disappearing. It is more and more important to make the cities inviting, so we can meet our fellow citizens face to face and experience directly through our senses. Public life in good quality public spaces is an important part of a democratic life and a full life. — Jan Gehl

It is the thesis of this book that society can only be understood through a study of the messages and the communication facilities which belong to it; and that in the future development of these messages and communication facilities, messages between man and machines, between machines and man, and between machine and machine, are destined to play an ever-increasing part. — Norbert Wiener

The Internet: transforming society and shaping the future through chat. — Dave Barry

Access to computers and the Internet has become a basic need for education in our society. — Kent Conrad

In his heart he heard the voice talking, which was newly awaking, and it told him: Love this water! Stay near it! Learn from it! Oh yes, he wanted to learn from it, he wanted to listen to it. He who would understand this water and its secrets, so it seemed to him, would also understand many other things, many secrets, all secrets. — Hermann Hesse

The nuclear arms race is over, but the ethical problems raised by nonmilitary technology remain. The ethical problems arise from three "new ages" flooding over human society like tsunamis. First is the Information Age, already arrived and here to stay, driven by computers and digital memory. Second is the Biotechnology Age, due to arrive in full force early in the next century, driven by DNA sequencing and genetic engineering. Third is the Neurotechnology Age, likely to arrive later in the next century, driven by neural sensors and exposing the inner workings of human emotion and personality to manipulation. — Freeman Dyson

Emphasizing the crowd means de-emphasizing individual humans in the design of society, and when you ask people not to be people, they revert to bad, mob-like behaviors. — Jaron Lanier

The big question society will have to answer is whether it wants computers thinking like humans. — David Smith

The moderns, carrying little baggage of the kind that Shelly called "merely cultural," not even living in the traditional air, but breathing into their space helmets a scientific mixture of synthetic gases (and polluted at that) are the true pioneers. Their circuitry seems to include no atavistic domestic sentiment, they have suffered empathectomy, their computers hum no ghostly feedback of Home, Sweet Home. How marvelously free they are! How unutterably deprived! — Wallace Stegner

When my books were translated, it was always about the characters, because the unique language aspect was lost in translation. — Etgar Keret

Each new day is another chapter in the unfolding promise of deliverance and life. — Elizabeth George

The internet could be a very positive step towards education, organisation and participation in a meaningful society. — Noam Chomsky

It appears that the media filters we carry in our heads are like computers: they've been forced to get faster in order to keep up with the demands our high-speed society puts on them. — Roy H. Williams

My favourite fellow of the Royal Society is the Reverend Thomas Bayes, an obscure 18th-century Kent clergyman and a brilliant mathematician who devised a complex equation known as the Bayes theorem, which can be used to work out probability distributions. It had no practical application in his lifetime, but today, thanks to computers, is routinely used in the modelling of climate change, astrophysics and stock-market analysis. — Bill Bryson

The soul integrates the will and mind and body. Sin disintegrates them. In sin, my appetite for lust or anger or superiority dominates my will. My will, which was made to rule my body, becomes enslaved to what my body wants. When I flatter other people, I learn to use my mouth and my face to conceal my true thoughts and intentions. This always requires energy: I am disintegrating my body from my mind. I hate, but I can't admit it even to myself, so I must distort my perception of reality to rationalize my hatred: I disintegrate my thoughts from the reality. Sin ultimately makes long-term gratitude or friendship or meaning impossible. Sin eventually destroys my capacity even for enjoyment, let alone meaning. It distorts my perceptions, alienates my relationships, inflames my desires, and enslaves my will. This is what it means to lose your soul. — John Ortberg

Society needs people who ... know how to be compassionate and honest ... Societ y needs all kinds of skills that are not just cognitive; they're emotional, they're affectional. You can't run the society on data and computers alone. — Alvin Toffler

I think, however, the current fascination with the computer and its principal product, information, deserves a more critical response. This is because the computer does so ingeniously mimic human intelligence that it may significantly shake our confidence in the uses of the mind. And it is the mind that must think about all things, including the computer. — Theodore Roszak

Did you ever see mum and dad hug?' Yngve said.
I walked back to him.
'No,' I said. 'Not that I can remember. Did you?'
He nodded in front of me in the semi-darkness.
'Once. It was in Hove, so I must have been five. Dad was yelling at mum so much she burst into tears. She was standing in the kitchen crying. He went into the living room. Then he went back and put his arms around her and consoled her. That's the only time. — Karl Ove Knausgard

A global society is coming into being, a global society that is made out of information that was not intended to be ours, but is ours, by the mistaken invention of computers and the printing press, information is power, and information has spilled by the clumsy hands of the dominator culture so that the information is everywhere, never before has the situation been so fluid, we might be able to finally have a crack at this — Terence McKenna

When people think of the outcomes of their decisions, they think much more short term than that. They think in terms of gains and losses. — Daniel Kahneman

I don't like this world. I definitely do not like it. The society in which I live disgusts
me; advertising sickens me; computers make me puke. — Michel Houellebecq

If an aircraft is able to fly day and night without fuel, propelled only by solar energy, let no one claim that it is impossible to do the same thing for motor vehicles, heating and air-conditioning systems, and computers. This project voices our conviction that a pioneering spirit with political vision can together change society and bring about an end to fossil fuel dependency. — Bertrand Piccard

What's happened with society is that we have created these devices, computers, which already can register and process huge amounts of information, which is a significant fraction of the amount of information that human beings themselves, as a species, can process. — Seth Lloyd