Electronic Quotes & Sayings

By the way, goals and objectives are meaningless at the speed of light. At the speed of light, you aren't going somewhere, you're already there. On the telephone you're not going somewhere, you're there. And in the electronic world, going somewhere, you're there. And in the electronic world, there are no goals or objectives, we're already there.
McLuhan CD-ROM — Marshall McLuhan

Music is real when it goes inside you. You know when you really love someone, and you look into their eyes and you know it's real? Even though I'm an electronic artist, I wanna keep it real. — Eva Simons

They are this horrible thing where you are distorted. The chin is too big, the head is too small. No, this is electronic masturbation. — Karl Lagerfeld

It starts with the writer-it's a familiar dictum, but somehow it keeps getting forgotten along the way. No film-maker, irrespective of his electronic bag of tricks, can ever afford to forget his commitment to the written word. — Steven Spielberg

Hip-hop and electronic music are so similar, in the fact that they're both very visceral, have so much bass; a lot of times, it's the same tempos. The culture and some of the sound design is different but a lot of times, it's the same stuff. — Skrillex

To me, a book is a book, an electronic device is not, and love of books was the reason I started writing. — Elmore Leonard

Anybody who trusts an electronic voting machine should have their head examined. — Michael Ruppert

Electronic music right now is in its comfort zone, and it's not moving one inch, — Thomas Bangalter

Her eyes scanned the room and spotted her cell phone lying on the coffee table at least three whole feet away from her hands. She groaned. This was when she didn't want to be a witch, she wanted to be a Jedi, so she could use the Force to make her phone fly right into her hand.
What the hell, right? Lifting one arm she reached out an open hand toward the small electronic device. Use the Force, Wynn, she thought and had to stifle a slightly punch-drunk giggle.
From his seat in the oversized chair, Knox eyed her strangely. After a moment, she gave up and dropped her hand to her side, rolling her head along the sofa cusions to meet her mate's gaze. "What were just doing?" he asked warily.
"Using the Force."
He looked from her to the table and back again. "Did you do this successfully?"
She shook her head and grinned. "The Force is weak with this one. I'll never be a Jedi Master. — Christine Warren

We might laugh at the notion of plastic tea sets in the jungle, but it is a time-honored ritual for Western travelers to collect preindustrial artifacts to use as home decorations...Possession of primitive artifacts suggests worldly knowledge, just as in the highland communities of Borneo an electronic wristwatch that plays "Happy Birthday" is the mark of a great traveler. Funny thing how travel can narrow the mind. — Eric Hansen

I had an album out at exactly the same time as 'Love to Love You' called 'Einzelganger,' and it's great, all electronic. I'm using a vocoder, doing all this cut-up stuff on there, but no one knows about it. — Giorgio Moroder

I'm really excited about the remixes. I've always been a fan of electronic music and I'm thinking about that very seriously for the next record as well. — Matt Tong

There already exists the electronic capability for the tracking of individual behavior by centralized networks of surveillance and record-keeping computers. It is highly probable that the conversion to nuclear energy production will provide precisely those basic material conditions most appropriate for using the power of the computer to establish a new and enduring form of despotism. Only by decentralizing our basic mode of energy production - by breaking the cartels that monopolize the present system of energy production and by creating new decentralized forms of energy technology - can we restore the ecological and cultural configuration that led to the emergence of political democracy in Europe. — Marvin Harris

The level of intelligence has been tremendously increased, because people are thinking and communicating in terms of screens, and not in lettered books. Much of the real action is taking place in what is called cyberspace. People have learned how to boot up, activate, and transmit their brains.
Essentially, there's a universe inside your brain. The number of connections possible inside your brain is limitless. And as people have learned to have more managerial and direct creative access to their brains, they have also developed matrices or networks of people that communicate electronically. There are direct brain/computer link-ups. You can just jack yourself in and pilot your brain around in cyberspace-electronic space. — Timothy Leary

European languages and a Google app can now turn your words into a foreign language, either in text form or as an electronic voice. Skype, an internet-telephony service, said recently that it would offer much the same (in English and Spanish only). But claims that such technological marvels will spell the end of old-fashioned translation businesses are premature. Software can give the gist of a foreign tongue, but for business use (if executives are sensible), rough is not enough. And polyglot programs are a pinprick in a vast industry. The business of translation, interpreting and software localisation (revising websites, apps and the like for use in a foreign language) generates revenues of $37 billion a year, reckons Common Sense Advisory (CSA), a consulting firm. — Anonymous

Reading all kinds of books, in whatever format you choose
electronic or printed or audio
is the grandest entertainment, and also is how you take part in the human conversation. — Will Schwalbe

The new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village. — Marshall McLuhan

We are in an electronic technology age now and it's about time we put away the old stuff. — Monica Edwards

In removing the friction involved in paying bills, electronic billing has substantially increased the friction involved in not paying them. — Timothy Noah

I only discovered electronic music as a teenager and I still love the Prodigy and Massive Attack. — Dhani Harrison

We're losing social skills, the human interaction skills, how to read a person's mood, to read their body language, how to be patient until the moment is right to make or press a point. Too much exclusive use of electronic information dehumanises what is a very, very important part of community life and living together. — Vincent Nichols

The human brain must continue to frame the problems for the electronic machine to solve. — David Sarnoff

Electronic equipment replaces neither Eyes, Hands, nor Heart. — Wolfgang Weingart

Computers and electronic music are not the opposite of the warm human music. It's exactly the same. — Bill Laswell

The electronic spectrum is the only natural resource in which there's no such thing as private property rights. You can't own a piece of the spectrum. — Adrian Cronauer

I'm with you on measuring this week in letters and the two-day drought we are about to experience. If only there was a way to transport letters faster, through some sort of electronic device that codes messages and sends them through the air. But that's just crazy talk.

Friday from me:

Sending letters through the sky? Like when airplanes attach notes to their tails? I thought they only advertised for going-out-of-business sales. But perhaps our letters would be okay up there as well. I wonder how much they charge per word. — Kasie West

[ ... ]he also had a device which looked rather like a largish electronic calculator. This had about a hundred tiny flat press buttons and a screen about four inches square on which any one of a million "pages" could be summoned at a moment's notice. It looked
insanely complicated, and this was one of the reasons why the snug plastic cover it fitted into had the words
Don't Panic printed on it in large friendly letters. The other reason was that this device was in fact that most
remarkable of all books ever to come out of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor - The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The reason why it was published in the form of a micro sub meson electronic component is that if it were printed in normal book form, an interstellar hitch hiker would require several inconveniently large buildings to carry it around in. — Douglas Adams

I'm always interested in very, very futuristic music and bridging the gap between the physicality of organic guitar music and trying to translate that into something electronic is really fascinating. — Justin Broadrick

I am also a drummer of sorts. I've got an electronic set sitting in my bedroom. — Gary Cole

I think the Flecktones are a mixture of acoustic and electronic music with a lot of roots in folk and bluegrass as well as funk and jazz. — Bela Fleck

Recite to yourself some of the traditional attributes of the word 'spiritual': mythic, magical, ethereal, incorporeal, intangible, nonmaterial, disembodied, ideal, platonic. Is that not a definition of the electronic-digital? — Timothy Leary

Theophilus Crowe's mobile phone played eight bars of "Tangled Up in Blue" in an irritating electronic voice that sounded like a choir of suffering houseflies, or Jiminy Cricket huffing helium, or, well, you know, Bob Dylan. — Christopher Moore

I wonder what book signings will be like when most of the books we read are electronic. Will authors sign something else? A flyer, perhaps? A special kind of card devised for the purpose? — Susan Orlean

The conservatives see man as a body freely roaming the earth, building sand piles or factories - with an electronic computer inside his skull, controlled from Washington. The liberals see man as a soul freewheeling to the farthest reaches of the universe - but wearing chains from nose to toes when he crosses the street to buy a loaf of bread. — Ayn Rand

More and more books are published every year. If people were not reading them, they wouldn't be published. We are now reading electronic books or whatever else, but people are still reading, and people still need stories. — Isabel Allende

I find it so amazing when people tell me that electronic music has no soul. You can't blame the computer. If there's no soul in the music, it's because nobody put it there. — Bjork

I think I was first to do live performances on a modern electronic sound synthesizer. — John Eaton

Even though I'm totally dependent on modern electronic gizmos, from my laptop to my iPod to my cell phone, I love to embrace old technology or no technology at all. — John Grogan

There was no control except the mood of his power ... and it is for this reason it is good you never heard him play someplace where the weather for instance could change the next series of notes
then you should never have heard him at all. He was never recorded. He stayed away while others moved into wax history, electronic history, those who said later that Boldon broke the path. It was just as important to watch him stretch and wheel around the last notes or to watch nerves jumping under the sweat of his head. — Michael Ondaatje

There was a naive quality in 1982 around technology and the start of video games. And that's like the start of electronic music - there was this statement and, ideologically, these things to fight for. — Thomas Bangalter

Yes, I was invited to make the sound environment at a booth of a huge electronic company, during the Hanover Industrial Fair in 1973. It was a job. Slightly good paid. But not as much as my producer then told the press. — Klaus Schulze

We should not see print and electronic literature as in competition, but rather in conversation. The more voices that join in, the richer the dialogue is likely to be. — N. Katherine Hayles

We need to educate young people to deal with new modes of education that are emerging with the new electronic technologies and we need to educate them to not only learn how to critically read this ubiquitous screen culture but also how to be cultural producers. — Henry Giroux

When I'm skiing, I listen to electronic music. It's repetitive and let's me get into a groove and crank out the miles. — Ben Saunders

Well, they've come a long way. To think that he now could access a secret document held in the Vatican archives, via electronic technology. — Peter J. Tanous

I eagerly await new concepts and processes. I believe that the electronic image will be the next major advance. Such systems will have their own inherent and inescapable structural characteristics, and the artist and functional practitioner will again strive to comprehend and control them. — Ansel Adams

What we're experiencing is, in a metaphorical sense, a reversal of the early trajectory of civilization: we are evolving from being cultivators of personal knowledge to being hunters and gatherers in the electronic data forest. — Nicholas Carr

I will tell you what is poetry ...
It is a remote electronic claw picking up a stuffed bunny rabbit ... — Chelsey Minnis

The next time you pick up a camera think of it not as an inflexible and automated robot, but as a flexible instrument which you must understand to properly use. An electronic and optical miracle creates nothing on its own! Whatever beauty and excitement it can represent exist in your mind and spirit to begin with. — Ansel Adams

It seems to me the book has not just aesthetic values - the charming little clothy box of the thing, the smell of the glue, even the print, which has its own beauty. But there's something about the sensation of ink on paper that is in some sense a thing, a phenomenon rather than an epiphenomenon. I can't break the association of electric trash with the computer screen. Words on the screen give the sense of being just another passing electronic wriggle. — John Updike

I really like Caravan Palace's electro swing stuff. They incorporate the electronic, but when you see them live, they're all on stage playing live music. They're all playing their instruments. They drop these beats with the DJs that are so incredible. — Drake Bell

I've been making electronic music for twenty some odd years but, because I grew up playing in punk rock bands, when I started touring, I thought in order to be a viable touring musician I had to do it with a band. I would DJ or tour with a full rock band. — Moby

I wouldn't encourage new writers to start off publishing through electronic media ... it still isn't wide enough for the readership they would need to get a good start. — Anne McCaffrey

In my view, it is an error to think about 'alternatives to prison' if what we mean by that is 'electronic bracelets,' through which people are subject to computer-monitored house arrest, or granting fuller surveillance and disciplinary powers and technologies to other state agencies, such as welfare and mental health, through 'transcarceration' policies ... We need to decrease, not increase, the means by which the state, in its multifarious networks of authority, controls human lives and selectively incapacitates people who, no less than others, have the potential to contribute to the improvement of hte human condition. — Karlene Faith

In 1948, television was introduced, and millions and millions of people lead larval, low-awareness, warehoused lives mainlining an electronic drug straight into their brains. — Terence McKenna

What we are, in fact, are electronic ape-men. We woke up just now in the electronic dawn and there, looming against the brightening sky, is this huge black rectangle. And we're reaching out and touching it and saying, "Is it WAP enabled? Can we have sex with it? Can you get it in a different colour? Is it being sold cheap because the Monolith2 is being released next month and has a built-in PDA for the same price? — Terry Pratchett

It's cheaper to put an entire microprocessor in your car key, microwave, or cell phone than it is to put in discrete chips and electronic components. Thus, a new technical economy drives the design of the product. — Alan Cooper

We remake the world through our technologies, and these in turn remake and extend us, in ever spiraling lattices of complexity. McLuhan uncannily foresaw the future, where electronic technology would shape and expand cultures and societies into a global membrane of communications. — B.W. Powe

If history only remembers one in a thousand of us, then that future will be filled with stories of who we were and what we did. — Electronic Arts

I think the indie-rock world is very creative. They're always looking for something new, and I think of all the instruments we have in the world, the ones that are the most creative and interesting are the electronic ones. There are so many sounds and plug-ins you can use. — Tiesto

I could create music that sounded as strange as any electronic music, because you see, my opinion about electronic music is that the real composer is the guy who invented the instrument. Pressing buttons is not composing. Composing is about creating something. — Glenn Branca

Don't confuse a reliance on electronic technology with life itself. — Ryan Quinn

I am a big fan of the electronic book. I hate to see the old bookstores close, but they have to reinvent themselves. I believe the First Edition bookstore will be the next thing. People will read electronically, then decide they want to own that book. The author will then be invited to the old bookstores to sign. I think books will always be with us, but they will fill a different need. — Nikki Giovanni

If the human race develops an electronic nervous system, outside the bodies of individual people, thus giving us all one mind and one global body, this is almost precisely what has happened in the organization of cells which compose our own bodies. We have already done it. [ ... ] If all this ends with the human race leaving no more trace of itself in the universe than a system of electronic patterns, why should that trouble us? For that is exactly what we are now! — Alan W. Watts

The sensory ratios that are being reinforced by the new electronic technology are like the sensory ratios that were in place fifteen thousand years ago ... Print imposes a condition on human mind which is now lifting. — Terence McKenna

In America, we have achieved the Orwellian prediction - enslaved, the people have been programmed to love their bondage and are left to clutch only mirage-like images of freedom, its fables and fictions. The new slaves are linked together by vast electronic chains of television that imprison not their bodies but their minds. Their desires are programmed, their tastes manipulated, their values set for them. — Gerry Spence

My back pay came to $892,746,012. Not in the form of bales of currency, fortunately; on Heaven they used an electronic credit exchange, so I carried my fortune around in a little machine with a digital readout. To buy something you punched in the vendor's credit number and the amount of purchase; the sum was automatically shuffled from your account to his. The machine was the size of a slender wallet and coded to your thumbprint. — Joe Haldeman

There will be an electronic currency, and it will be universal, and we must accept that fact. — John McAfee

There does seem to be a kind of split. There are those people who are more entrenched in the early electronic years, and new people who have come to it because of people like Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson. — Gary Numan

As president of the American Historical Association, I started a programme to make dissertations into e-books in 1999. Before I knew it, I was involved in other electronic projects. Harvard invited me to become director of the libraries in 2007. — Robert Darnton

I like all kinds of music - classical, pop, rock, electronic. — Ha-Joon Chang

Disconnect from anything and everything electronic. — Austin Kleon

I get most of my news updates from electronic and social media. — LeVar Burton

To me, there's never been a difference between electronic and acoustic. I've always had this idea that electricity is another element like wind or fire or water. — Patrick Wolf

People call me a bedroom electronic musician, which I suppose I am. But I hate most electronic music; I find it really boring. — Max Tundra

The good thing, really, is that electronic music started as a fringe subculture, and now it's the biggest youth culture in the world. People pretty much everywhere go crazy for electronic music. — Paul Van Dyk

I've been talking about how electronic books will come, and how important they will be, and all of a sudden Stephen King publishes one. I feel a complete idiot, as it should have been me. — Douglas Adams

Electronic brains may help us to use our heads but will not excuse us from that duty, and as to our hearts-cardiograms cannot diagnose what may be most ill about them, or confirm what may be best. The faithful woman and the versatile brave man, the wakeful intelligence open to inspiration or grace-these are still exemplary for our kind, as they always were and always will be. — Robert Fitzgerald

Rave music sounds like an electronic disco version of '30s Universal monster movies. — Mojo Nixon

In the era of electronic products, all electrical fuse boards should have a surge protector and a filter installed into them as standard. — Steven Magee

I believe we should celebrate new possibilities of combining the printed codex with electronic technology ... The information ecology is getting richer, not thinner. — Robert Darnton

We have an electronic vein we have tapped and applied it to a rock setting like tons of bands out there. — Mike Lowry

Electronic communications networks match trades between investors directly, without using a market maker or specialist as an intermediary. — Alex Berenson

Paintings are not like the Internet. They're not like movies. They're not electronic-friendly. You have to go see them. You have to stand in front of them. That's the great thing about them. — Julian Schnabel

I usually write my music on a piano, and I really enjoy performing that way, because that actually shows how the music was in my mind before it actually became an electronic song. — Zedd

Something about family and trying to relate it to the movie with, 'Oh, if I was to have a child how many kids do I want?' And 'do I want a boy or a girl?' I didn't realize you could place orders, I honestly didn't realize it was like a drive-through, that you could talk to a little electronic voice. — Jennifer Aniston

From that night on, the electron-up to that time largely the plaything of the scientist-had clearly entered the field as a potent agent in the supplying of man's commercial and industrial needs ... The electronic amplifier tube now underlies the whole art of communications, and this in turn is at least in part what has made possible its application to a dozen other arts. It was a great day for both science and industry when they became wedded through the development of the electronic amplifier tube. — Robert Andrews Millikan

I spent my childhood tinkering with electronic circuits, on breadboards, as they used to be called, in particular making radio transmitters. — Giles Foden

Most Americans living below the official poverty line own a car or truck - and government entitlement programs seldom provide cars and trucks. Most people living below the official poverty line also have air condition, color television and a microwave oven - and these too are not usually handed out by government entitlement programs. Cell phone and other electronic devices are by no means unheard of in low-income neighborhoods, where children would supposedly go hungry if there were no school lunch programs. In reality, low-income people are overweight even more often than other Americans. — Thomas Sowell

A well-dressed, self-assured business executive steps into a quiet corner of the conference room, crowded with people. Everyone there is aware of her presence. She's dark-haired, petite, and alluring. She is quick to smile, and when she does, her whole face lights up. Her enthusiasm is infectious. Young men and women nod as they pass by, briefly breaking off their conversations with colleagues. The executive looks down at her compact electronic device and quickly texts: "Smile. Talk into the mic. Good luck. — Jill Bryant

The modern computer with all its various gadgets and wonderful electronic facilities now makes it possible to preserve and reinvigorate all the cultural richness of mankind. — Alan Lomax

I am very grateful to the electronic world for making my life easier, but there is something about holding a book - the smell and the world of association. Even when e-books are perfected, as they surely will be, it will be like being in bed with a very well-made robot rather than a warm, soft, human being whom you love. — Anne Fadiman

The information superhighways will have the same effect as our present superhighways or motorways. They will cancel out the landscape, lay waste to the territory and abolish real distances. What is merely physical and geographical in the case of our motorways will assume its full dimensions in the electronic field with the abolition of mental distances and the absolute shrinkage of time. All short circuits (and the establishment of this planetary hyper-space is tantamount to one immense short circuit) produce electric shocks. What we see emerging here is no longer merely territorial desert, but social desert, employment desert, the body itself being laid waste by the very concentration of information. A kind of Big Crunch, contemporaneous with the Big Bang of the financial markets and the information networks. We are merely at the dawning of the process, but the waste and the wastelands are already growing much faster than the computerization process itself. — Jean Baudrillard

Professor Wilkes is best known as the builder and designer of the EDSAC, the first computer with an internally stored program. Built in 1949, the EDSAC used a mercury delay line memory. He is also known as the author, with Wheeler and Gill, of a volume on "Preparation of Programs for Electronic Digital Computers" in 1951, in which program libraries were effectively introduced. — Maurice Wilkes

Electronic medical records are, in a lot of ways, I think the aspect of technology that is going to revolutionize the way we deliver care. And it's not just that we will be able to collect information, it's that everyone involved in the healthcare enterprise will be able to use that information more effectively. — Risa Lavizzo-Mourey

One common puzzle for the security-minded is how to work with confidential data on the road. Sometimes you can't bring your laptop, or don't want to. But working on somebody else's machine exposes you to malware and leaves behind all kinds of electronic trails. — Barton Gellman

I don't really care what music's made on - I love guitars, but I'm fine with great electronic music. — Johnny Marr

'The Burning Dark' needs a certain kind of soundtrack - something dark and moody, electronic, weird. One of my favourite bands is Ladytron, and I think they'd fit the bill quite well. — Adam Christopher

I don't feel that electronic music has to stand on the back of urban artists or anyone else to be recognized. It's great music. — Kaskade

I'll listen to pretty much anything good, but I probably listen to more "electronic" music than anything else. — Marques Brownlee