Luddite Quotes & Sayings

I had a dream about you. You were an escalator, and I was a flight of stairs. You thought I was a Luddite, and I thought I was as ostrich, because I hadn't figured out how to put the fly in flight. One day you broke down, and then you saw that you and I weren't so different after all. — Dora J. Arod

I'm a real Luddite. — Louise Rennison

Belief that where there is a problem, there must be a solution, I shall conclude with the following suggestions. We must, as a start, not delude ourselves with preposterous notions such as the straight Luddite position as outlined, for example, in Jerry Mander's Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. Americans will not shut down any part of their technological apparatus, and to suggest that they do so is to make no suggestion at all. It is almost equally unrealistic to expect that nontrivial modifications in the availability of media will ever be made. Many civilized nations limit by law the amount of hours television may operate and thereby mitigate the role television plays in public life. But I believe that this is not a possibility in America. Once having opened the Happy Medium to full public — Neil Postman

I'm a bit of a Luddite and I hate the internet. — Kirsty Gallacher

The Luddites ... asserted the precedence of community needs over technological innovation and monetary profit; ... The victory of industrialism over Luddism was overwhelming and unconditional; it was undoubtedly the most complete, significant, and lasting victory of modern times. ... To this day, if you say you would be willing to forbid, restrict, or reduce the use of technological devices in order to protect the community -- or to protect the good health of nature on which the community depends -- you will be calle4d a Luddite, and it will not be a compliment. ... Technological determinism has triumphed. — Wendell Berry

I'm a total technophobe. What is wrong with paper and pen? I was delighted when I learnt the word 'Luddite,' as I thought it described me perfectly. — Jasmine Guinness

Anyone who wants bookstores to survive is portrayed as a Luddite who goes around smashing up Kindles. — John Connolly

For it is a mad world and it will get madder if we allow the minorities, be they dwarf or giant, orangutan or dolphin, nuclear-head or water conservationalist, pro-computerologist or Neo-Luddite, simpleton or sage, to interfere with aesthetics. The real world is the playing ground for each and every group, to make or unmake laws. But the tip of the nose of my book or stories or poems is where their rights end and my territorial imperatives begin, run and rule. If Mormons do not like my plays, let them write their own. If the Irish hate my Dublin stories, let them rent typewriters. If teachers and grammar school editors find my jawbreaker sentences shatter their mushmilk teeth, let them eat stale cake dunked in weak tea of their own ungodly manufacture. If the Chicano intellectuals wish to re-cut my "Wonderful Ice Cream Suit" so it shapes "Zoot," may the belt unravel and the pants fall. — Ray Bradbury

I still can't set up the ironing-board. A complete Luddite. — Jenny Eclair

I don't have a computer. I am the Luddite of rock'n'roll, I don't have a portable phone. I write things down. — Elton John

I definitely have a Luddite's approach to what's going on. I find that as I get older, I get stupider. — Rufus Wainwright

I am not a Luddite. I am suspicious of technology. I am perfectly aware of its benefits, but I also try to pay attention to some of the negative effects. — Neil Postman

I'm often saddened and dismayed to see myself portrayed as either a Luddite or as a raving technophile. I've always thought that my job was to be as anthropologically neutral about emerging technologies as possible. — William Gibson

How much of her life had she spent waiting? Waiting for a plant to sprout? Waiting for her father's judgment? Waiting for another letter
to appear in the knothole from Kai? Waiting for years after Kai left to feel at peace with her decision? She fed the Reduced, she did her chores, she avoided her father and her sister, and she waited.She did the duties she'd been taught as a Luddite, and she lied with every breath. — Diana Peterfreund

I am so in the past. I'm such a Luddite when it comes to making music. All I can do is write at the piano. — Elton John

I'm no online whiz, but I'm not a Luddite, either. I love that we have these laptops and tablets and smart phones; they're awesome and convenient and all that. It's more about maintaining balance. Technology should always be a predicate of the true subject: our individual humanity, our examined lives. — Paul Harding

I'm kind of a Luddite myself. I've got a bunch of typewriters at home. I'm a big fan of old technology. — Kerry Bishe

To use a word I never thought I'd apply to myself, I've sort of become a Luddite with regard to information. Where everyone else is getting their Twitter feeds from 'The New York Times' and their 'Huffington Post' emails, I live in a little bit of a bubble. — Mark Feuerstein

I am the complete and utter definition of a Luddite. — Graham McTavish

I'm a neo-Luddite. — Juliana Hatfield

The Luddite impulse is strong among Christians, and our first reaction is to rage against the machine. — Kevin DeYoung

I'm not a website guy, although I'm not a Luddite, either. I have looked at a computer, but I don't go to PopSugar and Goop and all that. — James Gray

One unlikely Luddite was also one of the first long-term beneficiaries. Plato (channeling the nonwriter Socrates) warned that this technology meant impoverishment: For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom. — James Gleick

I'm not in denial about technology, but my mother used to say when I was a kid, 'Son, you're handless,' because I couldn't fix anything. My ambition is to be a Luddite. — Stephen Rea

I'm not a Luddite, but I'm outside more than I'm on my computer. We have a micro-farm - it's a step up from a garden. We have a pretty extensive vineyard. We grow about 60 percent of our own food, make our own wine, have chickens for eggs. — Emilio Estevez

Gee, I am a complete Luddite when it comes to computers, I can barely log on! — Jonathan Shapiro

I'm not a Luddite completely; I believe in refrigerators to cool my martinis, and washing machines because I hate to see women smacking their laundry against a rock. When I hear about hardware, I think of pots and pans, and when I hear about software, I think of sheets and towels. — Studs Terkel

'In Praise of Slowness' chronicles the global trend towards deceleration that has come to be known as the Slow Movement. Don't worry, though: it is not a Luddite rant. I love speed. Going fast can be fun, liberating and productive. The problem is that our hunger for speed, for cramming more and more into less and less time, has gone too far. — Carl Honore

I guess I'm a Luddite. — Michael Eric Dyson

Luddites were those frenzied traditionalists of the early 19th century who toured [England] wrecking new weaving machines on the theory that if they were destroyed ... old jobs and old ways of life could be preserved ... At certain times in his life each man is tempted to become a Luddite, for there is always something he would like to go back to. But to be against all change-against change in the abstract-is folly. — James A. Michener

All forms of contact are good: letters, parcels, e-mails - I've been trying to get a Webcam for my computer, but I'm such a Luddite. — Rose Byrne

Miss Parkinson lived alone in a big bay-windowed house of Edwardian brick with a vast garden of decaying fruit trees and untidy hedges of gigantic size. She was great at making elderberry wine and bottling fruit and preserves and lemon curd and drying flowers for winter. She felt, like Halibut, that things were not as they used to be. The synthetic curse of modern times lay thick on everything. There was everywhere a sad drift from Nature. — H.E. Bates

I read the paper pretty much every day, as well as getting news from the Internet and on TV. But I don't do social media at all; I'm a Luddite from that point of view. — Romola Garai

I'm a bit of a Luddite, really: I don't use email much, as I started drowning in it. So I said 'screw this' and dumped my laptop, though I've begun to re-engage with it. — Charles Hazlewood

I find that as I get older I seem to become more of a Luddite ... And hearing animal experimenters describe me as a Luddite
which used to think I was not. And now I think Ned Lud had the right idea and we should have stopped all the machinery way back when, and learned to live simple lives. — Ingrid Newkirk

I'm not a Luddite at all. I love all this stuff. I look at all the gadgets that come out and I think, 'Oh, this fix works for me. But the rest don't.' I'm not genuflecting in front of the God of Newness. — Carl Honore

The serious reader in the age of technology is a rebel by definition: a protester without a placard, a Luddite without hammer or bludgeon. She reads on planes to picket the antiseptic nature of modern travel, on commuter trains to insist on individualism in the midst of the herd, in hotel rooms to boycott the circumstances that separate her from her usual sources of comfort and stimulation, during office breaks to escape from the banal conversation of office mates, and at home to revolt against the pervasive and mind-deadening irrelevance of television. — Eric Burns

I'm a Luddite with computers, and I'm slightly worried about being hacked as well. — Jo Brand

I got hundreds of emails insulting me, accusing me of being some caveman. I am by no means a Luddite. I have two iPods. I have a cell phone. I have cable TV, HDTV! — Sherman Alexie

People think I'm just an old Luddite, but that's untrue. I buy every new gizmo as it comes out, play with it until I understand how it works, and then give it away. — Felix Dennis

I don't see myself as a Luddite. — Morley Safer

Obamacare notwithstanding, the current president's progressive instincts have been neutered by the rise of the Tea Party and Luddite conservatism. — Richard Corliss