Technology

Technology is a broad term dealing with the use and knowledge of humanity's tools and crafts.

Sourced

• We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.
  • Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt (2002)

• Technology and the machine resurrected San Francisco while Pompeii still slept in her ashes.
  
  • Silas Bent, Machine Made Man, p. 326. (1930)

• Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
  • Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry Into The Limits of the Possible (1962; revised 1973)

• For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.
  • Richard P. Feynman, Rogers' Commission Report into the Challenger Crash, Appendix F - "Personal Observations on Reliability of Shuttle" (June 1986)

• Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.
  • Alfred North Whitehead, An Introduction to Mathematics (1911), ch. 5

Unsourced

• Technology is a sprinter, the Law is a marathon runner.
  • A.K.T. Rex

• A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
  • Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

• The drive toward complex technical achievement offers a clue to why the U.S. is good at space gadgetry and bad at slum problems.
  • John Kenneth Galbraith

• For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of life, please press three.
  • Alice Kahn

• The general precept of any product is that simple things should be easy, and hard things should be possible.
  • Alan Kay

• Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.
  • R. Buckminster Fuller

• I am sorry to say that there is too much point to the wisecrack that life is extinct on other planets because their scientists were more advanced than ours.
  • John F. Kennedy

• I like my new telephone, my computer works just fine, my calculator is perfect, but Lord, I miss my mind!
  • Anonymous

• I think I should not go far wrong if I asserted that the amount of genuine leisure available in a society is generally in inverse proportion to the amount of labor-saving machinery it employs.
  • E.F. Schumacher

• If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger.
  • Frank Lloyd Wright

• I'm struck by the insidious, computer-driven tendency to take things out of the domain of muscular activity and put them into the domain of mental activity. The transfer is not paying off. Sure, muscles are unreliable, but they represent several million years of accumulated finesse.
  • Brian Eno, Wired, January 1999

• In the future, airplanes will be flown by a dog and a pilot. And the dog's job will be to make sure that if the pilot tries to touch any of the buttons, the dog bites him.
  • Scott Adams

• It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.
  • Albert Einstein

• The most important and urgent problems of the technology of today are no longer the satisfactions of the primary needs or of archetypal wishes, but the reparation of the evils and damages by the technology of yesterday.
  • Dennis Gabor, Innovations: Scientific, Technological and Social, 1970

• The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers.
  • Sydney J. Harris

• The system of nature, of which man is a part, tends to be self-balancing, self-adjusting, self-cleansing. Not so with technology.
  • E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful, 1973

• Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
  • Aldous Huxley

• Technology can do little for people who have nothing to say.
  • Eric Auchard, "Blog Publishers Stealing Web Limelight" (3/1/03), from the Reuters Internet Report

• Technology…is a queer thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other.
  • C.P. Snow, New York Times, 15 March 1971

• Technology... the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it.
  • Max Frisch

• This is perhaps the most beautiful time in human history; it is really pregnant with all kinds of creative possibilities made possible by science and technology which now constitute the slave of man - if man is not enslaved by it.
  • Jonas Salk

• Technology presumes there's just one right way to do things and there never is.
  • Robert M. Pirsig

• We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.
  • Carl Sagan

• We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.
  • Carl Sagan, interview with Anne Kalosh, 1995

• Western society has accepted as unquestionable a technological imperative that is quite as arbitrary as the most primitive taboo: not merely the duty to foster invention and constantly to create technological novelties, but equally the duty to surrender to these novelties unconditionally, just because they are offered, without respect to their human consequences.
  • Lewis Mumford