All attempts to adapt our ethical code to our situation in the technological age have failed.

’Tis the sport to have the engineer / Hoist with his own petard.

Whenever there is excess, an ax remedies it.

When man wanted to make a machine that would walk, he created the wheel, which does not resemble a leg.

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.

Industrialism is the religion with “the machine” as the god going to answer all the prayers. Communism and capitalism were just competing sects.

I’d like to be a machine, wouldn’t you?

Civilization, a much-abused word, stands for a high matter quite apart from telephones and electric lights.

What can you conceive more silly and extravagant than to suppose a man racking his brains and studying night and day how to fly?

When poets don’t know what to say and have completely given up on the play, just like a finger, they lift the machine and the spectators are satisfied.

You cannot endow even the best machine with initiative; the jolliest steamroller will not plant flowers.

I have always found it in mine own experience an easier matter to devise many and profitable inventions than to dispose of one of them to the good of the author himself.