The belly is the teacher of the arts and bestower of invention.
—Persius, c. 55Quotes
If there is a technological advance without a social advance, there is, almost automatically, an increase in human misery.
—Michael Harrington, 1962Whatever the pace of this technological revolution may be, the direction is clear: the lower rungs of the economic ladder are being lopped off.
—Bayard Rustin, 1965We want a lot of engineers in the modern world, but we do not want a world of engineers.
—Winston Churchill, 1948When 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.
—Antiphanes, c. 350 BCWhen man wanted to make a machine that would walk, he created the wheel, which does not resemble a leg.
—Guillaume Apollinaire, 1917Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of these two has the grander view?
—Victor Hugo, 1862Great inventors and discoverers seem to have made their discoveries and inventions, as it were, by the way, in the course of their everyday life.
—Elizabeth Charles, 1862The art of invention grows young with the things invented.
—Francis Bacon, 1605The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.
—B.F. Skinner, 1969All technologies should be assumed guilty until proven innocent.
—David Brower, 1992Industrialism is the religion with “the machine” as the god going to answer all the prayers. Communism and capitalism were just competing sects.
—Dora Russell, 1983Whenever there is excess, an ax remedies it.
—Sumerian proverb