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

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

Whatever the pace of this technological revolution may be, the direction is clear: the lower rungs of the economic ladder are being lopped off.

If there is a technological advance without a social advance, there is, almost automatically, an increase in human misery.

Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of these two has the grander view?

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

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

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

The civilized man has built a coach but has lost the use of his feet.

You can steal a lot more with a computer than with a gun.

Great inventors and discoverers seem to have made their discoveries and inventions, as it were, by the way, in the course of their everyday life.

The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.

We don’t have the option of turning away from the future. No one gets to vote on whether technology is going to change our lives.