Lapham’s Quarterly

As usual, what we call “progress” is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance.

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.

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

Technology is so much fun, but we can drown in our technology. The fog of information can drive out knowledge.

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

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

We want a lot of engineers in the modern world, but we do not want a world of engineers.

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

Whenever there is excess, an ax remedies it.

The belly is the teacher of the arts and bestower of invention.