Lapham’s Quarterly

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Inventions that are not made, like babies that are not born, are rarely missed.

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.

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

The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.

Machines seem to sense that I am afraid of them. It makes them hostile.

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.

I have seen the science I worshipped, and the aircraft I loved, destroying the civilization I expected them to serve.

The mere existence of nuclear weapons by the thousands is an incontrovertible sign of human insanity.

The ability to store our data externally helps us imagine that our time is limitless, our space infinite.

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

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.

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

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

If the human race wants to go to hell in a basket, technology can help it get there by jet.

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

Whenever there is excess, an ax remedies it.

All technologies should be assumed guilty until proven innocent.

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

The art of invention grows young with the things invented.

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

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

A machine is a slave that neither brings nor bears degradation.

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

Refrigerators and television sets, or even rockets sent to the moon, do not change man into God.

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

Lo, this only have I found, that God hath made man upright; but they have sought out many inventions.

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

Inventor, n. A person who makes an ingenious arrangement of wheels, levers, and springs and believes it civilization.

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

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

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.

Most people who sneer at technology would starve to death if the engineering infrastructure were removed.

Doing research on the web is like using a library assembled piecemeal by pack rats and vandalized nightly.

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

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

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

Machines do not run in order to enable men to live, but we resign ourselves to feeding men in order that they may serve the machines.

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

Technology feeds on itself. Technology makes more technology possible.

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

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

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