Quotes About Technology

Why are people born? Why do they die? Why do they want to spend so much of the intervening time wearing digital watches?

I don't like games. You're robbing the precious time of children to be children. They need to be in touch with the real world more.

When you're on a submarine you're usually underwater for months at a time, and you don't get to Skype or make phone calls. When you get messages, they're maybe two sentences. They're very short.

It is interesting to note how often a technological development—such as Gutenberg's—promotes rather than eliminates that which it is supposed to supersede.

Does anyone write texts or emails as substantial or as telling as what we find in the letters of the past?

Some day, as soon as a book is printed it will be simultaneously put into digital form. That will be a wonderful research tool, but it will never substitute for holding the book. I feel certain that at least within my lifetime, everyone will still be going to the bookstore and buying printed books. Thank God I'll die before I have to worry about whether the printed book itself will disappear. That's something I don't want to live to see.

In early sobriety I heard that if you have an idea after ten p.m., it is probably not a good idea—and this was before e-mail.

his cell phone—the adolescent's pacemaker.

Deep is so un-American now, even radical. We live too often like water skeeters on the surface of the pond, dropping down for a quick bite of insect or e-mail. Deep is the realm of soul.

But with antibiotics and technology came great expectations, of being able to keep our children safe, of living long and healthy lives, relaxed and content and able to keep up the car payments. Even with the Internet, deciphering the genetic code, and great advances in immunotherapy, life is frequently confusing at best, and guaranteed to be hard and weird and sad at times.

T. S. Eliot wrote, 'Teach us to care and not to care / Teach us to sit still.' We long for this, and yet we check our smartphones every ten minutes for news, texts, distraction.

chuckled, referring to the time Markel had used up sixty percent of the system's resources to simulate a series of space battles in real time for one of his war games. Markel flushed.

Now, instead of planting our solitude with our own dream blossoms, we choke the space with continuous music, chatter and companionship to which we do not even listen. It is simply there to fill the vacuum. When the noise stops there is no inner music to take its place. We must re-learn to be alone.

Modern communication loads us with more problems than the human frame can carry. [...] Our grandmothers, and even - with some scrambling - our mothers, lived in a circle small enough to let them implement in action most of the impulses of their hearts and minds. We were brought up in a tradition that has now become impossible, for we have extended our circle throughout space and time.

Roman influence seeds itself, sprouting mighty oaks right through the modern forest of computers, digital disks, microviruses and space satellites.

There is a horrifying loneliness at work in this time. No, listen to me. We lived six and seven to a room in those days, when I was still among the living. The city streets were seas of humanity; and now in these high buildings dim-witted souls hover in luxurious privacy, gazing through the television window at a faraway world of kissing and touching. It is bound to produce some great fund of common knowledge, some new level of human awareness, a curious skepticism, to be so alone.

A large American automobile came crawling close to us, and we could hear from behind its thick windows the deep bass of the radio, and the nasty words of a hateful song.It seemed like so much of modern music, a din to drive human beings mad.

Did they have no inkling of how the advances in lighting had affected the behavior and the minds of people, what it meant for the tiniest hamlet to have its brilliantly lighted drugstores and supermarkets, and for people to wander at eight o'clock of an evening with the same energetic curiosity and eagerness for work and experience that they enjoyed during the sunlight hours?

Information age. I guess I'm part of it, even if I can't remember how to use my iPhone from week to week, and have to learn how to send e-mails all over again every couple of years, and can't retain any profound technological knowledge about the computers I sometimes use.

No knowledge can defeat him, tempered by fire and time, he is too strong for the horrors of technology or the spells of science.

Where could she have gotten these notions, except from the bits and pieces of electric dreams that she watched on a great screen I'd provided for her?

How can this magnificent modern world enter into war? How can these modern people who know so much, who've come so far, suddenly be on the attack against one another?

The thing about caller ID is," Red said, more or less to himself, "it seems a little like cheating. A person should be willing to take his chances, answering the phone.

It was beginning to get a bit cooler out, thank heaven. One thing she was never going to adjust to was how you needed constant air conditioning here. People were dependent upon it in the same way that space travelers were dependent upon their oxygen tanks. It seemed possible that if the electricity went off, they could actually die. When Willa thought about that too long, it made her feel kind of panicky.