Quotes About Technology

The sensitive person's hostility to the machine is in one sense unrealistic, because of the obvious fact that the machine has come to stay. But as an attitude of mind there is a great deal to be said for it. The machine has got to be accepted, but it is probably better to accept it rather as one accepts a drug - that is, grudgingly and suspiciously. Like a drug, the machine is useful, dangerous and habit-forming. The oftener one surrenders to it the tighter its grip becomes.

That's the way we're going nowadays. Everything slick and streamlined, everything made out of something else.

The tank, the submarine, the torpedo, the machine-gun, even the rifle and the hand grenade are still in use.

And even technological progress only happens when its products can in some way be used for the diminution of human liberty.

The mob is in fact loose now, and–in the shape of rich men–is using its power to set up enormous treadmills of boredom, such as 'smart' hotels.

The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely.

As a whole the world is more primitive today than it was fifty years ago. Certain backward areas have advanced, and various devices, always in some way connected with warfare and police espionage, have been developed, but experiment and invention have largely stopped, and the ravages of the atomic war of the Nineteen-fifties have never been fully repaired.

Winston glanced across the hall. In the corresponding cubicle on the other side a small, precise-looking, dark-chinned man named Tillotson was working steadily away, with a folded newspaper on his knee and his mouth very close to the mouthpiece of the speakwrite.

To the right of the speakwrite, a small pneumatic tube for written messages; to the left, a larger one for newspapers; and in the side wall, within easy reach of Winston's arm, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating.

And in all of us there is at least a tinge of that habit of mind. In every country in the world the large army of scientists and technicians, with the rest of us panting at their heels, is marching along the road of 'progress' with the blind persistence of a column of ants.

Everything's streamlined nowadays, even the bullet Hitler's keeping for you.

there is always a temptation to think that industrialism is harmless so long as it is clean and orderly.

Has it ever occurred to you [...] that by the year 2050...not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?

Our civilisation is haunted by the notion that the quickest way of doing anything is invariably the best.

A machine evolves by becoming more efficient, that is, more foolproof; hence the objective of mechanical progress is a foolproof world—which may or may not mean a world inhabited by fools.

The mechanisation of the world could never proceed very far while taste, even the taste-buds of the tongue, remained uncorrupted, because in that case most of the products of the machine would be simply unwanted.

In a world where everything could be done by machinery, everything would be done by machinery.

the tendency towards mechanization which had become quasi-instinctive throughout almost the whole world

Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?

The invention of print, however, made it easier to manipulate public opinion, and the film and the radio carried the process further.

Science and technology were developing at a prodigious speed, and it seemed natural to assume that they would go on developing. This failed to happen, partly because of the impoverishment caused by a long series of wars and revolutions, partly because scientific and technical progress depended on the empirical habit of thought, which could not survive in a strictly regimented society.

The problem came down to this: Americans, who had invented the modern assembly line, the skyscraper, the airplane, and the integrated circuit, no longer believed in the future.

The creation of virtual worlds had taken the place of advances in the physical world. "You can say the whole Internet has something very escapist to it

There had been many definitions of Man; he would make another: "The noise-producing animal." Now there was only the nearly imperceptible murmur of his own engine. He had no need to blow the horn. There were no back-firing trucks, no snorting trains, no pounding planes overhead. In the little towns no whistles blew or bells rang or radios blared or people talked. Even if it was the peace of death, still that was a kind of peace.