Quotes About Progress

There was a time when educators became famous for providing reasons for learning; now they become famous for inventing a method.

What is clear is that, to date, computer technology has served to strengthen Technopoly's hold, to make people believe that technological innovation is synonymous with human progress.

If the press was, as David Riesman called it, "the gunpowder of the mind," the computer, in its capacity to smooth over unsatisfactory institutions and ideas, is the talcum powder of the mind.

Nonetheless, as incomprehensible problems mount, as the concept of progress fades, as meaning itself becomes suspect, the Technopolist stands firm in believing that what the world needs is yet more information. It is like the joke about the man who complains that the food he is being served in a restaurant is inedible and also that the portions are too small

How does a culture change when new technologies are introduced to it? And is it always desirable for a culture to accommodate itself to the demands of new technologies?

Public consciousness has not yet assimilated the point that technology is ideology.

Physical reality seems to recede in proportion as man's symbolic activity advances.

America was founded by intellectuals, from which it has taken us two centuries and a communications revolution to recover.

to whom will the technology give greater power and freedom? And whose power and freedom will be reduced by it?

The principal strength of the telegraph was its capacity to move information, not collect it, explain it or analyze it.

But the telegraph demands that we burn its contents.

the assumption that a new medium is merely an extension or amplification of an older one; that an automobile, for example, is only a fast horse, or an electric light a powerful candle.

new technologies compete with old ones—for time, for attention, for money, for prestige, but mostly for dominance of their world-view.

Surrounding every technology are institutions whose organization—not to mention their reason for being—reflects the world-view promoted by the technology.

New technologies alter the structure of our interests: the things we think about. They alter the character of our symbols: the things we think with. And they alter the nature of community: the arena in which thoughts develop.

America is engaged in the world's most ambitious experiment to accommodate itself to the technological distractions made possible by the electric plug.

In tabulating the cost of technological progress, Freud takes a rather depressing line, that of a man who agrees with Thoreau's remark that our inventions are but improved means to an unimproved end.

People will come to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think

What did we do before we were so tethered? I

Disaffection, once begun, acquires a momentum of its own

I've never trusted collaborations, because most people in this world are not closers. They don't finish what they start; they don't live what they dream; they sabotage their own progress because they're afraid they won't find what they seek.

Why waste yourself doing something pointless, when you can spend your life being productive in your own eyes?

A job is never truly finished. It just reaches a stage where it can be left on its own for a while.

Hate was just a legend And war was never known The people worked together And they lifted many stones. They carried them to the flatlands And they died along the way But they built up with their bare hands What we still can't do today.