Technological Progress Quotes

• Our entire much-praised technological progress, and civilization generally, could be compared to an axe in the hand of a pathological criminal.

  Albert Einstein

  Love, Life, Motivational

  Letter to Heinrich Zangger (1917), as quoted in "Albert Einstein: A Biography" by Albrecht Fölsing, (p. 399), 1997.

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• Progress is impossible without change; and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Inspirational, Change, Attitude

  "Everybody's political what's what?" by George Bernard Shaw, Chapter XXXVII, (p. 330), 1944.

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• Maybe the preoccupation with technological progress has overshadowed our concern with human progress.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Progress, Preoccupation, Concern

  "Uber CEO’s Time-Out Is a Wake-Up Call to Us All" by David Sable, www.huffingtonpost.com. June 20, 2017.

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• There might be new technology, but technological progress itself was nothing new - and over the years it had not destroyed jobs, but created them.

  Margaret Thatcher

  Jobs, Technology, Years

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• Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.

  Aldous Huxley

  Mean, Technology, Progress

  Aldous Huxley (1937). “Ends and Means: An Inquiry Into the Nature of Ideals and Into the Methods Employed for Their Realization”, p.9, Transaction Publishers

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• Technology... the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it.

  Max Frisch

  Wisdom, Science, Technology

  Max Frisch (1994). “Homo Faber”, p.186, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• In the developed world, technological progress means that you can have a situation where there's growth, where there's a way in which everybody can be better off over time.

  Peter Thiel

  Mean, Growth, Progress

  Source: bigthink.com

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• I'm serenely convinced that we are heading into what will amount to a time out from technological progress as we know it.

  James Howard Kunstler

  Progress, Technological, Headings

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• As we consider the fast pace of scientific and technological progress in our modern world, we must not lose our moral compass and give way to 'free market eugenics'.

  Sam Brownback

  Eugenics, Giving, Progress

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• Despite our high rate of unemployment, 300,000 jobs go unfilled largely because many of the unemployed lack the skills needed today as a result of technological progress.

  Kim Campbell

  Jobs, Skills, Progress

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• Scientific and technological progress themselves are value-neutral. They are just very good at doing what they do. If you want to do selfish, greedy, intolerant and violent things, scientific technology will provide you with by far the most efficient way of doing so. But if you want to do good, to solve the world's problems, to progress in the best value-laden sense, once again, there is no better means to those ends than the scientific way.

  Richard Dawkins

  Selfish, Mean, Science

  "The Evolutionary Future of Man". The Economist, Septermber 11, 1993.

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• More and more I come to value charity and love of one's fellow being above everything else...All our lauded technological progress-our very civilization-is like the axe in the hand of the pathological criminal.

  Albert Einstein

  Love, Hands, Civilization

  Albert Einstein (2013). “Albert Einstein, The Human Side: Glimpses from His Archives”, p.88, Princeton University Press

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• In the past, we've always come up with new jobs for humans to do and so it's always benefitted us, technological progress, but now we're not really creating enough new jobs to replace the jobs that are being automated.

  Gemma Chan

  Jobs, Past, Creating

  Source: www.denofgeek.com

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• Technological society leads to increasing numbers of people who cannot adapt to the inhuman rhythm of modern life with its emphasis on specialization. A class of people is growing up who are unexploitable because they are not worth employing even for the minimum wage. Technological progress makes whole categories of people useless without making it possible to support them with the wealth produced by the progress.

  Jacques Ellul

  Growing Up, Class, Numbers

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• Because of the disruption phenomenon - technological progress outstripping the ability of customers to utilize it - the general tendency is for the money to migrate toward the subsystems.

  Clayton Christensen

  Progress, Disruption, Tendencies

  Source: www.strategy-business.com

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• The Church welcomes technological progress and receives it with love, for it is an indubitable fact that technological progress comes from God and, therefore, can and must lead to Him.

  Pope Pius XII

  Progress, Church, Facts

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• Never before have people been so infantalized, made so dependant on the machine for everything; as the earth rapidly approaches its extinction due to technology, our souls are shrunk and flattened by its pervasive rule. Any sense of wholeness and freedom can only return by the undoing of the massive division of labour at the heart of technological progress. This is the liberatory project in all its depth.

  John Zerzan

  Heart, Technology, People

  John Zerzan (1994). “Future primitive: and other essays”

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• The Soviet Union and its empire disappeared in large part because its smokestack economy could no longer keep up with the technological progress of the world's major economic powers.

  John Mearsheimer

  Progress, World, Unions

  John J. Mearsheimer (2003). “The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (Updated Edition)”, p.219, W. W. Norton & Company

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• We had learned how to invent things, and the question of why we invent things receded in importance. The idea that if something could be done it should be done was born in the nineteenth century. And along with it, there developed a profound belief in all the principles through which invention succeeds: objectivity, efficiency, expertise, standardization, measurement, and progress. It also came to be believed that the engine of technological progress worked most efficiently when people are conceived of not as children of God or even as citizens but as consumers-that is to say, as markets.

  Neil Postman

  Children, Objectivity, Ideas

  Neil Postman (2011). “Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology”, p.61, Vintage

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• [We] assume that social progress is like technological progress: one cannot uninvent the internal combustion engine, so how could one uninvent liberty?

  Mark Steyn

  Progress, Liberty, Assuming

  Mark Steyn (2012). “After America: Get Ready for Armageddon”, p.208, Regnery Publishing

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• If you have technological progress, that will encourage more capitalist system. On the other hand, if you don't, if things are stalled, you end up with much more of a zero sum type thing, where there's no progress and basically everybody's gain is somebody else's loss.

  Peter Thiel

  Zero, Loss, Hands

  Interviewed with Victoria Brown, bigthink.com. November 15, 2010.

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• The human species does not necessarily move in stages from progress to progress ... history and civilization do not advance in tandem. From the stagnation of Medieval Europe to the decline and chaos in recent times on the mainland of Asia and to the catastrophes of two world wars in the twentieth century, the methods of killing people became increasingly sophisticated. Scientific and technological progress certainly does not imply that humankind as a result becomes more civilized.

  Gao Xingjian

  War, Moving, Europe

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• I realized that the future of aviation, to which I had devoted so much of my life, depended less on the perfection of aircraft than on preserving the epoch-evolved environment of life, and that this was true of all technological progress.

  Charles Lindbergh

  Perfection, Progress, Aviation

  Foreword to "The Gentle Tasady: A Stone Age People in the Philippine Rain Forest" by John Nance, 1975.

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• I'm in favor of free trade, but I think if you had to make a choice between having technological progress versus free trade, you had one or the other, you should always pick technological progress. I think it's an incredibly important variable for creating more prosperity.

  Peter Thiel

  Thinking, Creating, Choices

  Interviewed with Victoria Brown, bigthink.com. November 15, 2010.

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• If war can indeed be turned into a relic, then the virtue of greed will recede further. From a given society's standpoint, one big upside of wanton material acquisition has traditionally been the way it drives technological progress-which, after all, helps keep societies strong. In the nineteenth century, Russia ans Germany had little choice about modernizing; in those days stasis invited conquest. But if societies no longer face conquest, breakneck technological advance is an offer they can refuse, and frugality a luxury people can afford.

  Robert Wright

  Change, Strong, War

  Robert Wright (2001). “Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny”, p.314, Vintage

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