"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
— Arthur C. Clarke (Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible)

"First we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII — and we thought it was a typewriter. Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television. With the World Wide Web, we've realized it's a brochure."
— Douglas Adams

"We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works."
— Douglas Adams

"The iPod completely changed the way people approach music.
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— Karl Lagerfeld

"Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards."
— Aldous Huxley

"Before you become too entranced with gorgeous gadgets and mesmerizing video displays, let me remind you that information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, and wisdom is not foresight. Each grows out of the other, and we need them all."
— Arthur C. Clarke

"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."
— Pablo Picasso

"Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we do not experience it."
— Rollo May (The Cry for Myth)

"It's supposed to be automatic, but actually you have to push this button. "
— John Brunner (Stand on Zanzibar)

"Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount."
— Omar N. Bradley

"The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple. A good example of a simple technology with profound historical consequences is hay. Nobody knows who invented hay, the idea of cutting grass in the autumn and storing it in large enough quantities to keep horses and cows alive through the winter. All we know is that the technology of hay was unknown to the Roman Empire but was known to every village of medieval Europe. Like many other crucially important technologies, hay emerged anonymously during the so-called Dark Ages. According to the Hay Theory of History, the invention of hay was the decisive event which moved the center of gravity of urban civilization from the Mediterranean basin to Northern and Western Europe. The Roman Empire did not need hay because in a Mediterranean climate the grass grows well enough in winter for animals to graze. North of the Alps, great cities dependent on horses and oxen for motive power could not exist without hay. So it was hay that allowed populations to grow and civilizations to flourish among the forests of Northern Europe. Hay moved the greatness of Rome to Paris and London, and later to Berlin and Moscow and New York."
— Freeman Dyson (Infinite in All Directions)

"As technology advances in complexity and scope, fear becomes more primitive."
— Don DeLillo

"Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation...tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego. His anxiety subsides. His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a gray vegetation."
— Jean Arp

"To err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer."
— Farmer's Almanac, 1978

"Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men."
— Dr. Martin Luther King Jr

""We have not noticed how fast the rest has risen. Most of the industrialized world--and a good part of the nonindustrialized world as well--has better cell phone service than the United States. Broadband is faster and cheaper across the industrial world, from Canada to France to Japan, and the United States now stands sixteenth in the world in broadband penetration per capita. Americans are constantly told by their politicians that the only thing we have to learn from other countries' health care systems is to be thankful for ours. Most Americans ignore the fact that a third of the country's public schools are totally dysfunctional (because their children go to the other two-thirds). The American litigation system is now routinely referred to as a huge cost to doing business, but no one dares propose any reform of it. Our mortgage deduction for housing costs a staggering $80 billion a year, and we are told it is crucial to support home ownership, except that Margaret Thatcher eliminated it in Britain, and yet that country has the same rate of home ownership as the United States. We rarely look around and notice other options and alternatives, convinced that "we're number one.""
— Fareed Zakaria (The Post-American World)

"Our technology forces us to live mythically"
— Marshall McLuhan

"We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster."
— Carl Sagan

"Some of the greatest discoveries...consist mainly in the clearing away of psychological roadblocks which obstruct the approach to reality; which is why,post factum they appear so obvious."
— Arthur Koestler (The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe)

""You could put your faith in technology. It got you here, it can get you out" - Murray (WN 285)."
— Don DeLillo (White Noise: Text and Criticism)

"This is the whole point of technology. It creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens universal extinction on the other. Technology is lust removed from nature. - Murray (WN 285)"
— Don DeLillo (White Noise: Text and Criticism)

"The nice thing about twitter is the architecture of visibility. Email is invisible unless you reach out to someone directly. With Twitter, anyone can follow you and this is one of the big changes that was really introduced by Flickr, was this wonderful idea that you can follow somebody without their permission. Recognizing that relationships are asymmetrical, unlike facebook where we have to acknowledge each other otherwise we can’t see each other."
— Tim O'Reilly

"[Flaubert] didn’t just hate the railway as such; he hated the way it flattered people with the illusion of progress. What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid together."
— Julian Barnes (Flaubert's Parrot)

"As each wave of technology is released. It must be accompanied by a demand for new skills, new language. Consumers must constantly update their ways of thinking, always questioning their understanding of the world. Going back to old ways, old technology is forbidden. There in no past, no present, only an endless future of inadequacy"
— Richard Kadrey

"Progress is unstoppable. It is a drumbeat to which we must all march. Technology helps and good ideas spread – these are two lows of nature. If you don’t let technology help you, if you resist good ideas, you condemn yourself to dinosaurhood! I am utterly convinced of this."
— Yann Martel (Life of Pi)

"Technology - with all its promise and potential - has gotten so far beyond human control that its threatening the future of humankind."
— Kim J. Vicente

"[N]ew technology enables new kinds of group-forming."
— Clay Shirky (Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations)

"Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand."
— Archibald Putt

"The ultimate concept car will move so fast, even at rest, as to be invisible."
— J.G. Ballard

"There ain't nothin' worse than being stuck."
— Butch, in Living in the State of Stuck

"The goal of religious thinking is exactly the same as that of technological research -- namely, practical action. Whenever man is truly concerned with obtaining concrete results, whenever he is hard pressed by reality, he abandons abstract speculation and reverts to a mode of response that becomes increasingly cautious and conservative as the forces he hopes to subdue, or at least to outrun, draw ever nearer."
— René Girard (Violence and the Sacred)

"We are losing our common vocabulary, built over thousands of years to help and delight and instruct us, for the sake of what we take to be the new technology's virtues. "
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"The 90’s map the decades to come – full of invisible technologies that will ‘sub-contract’ many of the functions of the central nervous system."
— J.G. Ballard

"I wouldn't mind if the consumer culture went poof! overnight because then we'd all be in the same boat and life wouldn't be so bad, mucking about with the chickens and feudalism and the like. But you know what would be absolutely horrible. The worst? ... If, as we were all down on earth wearing rags and husbanding pigs inside abandoned Baskin-Robbins franchises, I were to look up in the sky and see a jet -- with just one person inside even -- I'd go berserk. I'd go crazy. Either everyone slides back into the Dark Ages or no one does."
— Douglas Coupland (Shampoo Planet)

"Just aiming a speely input device, or a Farspark chambre, or whatever you call it... a speelycaptor... at something doesn't collect what is meaningful to me. I need someone to gather it in with all their senses, mix it round in their head, and make it over into words."
— Neal Stephenson (Anathem)

"That new technologies and techniques would be forthcoming was a fundamental article of Christian faith. Hence, no bishops or theologians denounced clocks or sailing ships--although both were condemned on religious grounds in various non-Western societies. "
— Rodney Stark

"Technology is the campfire around which we tell our stories."
— Laurie Anderson

"Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski."
— Guy Billout

"Technos and clerics have much in common. Both take a world that can’t be fully understood and try to explain its fundamental properties.

Clerics postulate beliefs that can never be proven; they demand you accept these postulates as your Faith, which will guide your actions and thoughts. It’s a top down way of thinking; start with the big picture and derive rules for living. Fundamental knowledge is static. Even the derived rules rarely change.

Technos work from the bottom up. They build a baseline of observations and formulate theories to explain these phenomena. Nothing is sacred; with new observations, theories are discarded or modified to fit the facts.

Technos and clerics; how could they not be in conflict?
Dan Ronco’s Diary, 2016
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— Dan Ronco (Unholy Domain)

"Your brain may give birth to any technology, but other brains will decide whether the technology thrives. The number of possible technologies is infinite, and only a few pass this test of affinity with human nature."
— Robert Wright (Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny)

"It bears emphasizing: our traditional ways of thinking have ignored - and virtually made invisible - the relationship between people and technology."
— Kim J. Vicente

"The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you. There isn't any other test. If the machine produces tranquility it's right. If it disturbs you it's wrong until either the machine or your mind is changed."
— Robert M. Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values)

"[B]ecause the minimum costs of being an organization in the first place are relatively high, certain activities may have some value but not enough to make them worth pursuing in any organized way. New social tools are altering this equation by lowering the costs of coordinating group action."
— Clay Shirky (Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations)

"Technology is crucial to civilization why? Because it helps us make our fate. We don't need God or miracles or the flight of the bumble bee. But it is also crouched and undecidable. It can go either way."
— Don DeLillo (Cosmopolis)