#technology

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

For thousands of years, it had been nature--and its supposed creator--that had had a monopoly on awe. It had been the icecaps, the deserts, the volcanoes and the glaciers that had given us a sense of finitude and limitation and had elicited a feeling in which fear and respect coagulated into a strangely pleasing feeling of humility, a feeling which the philosophers of the eighteenth century had famously termed the sublime. But then had come a transformation to which we were still the heirs.... Over the course of the nineteenth century, the dominant catalyst for that feeling of the sublime had ceased to be nature. We were now deep in the era of the technological sublime, when awe could most powerfully be invoked not by forests or icebergs but by supercomputers, rockets and particle accelerators. We were now almost exclusively amazed by ourselves. ↗

— Alain de Botton

#humility #nature #sublime #technology #wonder

To say that the first casualty of war is truth is to miss the rather more important point that a principal weapon of war is lies. ↗

— Harry M. Collins

#science #technology #truth #war #science

Size does matter. Nano even better. ↗

— Toba Beta

#science #technology #science

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a completely ad hoc plot device. ↗

— David Langford

#technology #vision #science

I keep forgetting you’re technologically challenged. ↗

— Colleen Hoover

#dean-holder #hopeless #sky-and-holder #sky-davis #technology

Even the most ardent environmentalist doesn't really want to stop pollution. If he thinks about it, and doesn't just talk about it, he wants to have the right amount of pollution. We can't really afford to eliminate it - not without abandoning all the benefits of technology that we not only enjoy but on which we depend. ↗

— Milton Friedman

#technology

I was flipping channels, watching this cheerleading program on MTV. They took a field hockey girl and “transformed” her into a cheerleader by the end of the show. I was just wondering: what if she liked field hockey better? ↗

— Jess C. Scott

#books #cool #culture #desire #emotion

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 Nelson Bradley

#humanism #humanity #imperialism #nuclear-weapons #peace

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. 2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. 3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. ↗

— Arthur C. Clarke

#magic #possibility #science #technology #science