Technology Quote Activity
Running the activity in the classroom
The technology quotes activity was created as an introductory activity to encourage people to consider critical interpretations of technology that go beyond simply seeing technology as tools that always result in social progress. Educators can use all the quotes in full, choose some, or use simplified quotes. The Google slides linked below are intended to be printed out and posted on classroom walls for a “gallery walk,” but teachers can adapt the activity for their contexts.
We have continued adding quotes to this page as our community shares new ones with us. Only the quotes we have used in the classroom appear in the slides, but of course, it is easy to modify the slides to include different quotes. Please continue to check back for updates.
Creators: Dan Krutka and Jacob Pleasants
What are different ways to think about technology?
Technology quote activity instructions: Read the quotes and consider the following questions:
What do you believe each quote means?
How does the time and place from which it originates effect its meaning for today?
Which quote most resonates with you—for better or worse?
Jot down your responses and prepare to discuss them with a partner or small groups.
The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.
— Karl Marx (economic philosopher), The Poverty of Philosophy, 1847
Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.
— Henry David Thoreau (philosopher), Walden, 1855
Recent inventions and business methods call attention to the next step which must be taken for the protection of the person, and for securing to the individual… the right "to be let alone." Instantaneous photographs and newspaper enterprise have invaded the sacred precincts of private and domestic life; and numerous mechanical devices threaten to make good the prediction that "what is whispered in the closet shall be proclaimed from the house-tops." For years there has been a feeling that the law must afford some remedy for the unauthorized circulation of portraits of private persons; and the evil of invasion of privacy by the newspapers, long keenly felt...
— Louis Brandeis (future Supreme Court Justice), Harvard Law Review, 1890
The machine which at first blush seems a means of isolating man from the great problems of nature, actually plunges him more deeply into them.
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (pilot and poet), Wind, Sand and Stars, 1939
No man can be turned into a permanent machine. Immediately the dead weight of authority is lifted from his head, he begins to function normally.
— Mahatma Gandhi (Indian revolutionary), Letter, 1940
We must keep our moral and spiritual progress abreast with our scientific and technological advances. This poses another dilemma of modern man. We have allowed our civilization to outdistance our culture...Civilization refers to what we use; culture refers to what we are. Civilization is that complex of devices, instrumentalities, mechanisms, and techniques by means of which we live. Culture is that realm of ends expressed in art, literature, religion, and morals for which at best we live. The great problem confronting us today is that we have allowed the means by which we live to outdistance the ends for which we live. We have allowed our civilization to outrun our culture, and so we are in danger now of ending up with guided missiles in the hands of misguided men. This is what the poet Thoreau meant when he said, 'Improved means to an unimproved end.' If we are to survive today and realize the dream of our mission and the dream of the world, we must bridge the gulf and somehow keep the means by which we live abreast with the ends for which we live.
— Martin Luther King, Jr. (Civil Rights leader), The American Dream speech, 1961.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
— Arthur C. Clarke (science fiction writer), Profiles of the Future, 1962
We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.
— John Culkin (media scholar), Saturday Review, 1967
Machines… are an extension of their inventor-creators. That is not simple once you think. Machines, the entire technology of the West, is just that, the technology of the West.
Nothing has to look or function the way it does. The West man’s freedom, unscientifically got at the expense of the rest of the world’s people, has allowed him to xpand his mind–spread his sensibility wherever it cdgo, & so shaped the world, & its powerful artifact-engines.
— Amiri Baraka (writer), ”Technology and Ethos," 1969
Whether or not it draws on new scientific research technology is a branch of moral philosophy, not of science.
— Paul Goodman (social critic), ”Can Technology Be Humane?,” 1969
As the power of machines increases, the role of persons more and more decreases to that of mere consumers.
— Ivan Illich (theologian), Tools for Conviviality, 1973
The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.
— Audre Lorde, Institute for the Humanities conference talk, 1979
Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.
— Melvin Kranzberg (historian), Presidential address for the Society for the History of Technology, 1985
Our tools are not always at our beck and call. The less we know about them, the more likely it is that they will command us, rather than the other way around.
— Ruth Schwartz Cowan (historian), More Work for Mother, 1983
Technology giveth and technology taketh away.
— Neil Postman (media scholar), Technopoly, 1992
Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.
— Ian Malcolm (fictional scientist), Jurassic Park, 1993
Technological development has come to be viewed as an autonomous thing, beyond politics and society, with a destiny of its own which must become our destiny too.
— David Noble (Historian), Progress without People, 1995
When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution... Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress.
— Paul Virilio (French Philosopher), Politics of the Very Worst, p. 89, 1999
It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.
— Wendell Berry (Environmental Activist & Farmer), “Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition,” 2000
I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
— Douglas Adams (science fiction author), The Salmon of Doubt, 2002
If the experience of modern society shows us anything, it is that technologies are not merely aids to human activity, but also powerful forces acting to reshape that activity and its meaning.”
— Langdon Winner (Science and Technology Studies Professor), “Technology as a Form of Life,‘“ p. 105, 2004
Technology is the active human interface with the material world.
— Ursula K. Le Guin (science fiction writer), “A Rant About ‘Technology,” 2005
Indigenous peoples across the globe have developed technologies since pre-history. Tools for building, measuring, carving, hunting, holding, preserving food, making clothing, for communicating across distances… Indigenous technology is pragmatic, it is responsive and responsible to the ecology in which it lives and from which it came.
— Native Science Academy, 2007
Technology enchants. It makes us forget what we know about life. We slip into thinking that always being connected is going to make us less lonely. But we are at risk because it is actually the reverse: If we are unable to be alone, we will be more lonely. And if we don’t teach our children to be alone, they will only know how to be lonely.
— Sherry Turkle (academic), Reclaiming Conversation (p. 23), 2015
On the Internet and in our everyday uses of technology, discrimination is embedded in computer code and, increasingly, in artificial intelligence technologies that we are reliant on, by choice or not... We are only beginning to understand the long- term consequences of these decision- making tools in both masking and deepening social inequality.
— Safiya Umoja Noble (academic), Algorithms of Oppression, 2018
Three hundred years ago, intellectuals of the European Enlightenment constructed a mythology of technology. Influenced by a confluence of humanism, colonialism, and racism, the mythology ignored local wisdom and indigenous innovation, deeming it primitive. Guiding this was a perception of technology that feasted on the felling of forests and the extraction of resources. The mythology that powered the Age of Industrialization distanced itself from natural systems, favoring fuel by fire. Today, the legacy of this mythology haunts us.
— Julia Watson (Designer), The Power of Lo-TEK, 2019
Every future imagined by a tech company is worse than the previous iteration.
— Chris Gilliard (@hypervisible) & Guy McHendry (@acaguy) (academics & technology critics), sticker, 2021
It’s the same story, time and again: Technology that promises to alleviate work degrades it instead.
— Brian Merchant (Technology Journalist), Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech, p. 315, 2023
Technochauvinism is a kind of bias that considers computational solutions superior to all other solutions.
— Meredith Broussard (data journalism professor), More than a glitch, 2023, p. 2