This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Technology feeds on itself. Technology makes more technology possible.
Art changes all the time, but it never "improves." It may go down, or up, but it never improves as technology and medicine improve.
Art | Technology | Time |
Arthur Meier Schlesinger, Jr., born Arthur Bancroft Schlesinger
Science and technology revolutionize our lives, but memory, tradition and myth frame our response. Expelled from individual consciousness by the rush of change, history finds its revenge by stamping the collective unconscious with habits, values, expectations, dreams. The dialectic between past and future will continue to form our lives.
Change | Consciousness | Dreams | Future | History | Individual | Memory | Myth | Past | Revenge | Science | Technology | Tradition | Will |
Arthur C Clarke, formally Sir Arthur Charles Clark
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Magic | Technology |
Technology made larger populations possible; large populations now make technology indispensable.
Watching television, you’d think we lived at bay, in total jeopardy, surrounded on all sides by human-seeking germs, shielded against infection and death only by a chemical technology that enables us to keep killing them off.
Death | Technology | Television | Think |
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály
Every product of technology takes up space in the mind, and requires some investment of attention that could have been used for some other purpose.
Max Lerner, fully Maxwell "Max" Alan Lerner, aka Mikhail Lerner
A world technology means either a world government or world suicide.
Government | Means | Suicide | Technology | World | Government |
Modern technology has led to the concentration of economic and political power, and to the development of a society controlled (ruthlessly in the totalitarian states, politely and inconspicuously in the democracies) by Big Business and Big Government.
Business | Government | Power | Society | Technology | Society | Business |
It reflects a prevailing myth that production technology is no more amenable to human judgment or social interests than the laws of thermodynamics, atomic structure or biological inheritance.
Inheritance | Judgment | Myth | Technology |
David Eli Lilienthal, "Mr. TVA"
The machine that frees a man’s back of drudgery does not thereby make his spirit free. Technology has made us more productive, but it does not necessarily enrich our lives. Engineers can build us great dams, but only great people make a valley great. There is no technology of goodness. Men must make themselves spiritually free.
Man | Men | People | Spirit | Technology |
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology toward the organic, the gentle, the elegant and beautiful.
Science | Technology |
Leaving aside genetic surgery applied humans, I foresee that the coming century will place in our hands two other forms of biological technology which are less dangerous but still revolutionary enough to transform the conditions of our existence. I count these new technologies as powerful allies in the attack on Bernal's three enemies [the world, the flesh and the devil]. I give them the names 'biological engineering' and 'self-reproducing machinery'. Biological engineering means the artificial synthesis of living organisms designed to fulfil human purposes. Self-reproducing machinery means the imitation of the function and reproduction of a living organism with non-living materials, a computer-program imitating the function of DNA and a miniature factory imitating the functions of protein molecules. After we have attained a complete understanding of the principles of organization and development of a simple multicellular organism, both of these avenues of technological exploitation should be open to us.
Enough | Imitation | Means | Organization | Principles | Technology | Understanding | Will |
The most revolutionary aspect of technology is its mobility. Anybody can learn it. It jumps easily over barriers of race and language. … The new technology of microchips and computer software is learned much faster than the old technology of coal and iron. It took three generations of misery for the older industrial countries to master the technology of coal and iron. The new industrial countries of East Asia, South Korea, and Singapore and Taiwan, mastered the new technology and made the jump from poverty to wealth in a single generation.
Computer | Poverty | Race | Technology | Wealth | Learn | Old |
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.
Consequences | Example | Good | Life | Life | Technology |