76 Inspiring Technology Quotes

In a world where technology constantly reshapes the way we live, work, and interact, finding motivation and insight from the voices of tech visionaries and thought leaders can be a powerful source of inspiration. Whether you're coding the future, leading digital transformation, or simply fascinated by innovation, diving into the minds of those who have paved the way in technology can reignite your passion for the possibilities that lie ahead. Our curated collection of 76 inspiring technology quotes aims to uplift, motivate, and encourage your own journey through the ever-evolving landscape of technology. Let these words challenge your thinking and evoke a renewed appreciation for the remarkable impact technology has on our world.

1. “A CD. How quaint. We have these in museums.” - Eoin Colfer

2. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” - Arthur C. Clarke

3. “Truly, more than removing the partition between vectors and values, we would have needed to talk about strengthening crisscrossed lacings: an intertwined kind of understanding that would de-ideologize 'ideologies,' desanctify sanctities, but also mentalize the material bases of systems of inscription, and psychoanalyze not souls but tools. That is, in one and the same gesture, make our mnemo-technic equipment intelligible as mentality and our mental equipment intelligible as technology.” - Regis Debray

4. “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” - Dan Ronco

5. “You could put your faith in technology. It got you here, it can get you out" - Murray (WN 285).” - Don DeLillo

6. “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

7. “Technology is the campfire around which we tell our stories.” - Laurie Anderson

8. “The intentions of a tool are what it does. A hammer intends to strike, a vise intends to hold fast, a lever intends to lift. They are what it is made for. But sometimes a tool may have other uses that you don't know. Sometimes in doing what you intend, you also do what the knife intends, without knowing.” - Philip Pullman

9. “It's supposed to be automatic, but actually you have to push this button. ” - John Brunner

10. “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

11. “Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.” - Pablo Picasso

12. “I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.” - Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

13. “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

14. “Many aspects of our screen-bound lives are bad for our social skills simply because we get accustomed to controlling the information that comes in, managing our relationships electronically, deleting stuff that doesn't interest us. We edit the world; we select from menus; we pick and choose; our social 'group' focuses on us and disintegrates without us. This makes it rather confusing for us when we step outdoors and discover that other people's behaviour can't be deleted with a simple one-stroke command or dragged to the trash icon.” - Lynne Truss

15. “Prognoses which have been made contend that our technology will terminate in pure necromancy. If so, everything we now experience would be only a departure and mechanics would become refined to a degree that would no longer require any crude embodiment. Lights, words, yes even thoughts would be sufficient. (1957)” - Ernst Jünger

16. “Human perfection and technical perfection are incompatible. If we strive for one, we must sacrifice the other: there is, in any case, a parting of the ways. Whoever realises this will do cleaner work one way or the other.Technical perfection strives towards the calculable, human perfection towards the incalculable. Perfect mechanisms - around which, therefore, stands an uncanny but fascinating halo of brilliance - evoke both fear and Titanic pride which will be humbled not by insight but only by catastrophe.The fear and enthusiasm we experience at the sight of perfect mechanisms are in exact contrast to the happiness we feel at the sight of a perfect work of art. We sense an attack on our integrity, on our wholeness. That arms and legs are lost or harmed is not yet the greatest danger.” - Ernst Jünger

17. “Nin knew how much humans loved money, riches, and material things—though he never really could understand why. The more technologically advanced the human species got, the more isolated they seemed to become, at the same time. It was alarming, how humans could spend entire lifetimes engaged in all kinds of activities, without getting any closer to knowing who they really were, inside.” - Jess C. Scott

18. “But though it had prevailed against such fierce adversaries as fire and flood, it had fallen victim softly and swiftly to television in the 1960's.” - Kate Morton

19. “Don't explain computers to laymen. Simpler to explain sex to a virgin.” - Robert A. Heinlein

20. “Yong is the outer manifestation of something. Ti is the underlying essence. Technology is a yong associated with a particular ti that is ... Western, and completely alien to us [the Chinese]. For centuries, since the time of the Opium Wars, we have struggled to absorb the yong of technology without importing the Western ti. But it has been impossible. Just as our ancestors could not open our ports to the West without accepting the poison of opium, we could not open our lives to Western technology without taking in the Western ideas, which have been as a plague on our society. The result has been centuries of chaos.” - Neal Stephenson

21. “One-third to one-half of humanity are said to go to bed hungry every night. In the Old Stone Age the fraction must have been much smaller. This is the era of hunger unprecedented. Now, in the time of the greatest technical power, is starvation an institution. Reverse another venerable formula: the amount of hunger increases relatively and absolutely with the evolution of culture.” - Marshall Sahlins

22. “Books don't need batteries.” - Nadine Gordimer

23. “What was achieved under Nazi-fascism through bloody terror against the organized workers’ movement and the people is to be achieved again today in West Europe through the “information society” - Red Army Faction

24. “The Internet is the Petri dish of humanity. We can't control what grows in it, but we don't have to watch either.” - Tiffany Madison

25. “We are the children of a technological age. We have found streamlined ways of doing much of our routine work. Printing is no longer the only way of reproducing books. Reading them, however, has not changed.” - Lawrence Clark Powell

26. “Everyone knows that the Internet is changing our lives, mostly because someone in the media has uttered that exact phrase every single day since 1993. However, it certainly appears that the main thing the Internet has accomplished is the normalization of amateur pornography. There is no justification for the amount of naked people on the World Wide Web, many of whom are clearly (clearly!) doing so for non-monetary reasons. Where were these people fifteen years ago? Were there really millions of women in 1986 turning to their husbands and saying, 'You know, I would love to have total strangers masturbate to images of me deep-throating a titanium dildo, but there's simply no medium for that kind of entertainment. I guess we'll just have to sit here and watch Falcon Crest again.” - Chuck Klosterman

27. “She watched the tunnels as they flowed past: bare walls of concrete, a net of pipes and wires, a web of rails that went off into black holes where green and red lights hung as distant drops of color. There was nothing else to dilute it, so that one could admire naked purpose and the ingenuity that had achieved it.” - Ayn Rand

28. “Witchcraft had once been widely used before cursed by the society. I see today the society presumes technology will have a different treatment.” - Toba Beta [Betelgeuse Incident]

29. “If privacy had a gravestone it might read: 'Don't Worry. This Was for Your Own Good.” - John Twelve Hawks

30. “There’s no such thing as technology in the singular, only technologies in the plural.” - John Michael Greer

31. “Whatever happens, we have gotThe Maxim gun, and they have not.” - Hilaire Belloc

32. “Hi there," squeaked a precocious little voice, "you are speaking to Chloe Fusakawa, and I have just learned how to answer the phone.” - Gabrielle Zevin

33. “Be a surfer. Watch the ocean. Figure out where the big waves are breaking and adjust accordingly.” - 37signals

34. “But today our very survival depends on our ability to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant and to face the challenge of change. The large house in which we live demands that we transform this world-wide neighborhood into a world – wide brotherhood. Together we must learn to live as brothers or together we will be forced to perish as fools.We must work passionately and indefatigably to bridge the gulf between our scientific progress and our moral progress. One of the great problems of mankind is that we suffer from a poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance. The richer we have become materially, the poorer we have become morally and spiritually.” - Martin Luther King Jr.

35. “This condemnation of technology is ingratitude, that's what it is. Blind alley, though. If someone's ungrateful and you tell him he's ungrateful, okay, you've called him a name. You haven't solved anything.” - Robert M. Pirsig

36. “Technology is anything invented after you were born.” - Alan Kay

37. “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

38. “Our mission as humans is not only to discover our fullest selves in the technium, and to find full contentment, but to expand the possibilities for others. Greater technology will selfishly unleash our talents, but it will also unselfishly unleash others: our children, and all children to come.” - Kevin Kelly

39. “It's not technology that limits us. We're the limitation. Our technology is an expression of our intelligence and creativity, so the limitations of our technology are a reflection of our own limitations. We can't fundamentally advance technology until we fundamentally advance ourselves.” - Christian Cantrell

40. “What is the future going to be like, then?' 'Hey, it's gonna be a gas,' Scape assured me. 'If you're into machines and stuff - like I am - you'd go for it. People are gonna have all kinds of shit. Do whatever they want with it. That's why it didn't faze me when ol' Bendray first told me about wanting to blow up the world. Hey - in the Future, everybody will want to!” - K.W. Jeter

41. “A fashionable idea in technical circles is that quantity not only turns into quality at some extreme of scale, but also does so according to principles we already understand. Some of my colleagues think a million, or perhaps a billion, fragmentary insults will eventually yield wisdom that surpasses that of any well-thought-out essay, so long as sophisticated secret statistical algorithms recombine the fragments. I disagree. A trope from the early days of computer science comes to mind: garbage in, garbage out.” - Jaron Lanier

42. “Since our technology is really just an extension of ourselves, we don’t have to have contempt for its manipulability in the way we might with actual people. It’s all one big endless loop. We like the mirror and the mirror likes us. To friend a person is merely to include the person in our private hall of flattering mirrors.” - Jonathan Franzen

43. “Progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things.” - Robert A. Heinlein

44. “Extrapolated, technology wants what life wants:Increasing efficiencyIncreasing opportunityIncreasing emergenceIncreasing complexityIncreasing diversityIncreasing specializationIncreasing ubiquityIncreasing freedomIncreasing mutualismIncreasing beautyIncreasing sentienceIncreasing structureIncreasing evolvability” - Kevin Kelly

45. “Remember when only a few people had mobile phones. Generally regarded as an object of derision, you would occasionally see business types clutching those ridiculous grey bricks to their faces and mutter to yourself 'what a prick.' Nowadays, an eyebrow hardly even flutters when we see a ten-year-old child happily texting away. You probably wouldn't notice anyway; you'd be too busy downloading an app that could definitively pinpoint who it was that had just farted in your tube carriage.” - Simon Pegg

46. “Social capital may turn out to be a prerequisite for, rather than a consequence of, effective computer-mediated communication.” - Robert D. Putnam

47. “Because you can text while doing something else, texting does not seem to take time but to give you time. This is more than welcome; it is magical.” - Sherry Turkle

48. “It's too late to be studying Hebrew; it's more important to understand even the slang of today.” - Henry David Thoreau

49. “In terms of technological progress,the public is slower than focus group.” - Toba Beta

50. “A citizen at his home in Rockford, Illinois, or Boulder, Colorado, could read a newspaper, listen to a radio, or watch the round-the-clock coverage on television, but he had no way of connecting with those who shared his views. Nor was there a quick, readily available tool for an ordinary citizen to gather information on his own. In 1960, communication was a one-way street, and information was fundamentally inaccessible. The whole idea of summoning up data or reaching thousands of individuals with the touch of a finger was a science-fiction fantasy.” - Jeff Greenfield

51. “It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God.” - Ray Bradbury

52. “I can't blame modern technology for my predilection for distraction, not after all the hours I've spent watching lost balloons disappear into the clouds. I did it before the Internet, and I'll do it after the apocalypse, assuming we still have helium and weak-gripped children.” - COLSON WHITEHEAD

53. “He had a notebook. He took notes in it. It was always useful. And them Sybil, gods bless her, had brought him this fifteen-function imp which did so many other things, although as far as he could see at least ten of its functions consisted of apologizing for its inefficiency in the other five.” - Terry Pratchett

54. “I watch worry and anxiety being pandered to through technology which is neutral.” - Brian Richardson

55. “How do you explain plastic to a medieval forest bard?” - Jefferson Smith

56. “The attribution of intelligence to machines, crowds of fragments, or other nerd deities obscures more than it illuminates. When people are told that a computer is intelligent, they become prone to changing themselves in order to make the computer appear to work better, instead of demanding that the computer be changed to become more useful.” - Jaron Lanier

57. “Viteza cu care se înnoiește tehnologia ne obligă să ne reorganizăm continuu și într-un ritm imposibil deprinderilor mentale.” - Jean-Claude Carrière

58. “Fiecare nouă tehnologie impune dobândirea unui nou sistem de reflexe, care ne cere noi eforturi, și asta la răstimpuri din ce în ce mai scurte.” - Jean-Claude Carrière

59. “Technology doesn’t change people’s basic needs or their natures.” - Priya Ardis

60. “Il me semble qu'ils confondent but et moyen ceux qui s'effraient par trop de nos progrès techniques. Quiconque lutte dans l'unique espoir de biens matériels, en effet, ne récolte rien qui vaille de vivre. Mais la machine n'est pas un but. L'avion n'est pas un but : c'est un outil, un outil comme la charrue.Si nous croyons que la machine abîme l'homme c'est que, peut-être, nous manquons un peu de recul pour juger les effets de transformations aussi rapides que celles que nous avons subies. Que sont les cent années de l'histoire de la machine en regard des deux cent mille années de l'histoire de l'homme? C'est à peine si nous nous installons dans ce paysage de mines et de centrales électriques. C'est à peine si nous commençons d'habiter cette maison nouvelle, que nous n'avons même pas achevé de bâtir. Tout a changé si vite autour de nous : rapports humains, conditions de travail, coutumes. Notre psychologie elle-même a été bousculée dans ses bases les plus intimes. Les notions de séparation, d'absence, de distance, de retour, si les mots sont demeurés les mêmes, ne contiennent plus les mêmes réalités. Pour saisir le monde aujourd'hui, nous usons d'un langage qui fut établi pour le monde d'hier. Et la vie du passé nous semble mieux répondre à notre nature, pour la seule raison qu'elle répond mieux à notre langage.Pour le colonial qui fonde un empire, le sens de la vie est de conquérir. Le soldat méprise le colon. Mais le but de cette conquête n'était-il pas l'établissement de ce colon? Ainsi dans l'exaltation de nos progrès, nous avons fait servir les hommes à l'établissement des voies ferrées, à l'érection des usines, au forage de puits de pétrole. Nous avions un peu oublié que nous dressions ces constructions pour servir les hommes.(Terre des Hommes, ch. III)” - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

61. “I was impressed by the scene in Apollo 13 where the astronauts request confirmation of their calculations and several people at Mission Control dive for their slide rules. For several months after that, my standard response to statements like "We must implement multi-processor object-oriented Java-based client-server technologies immediately!" was "You know, FORTRAN and slide rules put men on the moon and got them back safely multiple times."Tended to shut them up, at least for a moment.” - Matt Roberts

62. “Technical people don't make good slaves. Without their wholehearted cooperation, things fall apart.” - Vernor Vinge

63. “In an age of infinite digital documentation, paper was the last safe place for secrets.” - Evan Angler

64. “..books look as if they contain knowledge, while e-readers look as if they contain information.” - Julian Barnes

65. “In those years before mobile phones, email and Skype, travelers depended on the rudimentary communications system known as the postcard. Other methods--the long-distance phone call, the telegram--were marked "For Emergency Use Only." So my parents waved me off into the unknown, and their news bulletins about me would have been restricted to "Yes, he's arrived safely,"and "Last time we heard he was in Oregon," and "We expect him back in a few weeks." I'm not saying this was necessarily better, let alone more character-forming; just that in my case it probably helped not to have my parents a button's touch away, spilling out anxieties and long-range weather forecasts, warning me against floods, epidemics and psychos who preyed on backpackers.” - Julian Barnes

66. “A tap is a zero-length swipe.” - Apple Inc.

67. “God, don't they teach you how to spell these days?""No," I answer. "They teach us to use spell-check.” - Jodi Picoult

68. “Because so many people use goodreads, it is an amazingly good—and amazingly underutilized—resource for understanding what people read, why, and how they feel about their reading experiences.” - John Green

69. “Western society has accepted as unquestionable a technological imperative that is quite as arbitrary as the most primitive taboo: not merely the duty to foster invention and constantly to create technological novelties, but equally the duty to surrender to these novelties unconditionally, just because they are offered, without respect to their human consequences.” - Lewis Mumford

70. “The ultimate form of our technological achievement will be identical to the beginning state of this nature.” - Toba Beta

71. “Walt loved technology. He didn't understand it half the time, but the beauty of good technology was that he didn't have to understand it. Just use it.” - Ridley Pearson

72. “Ancient miracles are technological wonders.” - Toba Beta

73. “What will we be doing, when everything that can be done, can be done better by robots?” - Humberto Contreras

74. “Curiously, only in sports do we agree to eschew technological advances, making rules, for example, to limit the power potential of baseball bats. We understand that technology will ruin our games, but we do not understand that it can also ruin cultures.” - Gene Logsdon

75. “Everywhere he went he saw this same phenomenon—parents unmindful of their children, their attention fixed on little glass windows in the palms of their hands, mesmerized like drug addicts, longing for some artificial connection while their own flesh and blood careened wildly through a chaotic and violent world behind their backs. The writer was even worse. He invented false worlds and peopled them with ghosts while his motherless son scanned the horizon for a human connection. It was shameful. What did a man need to lose to be shaken from his immersion in a dream? What terminal force could liberate him from the pursuit of phantoms and engage him in the living world around him?” - Douglas Wynne

76. “Based on the experience of history and civilization of mankind, which is more important for Muslims today, to no longer busy discussing the greatness that Muslims achieved in the past, or debating who first discovered the number zero, including the number one, two, three and so on, as the contribution of Muslims in the writing of numbers in this modern era and the foundation and development of civilizations throughout the world. But how Muslims will regained the lead and control of science and technology, leading back and become a leader in the world of science and civilization, because it represents a real achievement.” - Bacharuddin Jusuf Habibie