Jan. 21, 2025, 8:45 a.m.
In today's fast-paced digital age, technology continues to redefine how we live, work, and connect with the world around us. As we navigate this ever-evolving landscape, a bit of inspiration can go a long way in fueling our creativity and passion for innovation. Whether you’re a tech enthusiast, a seasoned professional, or simply someone looking to embrace the digital revolution, words of wisdom can serve as a powerful catalyst for motivation. In this blog post, we've gathered 84 of the most inspiring technology quotes that capture the essence of progress and the spirit of discovery. So, get ready to be inspired and let these insightful words light your path in the fascinating world of technology.
1. “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
2. “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
3. “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
4. “There will come a time when it isn't 'They're spying on me through my phone' anymore. Eventually, it will be 'My phone is spying on me'.” - Philip K. Dick
5. “Technology is the campfire around which we tell our stories.” - Laurie Anderson
6. “It's supposed to be automatic, but actually you have to push this button. ” - John Brunner
7. “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
8. “Our technology forces us to live mythically” - Marshall McLuhan
9. “[N]ew technology enables new kinds of group-forming.” - Clay Shirky
10. “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
11. “[novan]: bassists are very good with their fingers[novan]: and some of us sing backup vocals, so that means we're good with our mouths too...(~ IM chat with Novan Chang, 18, bassist)” - Jess C. Scott
12. “Within this new work of art a creature from beyond the reach of Humanity has insinuated herself and now lurks there at the heart of the mystery, a power unimagined before our time.” - Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam
13. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a completely ad hoc plot device.” - David Langford
14. “Don't explain computers to laymen. Simpler to explain sex to a virgin.” - Robert A. Heinlein
15. “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
16. “It doesn’t matter how long we’ve used something; all that matters is how awesome the thing replacing it is. MP3s and automobiles happen to be really, really awesome, whereas ebooks—at least so far—are fairly limited in their awesomeness.” - John Green
17. “[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
18. “The ultimate concept car will move so fast, even at rest, as to be invisible.” - J.G. Ballard
19. “We have too much technological progress, life is too hectic, and our society has only one goal: to invent still more technological marvels to make life even easier and better. The craving for every new scientific discovery breeds a hunger for greater comfort and the constant struggle to achieve it. All that kills the soul, kills compassion, understanding, nobility. It leaves no time for caring what happens to other people, least of all criminals. Even the officials in Venezuela's remote areas are better for they're also concerned with public peace. It gives them many headaches, but they seem to believe that bringing about a man's salvation is worth the effort. I find that magnificent.” - Henri Charrière
20. “Magic--that's just a label, you know. Completely meaningless. It wasn't so very long ago that people were saying that electricity was magic.” - Robert Bloch
21. “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
22. “Ethics change with technology.” - Larry Niven
23. “Once upon a time in the land of Shinar, God came down to see the city and the tower. People were united and spoke in one language. Then God confound their language and caused them scattered all over the planet earth. I believe, because of our technology, there will be one computer-based language on earth. Then God will come back again and make us all scattered all over the stars constellation.” - Toba Beta
24. “The socioeconomic impact of such a minor outburst is due to our technological development (air travel)—a century ago, such an eruption would have passed unnoticed. Technological development makes us more independent from nature. At the same time, at a different level, it makes us more dependent on nature’s whims.” - Slavoj Žižek
25. “Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe. ” - Alan Watts
26. “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]
27. “Size does matter.Nano even better.” - Toba Beta [Betelgeuse Incident]
28. “If privacy had a gravestone it might read: 'Don't Worry. This Was for Your Own Good.” - John Twelve Hawks
29. “There’s no such thing as technology in the singular, only technologies in the plural.” - John Michael Greer
30. “I'm not sure he's wrong about automobiles," he said. "With all their speed forward they may be a step backward in civilization -- that is, in spiritual civilization. It may be that they will not add to the beauty of the world, nor to the life of men's souls.” - Booth Tarkington
31. “Whatever happens, we have gotThe Maxim gun, and they have not.” - Hilaire Belloc
32. “Maybe you could be mine / or maybe we’ll be entwined / aimless in this sexless foreplay.” - Jess C. Scott
33. “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
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. “Technology is everything that doesn’t work yet.” - W. Danny Hillis
36. “[...] there is one inexorable law of technology, and it is this: when revolutionary inventions become widely accessible, they cease to be accessible. Technology is inherently democratic, because it promises the same services to all; but it works only if the rich are alone using it. When the poor also adopt technology, it stops working. A train used to take two hours to go from A to B; then the motor car arrived, which could cover the same distance in one hour. For this reason cars were very expensive. But as soon as the masses could afford to buy them, the roads became jammed, and the trains started to move faster. Consider how absurd it is for the authorities constantly to urge people to use public transport, in the age of the automobile; but with public transport, by consenting not to belong to the elite, you get where you're going before members of the elite do.” - Umberto Eco
37. “Technologies of easy travel "give us wings; they annihilate the toil and dust of pilgrimage; they spiritualize travel! Transition being so facile, what can be any man’s inducement to tarry in one spot? Why, therefore, should he build a more cumbrous habitation than can readily be carried off with him? Why should he make himself a prisoner for life in brick, and stone, and old worm-eaten timber, when he may just as easily dwell, in one sense, nowhere,—in a better sense, wherever the fit and beautiful shall offer him a home?” - Nathaniel Hawthorne
38. “[The modern age] knows nothing about isolation and nothing about silence. In our quietest and loneliest hour the automatic ice-maker in the refrigerator will cluck and drop an ice cube, the automatic dishwasher will sigh through its changes, a plane will drone over, the nearest freeway will vibrate the air. Red and white lights will pass in the sky, lights will shine along highways and glance off windows. There is always a radio that can be turned to some all-night station, or a television set to turn artificial moonlight into the flickering images of the late show. We can put on a turntable whatever consolation we most respond to, Mozart or Copland or the Grateful Dead.” - Wallace Stegner
39. “The real ugliness lies in the relationship between people who produce the technology and the things they produce, which results in a similar relationship between the people who use the technology and the things they use.” - Robert M. Pirsig
40. “Design is not limited to fancy new gadgets. Our family just bought a new washing machine and dryer. We didn’t have a very good one so we spent a little time looking at them. It turns out that the Americans make washers and dryers all wrong. The Europeans make them much better – but they take twice as long to do clothes! It turns out that they wash them with about a quarter as much water and your clothes end up with a lot less detergent on them. Most important, they don’t trash your clothes. They use a lot less soap, a lot less water, but they come out much cleaner, much softer, and they last a lot longer. We spent some time in our family talking about what’s the trade-off we want to make. We ended up talking a lot about design, but also about the values of our family. Did we care most about getting our wash done in an hour versus an hour and a half? Or did we care most about our clothes feeling really soft and lasting longer? Did we care about using a quarter of the water? We spent about two weeks talking about this every night at the dinner table. We’d get around to that old washer-dryer discussion. And the talk was about design. We ended up opting for these Miele appliances, made in Germany. They’re too expensive, but that’s just because nobody buys them in this country. They are really wonderfully made and one of the few products we’ve bought over the last few years that we’re all really happy about. These guys really thought the process through. They did such a great job designing these washers and dryers. I got more thrill out of them than I have out of any piece of high tech in years.” - Steve Jobs
41. “Progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things.” - Robert A. Heinlein
42. “In the age of technology there is constant access to vast amounts of information. The basket overflows; people get overwhelmed; the eye of the storm is not so much what goes on in the world, it is the confusion of how to think, feel, digest, and react to what goes on.” - Criss Jami
43. “منذ عهد آدم عليه السلام , وكل جيل يتعلم من آبائه فنون المهارات التي يحتاجها في هذه الحياة , ليعيش ويكسب منها إلا جيل الإنترنت الذي يعيش بيننا , فهم الذين يعلمون آبائهم المهارات وفنون التقنيات بل ويقنعونهم بجدواها” - يوسف الحضيف
44. “People addicted with technology.Technology has indulged mankind. Beware of technology dependency!” - Toba Beta
45. “Technology causes problems as well as solves problems. Nobody has figured out a way to ensure that, as of tomorrow, technology won't create problems. Technology simply means increased power, which is why we have the global problems we face today."(Interview, Sierra Magazine, May/June 2005)” - Jared Diamond
46. “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
47. “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
48. “Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.” - Barry Gehm
49. “Considering what is at stake politically, economically and technically for most organizations; usually justifying IT governance deployment based on one viewpoint narrows suitability and expected benefits.” - Robert E. Davis
50. “Code is not like other how-computers-work books. It doesn't have big color illustrations of disk drives with arrows showing how the data sweeps into the computer. Code has no drawings of trains carrying a cargo of zeros and ones. Metaphors and similes are wonderful literary devices but they do nothing but obscure the beauty of technology.” - Charles Petzold
51. “Man has created technology. Technology has created man; what we are today. Electricity is our way of life. Without it many would perish.” - O.J. Rendchen
52. “Man is a slow, sloppy, and brilliant thinker; computers are fast, accurate, and stupid.” - John Pfeiffer
53. “Many of our problems in US maternity care stem from the fact that we leave no room for recognizing when nature is smarter than we are.” - Ina May Gaskin
54. “The computer focuses ruthlessly on things that can be represented in numbers. In so doing, it seduces people into thinking that other aspects of knowledge are either unreal or unimportant. The computer treats reason as an instrument for achieving things, not for contemplating things. It narrows dramatically what we know and intended by reason.” - George Friedman
55. “Meditation is the ultimate mobile device; you can use it anywhere, anytime, unobtrusively.” - Sharon Salzberg
56. “Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.” - J.G. Ballard
57. “How do you explain plastic to a medieval forest bard?” - Jefferson Smith
58. “This digital revolutionary still believes in most of the lovely deep ideals that energized our work so many years ago. At the core was a sweet faith in human nature. If we empowered individuals, we believed, more good than harm would result. The way the internet has gone sour since then is truly perverse. The central faith of the web's early design has been superseded by a different faith in the centrality of imaginary entities epitomized by the idea that the internet as a whole is coming alive and turning into a superhuman creature. The designs guided by this new, perverse kind of faith put people back in the shadows. The fad for anonymity has undone the great opening-of-everyone's-windows of the 1990s. While that reversal has empowered sadists to a degree, the worst effect is a degradation of ordinary people.” - Jaron Lanier
59. “Emphasizing the crowd means de-emphasizing individual humans in the design of society, and when you ask people not to be people, they revert to bad, mob-like behaviors.” - Jaron Lanier
60. “Spirituality is committing suicide. Consciousness is attempting to will itself out of existence.” - Jaron Lanier
61. “A file on a hard disk does indeed contain information of the kind that objectively exists. The fact that the bits are discernible instead of being scrambled into mush - the way heat scrambles things - is what makes them bits. But if the bits can potentially mean something to someone, they can only do so if they are experienced. When that happens, a commonality of culture is enacted between the storer and the retriever of the bits. Experience is the only process that can de-alienate information. Information of the kind that purportedly wants to be free is nothing but a shadow of our own minds, and wants nothing on its own. It will not suffer if it doesn't get what it wants. But if you want to make the transition from the old religion, where you hope God will give you an afterlife, to the new religion, where you hope to become immortal by getting uploaded into a computer, then you have to believe information is real and alive. So for you, it will be important to redesign human institutions like art, the economy, and the law to reinforce the perception that information is alive. You demand that the rest of us live in your new conception of a state religion. You need us to deify information to reinforce your faith.” - Jaron Lanier
62. “However baby man may brag of his science and skill, and however much, in a flattering future, that science and skill may augment; yet for ever and for ever, to the crack of doom, the sea will insult and murder him, and pulverize the stateliest, stiffest frigate he can make; nevertheless, by the continual repetition of these very impressions, man has lost that sense of the full awfulness of the sea which aboriginally belongs to it.” - Herman Melville
63. “To be honest, my life has exhibited many strange and sometimes troubling characteristics, but shortness is not one of them. It feels like an eternity since I started school and a techno-social epoch since I moved to San Francisco. My phone couldn't even connect to the internet back then.” - Robin Sloan
64. “Viteza cu care se înnoiește tehnologia ne obligă să ne reorganizăm continuu și într-un ritm imposibil deprinderilor mentale.” - Jean-Claude Carrière
65. “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
66. “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
67. “I was, a near grown man, sat in his dank, dark and rickety digs, feverishly hovering about the glare of a computer screen like a disorientated moth, one searching for a flaming light of recognition from someone/anyone!” - Tom Conrad
68. “Technology enables us to work every minute of every day from any place on the planet.” - Carl Honoré
69. “Progress in science and technology is real, but it builds on past truths without rejecting them. Computers don’t have to be re-invented in order to keep getting better; innovations expand what they already do. Knowledge accumulates, so it can increase. Scientists and engineers know this, but artists, authors, and philosophers keep trying to start over from ground zero in the humanities. Thus, they don’t really progress—they become primitive.” - Gene Edward Veith
70. “She hung up before he could say goodbye. Stood there with her arm cocked, phone at ear-level, suddenly aware of the iconic nature of her unconscious pose. Some very considerable part of the gestural language of public places, that had once belong to cigarettes, now belonged to phones.” - William Gibson
71. “Another principle that I believe can be justified by scientific evidence so far is that nobody is going to emigrate from this planet not ever....It will be far cheaper, and entail no risk to human life, to explore space with robots. The technology is already well along....the real thrill will be in learning in detail what is out there...It is an especially dangerous delusion if we see emigration into space as a solution to be taken when we have used up this planet....Earth, by the twenty-second century, can be turned, if we so wish, into a permanent paradise for human beings...” - Edward O. Wilson
72. “The information age is so psychotic – without the cell phone and Internet, I would be drama free right now.” - Lauren Barnholdt
73. “In the half-century of his life, a tick on the Doomsday clock, he had borne witness to the most unbelievable technological advances. He had started off listening to an old Bush radio in the corner of the living room and now he had a phone in his hand on which he could pretend to throw a scrunched-up piece of paper into a waste bin. The world had waited a long time for that.” - Kate Atkinson
74. “I've heard it said that technology makes a good person better, and it makes a bad person worse. That's okay with me. I say we keep building new versions of ourselves, keep exploring the unknown, and keep growing. We're gonna be fine. Different, but fine.” - Daniel H. Wilson
75. “If you keep your eye on the profit, you’re going to skimp on the product. But if you focus on making really great products, then the profits will follow.” - Steve Jobs
76. “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
77. “In Japan, so many emoticons have been created that it’s reasonable to assume Japanese appreciate their convenience more than anyone else.” - Morinosuke Kawaguchi
78. “I believe there no surer path to leaping dramatically forward in your career than to earn a Ph.D. in the humanities. Because the thought leaders in our industry are not the ones who plodded dully, step by step, up the career ladder. The leaders are the ones who took chances and developed unique perspectives.” - Damon Horowitz
79. “It’s not that any sufficiently advanced technology is magic, it’s that any technology taking place beyond the threshold of our senses is.” - Nick Harkaway
80. “Regular crises perpetuate the past by reinvigorating cycles which started long ago. In contrast, (capital-C) Crises are the past's death knell. They function like laboratories in which the future is incubated. They have given us agriculture and the industrial revolution, technology and the labour contract, killer germs and antibiotics. Once they strike, the past ceases to be a reliable predictor of the future and a brave new world is born.” - Yanis Varoufakis
81. “War yet shall be, but warriors are now operatives; war's made less grand than peace.” - Herman Melville
82. “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
83. “Nature is the ultimate technology; a technology we are still too immature, arrogant, possessive and careless to care for responsibly.” - Bryant McGill
84. “Life without a phone is riskier, lonelier, more vivid.” - Eloisa James