Charlie Brooker Quotes

The effects of technology are always unpredictable. But they are not always inevitable.

The mediated world has approached us from a lot of different directions and we have freely chosen our automobiles and our skyscrapers and our televisions and our telephones and our computers because they have given us power and freedom. Now we are beginning to notice there's a price to pay for them. It's all interconnected, the good stuff and the bad stuff comes together.

There are dangers, but only dangers if people don't understand where technology is taking us.

It's true that virtually all new technologies do trigger what sociologists would call 'moral panics,' that there are a lot of people who are concerned with the possible political and social consequences, and that this has been true throughout the ages.

Every step and every movement of the multitude, even in what are termed enlightened ages, are made with equal blindness to the future; and nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.

Inevitably, these sorts of things are going to come back to blow up in people's faces.

It sometimes seems to me that the whole course of English history was one of accident, confusion, chance and unintended consequences - there's no real pattern.

Nearly all inventions are not recognised for their positive side either when they're made. So, for example, scientists didn't go out to design a CD machine: they designed a laser. But we got all sorts of things from a laser which we never remotely imagined, and we're still finding things for a laser to do.

Successful parties create their own monsters.

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

In world history man’s actions result in something quite different from what he purposes or intends.

All laws have unintended consequences.

I'm trying to think overall. Some of our stories [Black Mirror], I think you're right in that they don't tend to have a message.

We're letting [technology] take us places that we don't want to go.

The human imagination, in conjunction with technology, has become a force so potent that it really can no longer be unleashed on the surface of the planet with safety.

.. that a rule, which, in speculation, may seem the most advantageous to society, may yet be found, in practice, totally pernicious and destructive.

Future historians will surely see us as having created in the media a Frankenstein monster whom no one knows how to control ordirect, and marvelthat weshould have so meekly subjected ourselves to its destructive and often malign influence.

I never saw no miracle of science that did not go from a blessing to a curse.

My continuum? Blimey! For me,Black Mirror is all part of the whole.

Science bestowed immense new powers on man, and at the same time, created conditions which were largely beyond his comprehension.

In comedy writing, a sitcom plot is basically the same thing: What's the worst thing that could happen? But you're playing it for comic effect. It's a similar muscle being used with Black Mirror.

Death is a scandal. The machine is functioning, we are all hostages

Because we can engineer genetics, because we can telecast real lives-of course we must, right? But are these good things to do? The irony is, the people who will finally answer that question will be the very ones produced by the process.

Like for Einstein, and for people who create nuclear weapons, the problem with the pursuit of knowledge and the pursuit of the greater good is that it invariably leads to things you weren't expecting.

The tragic evils of our life are so commonly unintentional. We did not start out for that poor, cheap goal. That aim was not in our minds at all....Look to the road you are walking on. He who picks up one end of [a] stick picks up the other.He who chooses the beginning of a road chooses the place it leads to.