Douglas Tompkins Quotes

I think there's a tendency for modern man to become dominated by gadgets and machines, taking us further and further away from the things I've been talking about.

As much as technology has made me so much more efficient, enabling me to run a small but global company from where I happen to be, at times it feels like the technology is running me, as opposed to the other way round.

Technology is a useful servant but a dangerous master.

What more chilling indictment of the modern world is there than this: that the condition of the smartphone user is that of a dumb animal. Moooo!

Our technology has already outstripped our ability to control it.

In the end the question is: Who is to be master, man or his machines? As long as the control over technology rests primarily on economic calculation, the victor is not likely to be man.

Technology is the devil, and the more technology you have, the higher the price you pay.

We've got technological wonders around us, and we've used them to abrogate all responsibility for everything in our lives.

Whether one welcomes or deplores it, nothing is more surely and exactly characteristic of modern times than the irresistible invasion of the human world by technology. Mechanism invading like a tide all the places of the earth and all forms of social activity.

I hate technology and cellphones. I hate having to have one all of the time. I don't tweet or buzz or bing or whatever! It's a conscious thing - I hate the way that it can take over young people's lives.

Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.

It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.

I would rather have racing without computers. The human side is forgotten, and instead of talking over what's happening and just trusting the feel of the driver, the data becomes almost more important.

I'm a very simple man. You've got to have, like, a computer nowadays to turn the TV on and off... and the nightmare continues.

We were promised a simpler life, and technology has only complicated our lives.

Technology is neutral and sterile. Now, technology is the nature of modern man; it is our environment and our horizon. Of course, every work of man is a negation of nature, but at the same time, it is a bridge between nature and us. Technology changes nature in a more radical and decisive manner: it throws it out.

Machines are worshipped because they are beautiful and valued because they confer power; they are hated because they are hideous and loathed because they impose slavery.

Men have become the tools of their tools.

People are so busy positioning themselves before the screen and talking on the damn cellphones, communicating, that we're not reading, and in fact we're not really communicating, either. We're not talking to each other. There's just all these screens and wires and technology in between.

Our technologies become more complex while we become more simple. They learn about us while we come to know less and less about them. No one person can understand everything going on in an iPhone, much less pervasive systems.

The technologies of convenience are making our sphere of exploration and experience smaller.

Yet now we are faced with the sickening suspicion that technology has run ahead of us.

Technology can be our best friend, and technology can also be the biggest party pooper of our lives. It interrupts our own story, interrupts our ability to have a thought or a daydream, to imagine something wonderful, because we're too busy bridging the walk from the cafeteria back to the office on the cell phone.

Technology is a wonderful thing, but I think it's violently misused.

Mystery is gone to the certainty of technological principles. So the real terror, the real aggression against life comes in the form of the pursuit of our technological happiness.