Aldous Huxley Quotes

When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution...Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress.

The kids of today have to be better than us. We must strive to create tools adequate for human beings that come with other things that are, at least, different from those we used to have.

Progress would be wonderful - if only it would stop.

The computer is my favourite invention. I feel lucky to be part of the global village. I don't mean to brag, but I'm so fast with technology. People think it all seems too much, but we'll get used to it. I'm sure it all seemed too much when we were learning to walk.

We plow new fields, we open new mines, we found new cities, we girdle the land with iron roads and lace the air with telegraph wires. We add knowledge to knowledge and utilize invention after invention. Yet it becomes no easier for the masses of our people to make a living. On the contrary, it is becoming harder.

Ultimately, what the tech industry really cares about is ushering in the future, but it conflates technological progress with societal progress.

Men are so delving into the mysteries of things that today a boy of twenty knows more than twenty doctors formerly knew.

This society turns everything it touches into a potential source of progress and exploitation, of drudgery and satisfaction, of freedom and of oppression.

The paramount doctrine of the economic and technological euphoria of recent decades has been that everything depends on innovation. It was understood as desirable, and even necessary, that we should go on and on from one technological innovation to the next, which would cause the economy to "grow" and make everything better and better. This of course implied at every point a hatred of the past, of all things inherited and free. All things superceded in our progress of innovations, whatever their value might have been, were discounted as of no value at all.

As with our colleges, so with a hundred "modern improvements"; there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance. The devil goes on exacting a compound interest to the last for his early share and numerous succeeding investments in them.

Our modern lifestyle is not a political creation. Before 1700, everybody was poor as hell. Life was short and brutish. It wasn't because we didn't have good politicians; we had some really good politicians. But then we started inventing - electricity, steam engines, microprocessors, understanding genetics and medicine and things like that. Yes, stability and education are important - I'm not taking anything away from that - but innovation is the real driver of progress.

Those who have given themselves the most concern about the happiness of peoples have made their neighbors very miserable.

You may say that I am just another outdated old man complaining about progress and the changes of time. But, you see, I have well considered that possibility myself, and am prepared o submit to correction by anybody who cares about a community, who can show me how the world is improved by that community's dying.

Innovation is often the hidden thing, because we can't put numbers to it. And yet it's the thing that defines the way we live, the things we'd like to have for everyone whether it's health or education.

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual.

Ah, in every age there is always some new wonder to astound mankind until they grow accustomed to it and lose interest.

There are two things that have been happening over the last few decades in my opinion. First, there have been unbelievable, remarkable, pioneering advances in technology and, second, an equal amount of evolution in creativity. These two shifts are meeting at an intersection.

I dream of a society that is continuously creating knowledge, where each individual is a part of this creation, where youngsters can pursue courses with freedom of choice, where technology is used for universal access of education and yet the importance of the Guru is retained.

If you took away everything in the world that had to be invented, there'd be nothing left except a lot of people getting rained on.

Tomorrow country then, tomorrow country now.

It is science alone that can solve the problems of hunger and poverty, of insanitation and illiteracy, of superstition and deadening custom and tradition, of vast resources running to waste, or a rich country inhabited by starving people... Who indeed could afford to ignore science today? At every turn we have to seek its aid... The future belongs to science and those who make friends with science.

There is not a tool, an implement, or a machine that has not resulted in a decrease in the contribution of human labor. Labor is not made permanently idle [though]; when replaced in one special category... it turns its attack against other obstacles on the main road to progress.

We are now embarked on another venture to put the American dream to work in meeting the new demands of a new day. Once again we must start where men would improve their society have always known they must begin - with an educational system restudied, reinforced, and revitalized.

Without the library, you have no civilization.

Humans change themselves through technology.