John Templeton Quotes

I'm very pro-science and pro-technology; I believe that these have been key drivers of progress in the world in the last centuries.

There was an age, however, when the transition from savagery to civilization, with all its impressive outward manifestations in art and architecture, took place for the first time.

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.

The march of invention has clothed mankind with powers of which a century ago the boldest imagination could not have dreamt.

Maybe the preoccupation with technological progress has overshadowed our concern with human progress.

With the emergence of civilization, the rate of change shifted from hundreds of thousands of years to millennia. With the emergence of science as a way of knowing the universe, the rate of change shifted to centuries.

When I contemplate the immense advances in sciences and discoveries in the arts which have been made within the period of my life, I look forward with confidence to equal advances by the present generation, and have no doubt they will consequently be as much wiser than we have been as we than our fathers were, and they than the burners of witches

So give me the political economist, the sanitary reformer, the engineer; and take your saints and virgins, relics and miracles. The spinning-jenny and the railroad, Cunard's liners and the electric telegraph, are to me, if not to you, signs that we are, on some points at least, in harmony with the universe; that there is a mighty spirit working among us, who cannot be your anarchic and destroying Devil, and therefore may be the Ordering and Creating God.

… science is the great instrument of social change, all the greater because its object is not change but knowledge, and its silent appropriation of this dominant function, amid the din of political and religious strife, is the most vital of all the revolutions which have marked the development of modern civilization.

In the information age, when tradition, propriety, formality or culture clash with informational ease and utility, the traditional forms must … yield.

My obsession is with technology and how it can improve human life. In my view, what we have seen in the last 300 years is only a trailer.

Historically, science and society have gone separate ways, although society has provided the funds for science to grow, and in return, science has given society all the material things it enjoys.

Life gets boring, someone invents another necessity, and once again we turn the crank on the screwjack of progress hoping that nobody gets screwed.

Everyone who lives in an industrialized society is obliged gradually to give up the past, but in certain countries, such as the United States and Japan, the break with the past has been particularly traumatic.

Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable.

Civilization in certain respects is as inadequate as it was a thousand years ago.

The progressive development of man is vitally dependent on invention.

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.

It is especially difficult for modern people to conceive that our modern, scientific age might not be an improvement over the prescientific period.

Western Civilization has been in a state of decline since the Edwardian age, say 1910. That was the height of Greco-Roman European civilization. Then there was the First World War. That was the beginning of the end. That civilization has been in a decline ever since. But from the American triumphalist point of view our wonderful electronic revolution is really the forefront of an ongoing wonderful civilization.

Science of to-day-the superstition of to-morrow. Science of to-morrow-the superstition of to-day.

These times are too progressive. Everything has changed too fast. Railroads and telegraphs and kerosene and coal stoves -- they're good to have but the trouble is, folks get to depend on 'em.

The history of society is the history of the inventive labors that man alter man, alter his desires, habits, outlook, relationships both to other men and to physical nature, with which man is in perpetual physical and technological metabolism.

No discovery of mine has made, or is likely to make, directly or indirectly, for good or ill, the least difference to the amenity of the world.

There is at present in the United States a powerful activist movement that is anti-intellectual, anti-science, and anti-technology. If we are to have faith that mankind will survive and thrive on the face of the Earth, we must depend on the continued revolutions brought about by science.