Theodore Kaczynski Quotes

Police states cannot endure under the advance of the computer because it increases the power of the people far faster than the powers of surveillance.

Society will decide after the technology is created what we will and won't accept.

Man must shape his tools lest they shape him.

The Internet is the most liberating tool for humanity ever invented, and also the best for surveillance. It's not one or the other. It's both.

Our age has seen the birth of totalitarian systems and forms of tyranny which would not have been possible in the time before the technological leap forward.

The global threat of 'Big Brother' can actually be conquered purely by technology.

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

In fact, technology in, and of, itself does not cause particular kinds of change. It is, essentially, an enabling or facilitating agent. It makes possible new structures, new organizational and geographical arrangements of economic activities, new products and new processes, while not making particular, outcomes inevitable.

It is the nature of government and of technology to establish control.

Now, the vicissitudes that afflict the individual have their source in society. It is this situation that has given currency to the phrase social forces. Personal relations have given way to impersonal ones. The Great Society has arrived and the task of our generation is to bring it under control. The study of how it is to be done is the function of politics.

Technologies can be liberating, but it can also be a tool of coercion and control.

A fundamental rule in technology says that whatever can be done will be done.

Those are possibilities for technology, which don't tend to be used, because of the way power is concentrated. There are all kinds of possibilities, including for coercion. In China, technology is used to control and coerce. Here too, to an extent, but not to that extent.

Now, through the catalytic interaction with technology, the human species is getting set to redefine itself.

Our ancestors used to play with snakes, we play with mouse.

You can't turn back technology and you can't turn back authoritarianism. You can't have one hand in the dirt and one hand in the crystal clear water and say that you're clean. That's just the way it is.

The capabilities (intellectual and material) of contemporary society are immeasurably greater than ever before - which means that the scope of society's domination over the individual is immeasurably greater than ever before. Our society distinguishes itself by conquering the centrifugal social forces with Technology rather than Terror, on the dual basis of an overwhelming efficiency and an increasing standard of living.

The development of technology will leave only one problem: the infirmity of human nature.

Introducing a technology is not a neutral act--it is profoundly revolutionary. If you present a new technology to the world you are effectively legislating a change in the way we all live. You are changing society, not some vague democratic process. The individuals who are driven to use that technology by the disparities of wealth and power it creates do not have a real choice in the matter. So the idea that we are giving people more freedom by developing technologies and then simply making them available is a dangerous illusion.

In all the known history of Mankind, advances have been made primarily in physical technology; in the capacity of handling the inanimate world about Man. Control of self and society has been left to to chance or to the vague gropings of intuitive ethical systems based on inspiration and emotion. As a result no culture of greater stability than about fifty-five percent has ever existed, and these only as the result of great human misery.

Anytime you bring a really powerful new technology to market there are multiple implications. You start changing the relative position of countries.

Industrialism is the religion with 'the machine' as the god going to answer all the prayers. Communism and capitalism were just competing sects.

You have to be careful about what you do, about what you say, and that is more dangerous than what was happening with [John] McCarthy, but the technology the government now possesses is so much more insidious.

The newspapers print what the people want, and thus does the savage still swing his club and flourish his spear.

Technology will always win. You can delay technology by legal interference, but technology will flow around legal barriers.