Joel Mokyr Quotes

What gunpowder did for war the printing press has done for the mind.

the day Johannes Gutenberg finished his wooden printing press in 1440. Western civilization turned onto a path toward more efficient, accessible communication of knowledge.]

The core of what Google is about is bringing information to people.

It is the mission of the printer to diffuse light and knowledge by a judicious intermingling of black with white.

Printer's ink is the great apostle of progress, whose pulpit is the press.

The world has been printing books for 450 years, and yet gunpowder still has a wider circulation. Never mind! Printer's ink is the greater explosive: it will win.

It is well, when the wise and the learned discover new truths; but how much better to diffuse the truths already discovered, amongst the multitude! Every addition to true knowledge is an addition to human power; and while a philosopher is discovering one new truth, millions may be propagated amongst the people. Diffusion, then, rather than discovery, is the duty of our government.

The more rapidly truth is spread among mankind the better it will be for them. Only let us be sure that it is the truth.

Ever since the arrival of printing - thought to be the invention of the devil because it would put false opinions into people's minds - people have been arguing that new technology would have disastrous consequences for language.

When we developed written language, we significantly increased our functional memory and our ability to share insights and knowledge across time and space. The same thing happened with the invention of the printing press, the telegraph, and the radio.

The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book.

Technology feeds on itself. Technology makes more technology possible.

Everything great in science and art is simple. What can be less complicated than the greatest discoveries of humanity - gravitation, the compass, the printing press, the steam engine, the electric telegraph?

You can't have an industrial revolution, you can't have democracies, you can't have populations who can govern themselves until you have literacy. The printing press simply unlocked literacy.

America is the most inventive country in the world because everybody has access to information.

Science, as illustrated by the printing press, the telegraph, the railway, is a double-edged sword. At the same moment that it puts an enormous power in the hands of the good man, it also offers an equal advantage to the evil disposed.

Humans have always used our intelligence and creativity to improve our existence. After all, we invented the wheel, discovered how to make fire, invented the printing press and found a vaccine for polio.

We will acquire knowledge and science wherever they are to be found and we will stuff them into the head of every individual in the country. No limits, no conditions can be attached to knowledge and science.

Whoever imagines that, because so many inventions and so many improvements in machinery have been made, there remains little else to be discovered, has but a feeble conception of the infinitude and vastness of mechanical powers, or of the unlimited reach of science. Much has been discovered, infinitely more remains unrevealed. The ingenuity of man is exploring a reign without limits, and delving in a mine whose treasures are exhaustless.

We can go into no mechanic shop, into no manufactory of any description, upon no farm or plantation, or travel a mile on our railroads or in our steamboats, without seeing evidence of our originality and witnessing the fruits of our ingenuity and enterprise.

We have collapsed distances, taken down walls, and spread information.

Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing

The Knowledge of Nature tends to enlarge the human Mind, and give us more noble, more grand, and exalted Ideas of the Author of Nature, and if well pursu'd, seldom fails producing something useful to Man.

Of the present state we may justly say, that no nation under heaven ever struck out in so short a time, and with so much spirit and reputation, into the labyrinth of art and science; and that, not in the acquisition of knowledge only, but in the happy advantages flowing from it. The world does not at this day exhibit a parallel, neither can history produce its equal.

... things that people learn purely out of curiosity can have a revolutionary effect on human affairs.