Tommy Douglas Quotes

Technology changes all the time; human nature, hardly ever.

I'm a computer scientist by training. I'm also the author of three books, all of which endorse the use of biotechnology to improve the human condition. In the most recent of these, 'The Infinite Resource,' I talk about the power of innovation to save the world.

I am one of those who think like Nobel, that humanity will draw more good than evil from new discoveries.

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.

Technology and industry have distanced people from nature and magic and human values.

Some people consider utopia to be derived from nature. For some people, utopia is the city.

There are still some natural forces that everybody understands. Technology and industry have distanced people from nature and magic and human values.

All technology does is give us back to ourselves. So to be anti-technology in a sense is to be anti-human.

Science, which has transformed the material world, gives man the power of transforming himself.

… modern civilization … enables us to cure sickness on a huge scale and to destroy each other on a huge scale. It enables us to liberate each other on a huge scale and to tyrannize each other on a huge scale…. There is no evidence of any continuous upward line of social progress

I truly believe that everything Sci-fi taught me as a child about an efficient and wondrous world will be happening in my lifetime.

Paradises an only be made with our own hands, with our own creativity in harmony with the free creativity of nature.

We are all youthful barbarians, and only our new toys bring us excitement. That has been the sole purpose of our flights. This one flies higher, that one faster. But now we will make ourselves at home. We will forget the machine, the tool. It is no longer complex; it does what it is supposed to do, unnoticed. And through this tool we will find again the old nature, the nature of the gardener, the navigator, the poet.

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

We have to change this whole earth into a tremendous festival, and it is possible because man brings all that is needed to transform this earth into a paradise.

I think that laziness in many ways is the human condition, and that's what has led us to this place where, as we've developed technology.

Science has radically changed the conditions of human life on earth. It has expanded our knowledge and our power, but not our capacity to use them with wisdom.

This is the whole point of technology. It creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens universal extinction on the other. Technology is lust removed from nature. - Murray (WN 285)

As Arkwright and Whitney were the demi-gods of cotton, so prolific Time will yet bring an inventor to every plant. There is not a property in nature but a mind is born to seek and find it.

The more there is, the less I want. The more man flies to the moon, the more I want to look at a tree.

Tools arm the man. One can well say that man is capable of bringing forth a world; he lacks only the necessary apparatus, the corresponding armature of his sensory tools. The beginning is there. Thus the principle of a warship lies in the idea of the shipbuilder, who is able to incorporate this thought by making himself into a gigantic machine, as it were, through a mass of men and appropriate tools and materials. Thus the idea of a moment often required monstrous organs, monstrous masses of materials, and man is therefore a potential, if not an actual creator.

Technology is constantly changing and brings you automatically into the present. In that way, it automatically makes you build for this time.

Those two, in paradise, were given a choice: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness. There was no third alternative.

No doubt it was necessary to civilize man in relation to man. That work is already advanced and is making progress every day. But man must be civilized also in relation to nature.

It is not enough to wire the world if you short-circuit the soul. Technology without heart is not enough.