Thom Gunn Quotes

Man must shape his tools lest they shape him.

Technology is not destiny.

Economic systems ... have never arranged themselves by themselves. It is men who do the ordering according to their attitudes, desires and understanding of things. Changes take place, not independent of man's will, but on account of man's will.

The further a device is removed from human control, the more authentically mechanical it seems, and the whole trend in technology has been to devise machines that are less and less under direct human control and more and more under their own apparent will.

Man's will creates the things that paralyze his brain and brutalize his heart.

Computers make excellent and efficient servants, but I have no wish to serve under them.

The will of man without the grace of God is not free at all, but is the permanent prisoner and bondslave of evil since it cannot turn itself to good.

Our future may lie beyond our vision, but it is not completely beyond our control. It is the shaping impulse of America that neither fate nor nature nor the irresistible tides of history, but the work of our own hands, matched to reason and principle.

She wasn't interested in telling other people's futures. She was interested in going out and finding her own.

In art, there is one thing which does not receive sufficient attention. The element which is left to the human will is not nearly so large as people think.

The choice is yours. You hold the tiller. You can steer the course you choose in the direction of where you want to be - today, tomorrow, or in a distant time to come.

It is astounding that man, the instigator, inventor and vehicle of all these developments, the originator of all judgements and decisions and the planner of the future, must make himself such a quantité negligeable.

The more a man is imbued with the ordered regularity of all events the firmer becomes his conviction that there is no room left by the side of this ordered regularity for causes of a different nature. For him neither the rule of human nor the rule of divine will exist as an independent cause of natural events.

In the old days, land was important as the giver of all things. That period is gone now. Technology and brainpower are all that matters and yet conflicts over land, specially one like on the India-China border, that yields nothing, continue. This is a burden of ancient history that we continue to carry. If tomorrow there is settlement on planet Mars, we will begin to worry if others are interested.

The machine does not control the mind of man, though it affects the mind of man; it is the mind of man that can and should control the machine.

The human will stands beyond all circumstances. Everything must go down before the will, for that comes from God Himself; a pure and a strong will is omnipotent. Before it all the powers, even of nature, must bow down, succumb, and become its servants - the strong gigantic, infinite will in man.

The whole point is, I feel the machine should be eliminated. Now that it has served its purpose of alerting us to the dangers of machine control.

It is not the courage to be that we must develop as much as the courage to become. We are responsible for our destiny. The meaning of life is not located in some hidden crevice in the womb of nature but is created by free persons, who are aware that they are responsible for their own futures and have the courage to take this project into their own hands.

In every system of theology, therefore, there is a chapter De libero arbitrio. This is a question which every theologian finds in his path, and which he must dispose of; and on the manner in which it is determined depends his theology, and of course his religion, so far as his theology is to him a truth and reality

Our dreams of bringing the whole of human history under the control of the human will are ironically refuted by the fact that no group of idealists can easily move the pattern of history toward the desired goal of peace and justice. The recalcitrant forces in the historical drama have a power and persistence beyond our reckoning.

It is not in virtue of its liberty that the human will attains to grace, it is much rather by grace that it attains to liberty.

The past is past, and the future is yet to come. That means the future is in your hands - the future entirely depends on the present. That realization gives you a great responsibility.

It is God alone who can subdue and govern the unruly wills of sinful men.

The future is not laid out on a track. It is something that we can decide, and to the extent that we do not violate any known laws of the universe, we can probably make it work the way that we want to.

What's better, I wonder - to be a toy for the humans, or to control your own destiny , even if the only way to do so is suicide?