Ada Louise Huxtable Quotes

If you're the village blacksmith and a model T comes along, you better become a mechanic. People's lives are better when they get news online versus having to wait for the morning paper. It's a lot more efficient, a lot more real time, a lot less waste.

The new always competes with the old and destroys it. Men who build railroads destroy stage coach lines.

Nothing grows old faster than the new.

Every age thinks it's the modern age, but this one really is. Electricity is going to change everything. Everything!

Nothing is so dangerous as being too modern; one is apt to grow old fashioned quite suddenly.

I think my stuff's kind of obsolete now, you know? I'm making Model Ts or something, and everybody else is making spaceships.

Obsolescence is the very hallmark of progress.

In an age of multiple and massive innovations, obsolescence becomes the major obsession.

At the present time, when railways, the telegraph, the telephone, to say nothing of other inventions and improvements of importance, have simplified communication between all lands and nations to the last degree, there is scarcely any reason to fear either distance or the estrangement of the several parts of a single whole. Practically distance is almost nonexistent. What to our ancestors appeared simply near at hand now seems to lie immediately before our eyes

It’s important to embrace new technologies instead of fight them.

To endeavor to rehabilitate the sabbath of our forefathers is as foolish as to try to make people go back into log houses and cook in a fire-place. Some persons can never realize that the world grows; that what was a help to one age becomes a hindrance to another; that time corrects the mistakes of men and that respect and reverence for our ancestors does not necessarily require us to adopt their clothes or their habits.

It is not the owner of stage-coaches who builds railways.

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.

I am not afraid of new inventions or improvements, nor bigoted to the practices of our forefathers. It is that bigotry which keeps the Indians in a state of barbarism in the midst of the arts and would have kept us in the same state even now

No particular technology lasts for long.

Even while I protest the assembly-line production of our food, our songs, our language, and eventually our souls, I know that it was a rare home that baked good bread in the old days. Mother’s cooking was with rare exceptions poor, that good unpasteurized milk touched only by flies and bits of manure crawled with bacteria, the healthy old-time life was riddled with aches, sudden death from unknown causes, and that sweet local speech I mourn was the child of illiteracy and ignorance. It is the nature of a man as he grows older, a small bridge in time, to protest against change, particularly change for the better.

We have really made an advance in civilization, that the principles on which our political and social order rest are in harmony with the laws of the universe, that we have set up an ideal which may never in genuine happiness certain...We are getting rid of old world things and becoming accustomed to the new. We are forming new creeds, new judgments, new manners; we are becoming a new race of men.

We presumably believe that most of the technological progress over the arc of humanity to date has been good. I don't see any argument to go back to 1600.

Call me an optimist, but in the past 300 years we have built amazing technologies which - by and large - have advanced humanity.

You either innovate or you become defunct.

It's fun to sentimentalize the 20th-century lifestyle and the 20th-century brain, but it helps nobody, it makes you look ancient, there's no going back, and you'd be miserable if you did.

If we don't move with time, we'll be stuck in old ways.

If there's another iPhone that's better, that's sad for my old iPhone. But it means we get to use a better one.

The times change, and if you don't change with them, you get left behind.

It's good to be progressive, but don't shun the good things about tradition.