Frank Lloyd Wright Quotes

We are much better at creating complex technologies than we are at controlling them.

In the end the question is: Who is to be master, man or his machines? As long as the control over technology rests primarily on economic calculation, the victor is not likely to be man.

The problem isn't how to make the world more technological. It's about how to make the world more humane again.

It troubles me that we are so easily pressured by purveyors of technology into permitting so-called "progress" to alter our lives without attempting to control it-as if technology were an irrepressible force of nature to which we must meekly submit.

Man must shape his tools lest they shape him.

So one begins to wonder what is going to happen to the human race. Technology keeps on advancing with greater and greater power, either for good or for destruction.

Technology is not destiny.

Technologists provide tools that can improve people's lives. But I want to be clear that I don't think technology by itself improves people's lives, since often I'm criticized for being too pro-technology. Unless there's commensurate ethical and moral improvements to go along with it, it's for naught.

I feel every technology can be abused, but fundamentally we put new technologies into the service of humanity.

All attempts to adapt our ethical code to our situation in the technological age have failed.

Science is a magnificent force, but it is not a teacher of morals. It can perfect machinery, but it adds no moral restraints to protect society from the misuse of the machine. It can also build gigantic intellectual ships, but it constructs no moral rudders for the control of storm tossed human vessel.

Of course, technology is not an exogenous force over which humans have no control. We are not constrained by a binary choice between acceptance and rejection. Rather, the decisions we make every day as citizens, consumers, and investors guide technological progress.

In any discussion of technology, you hear the same argument: You can't turn the clock back and you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Maybe not. But there are steps we can take to limit the social harm caused by this industry, just like we do with others.

Top technologists have a tremendous capacity - and, therefore, a tremendous responsibility - to build things that make a positive impact on the world.

Technology must be guided and driven by ethics if it is to do more than provide new toys for the rich.

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

Our age is one of guided missiles and unguided men.

Although technology is proceeding at a dizzying pace, I believe that the human mind will always have control of itself. And since the human mind has a degree of infinity and imagination unlikely to be matched by a machine for a very, very long time, I don't think that we will become the machines of the machines.

Civilization is that mode of conduct which points out to man the path of duty.

It is more important to find out what you are giving to society than to ask what is the right means of livelihood.

I move in a society so devoid of ordinary reality that I am continually stopping to teach good sense, to give support, to help out, as a young gangster might help an old lady across the street on his way to the stick-up.

I ask that you offer to the political arena, and to the critical problems of our society which are decided therein, the benefit of the talents which society has helped to develop in you. I ask you to decide, as Goethe put it, whether you will be an anvilor a hammer. The question is whether you are to be a hammerwhether you are to give to the world in which you were reared and educated the broadest possible benefits of that education.

He that lays down precepts for the governing of our lives, and moderating our passions, obliges humanity not only in the present, but in all future generations.

I think that every educator, indeed every human being, is concerned with what is true and what is not; what experiences to cherish and which ones to avoid; and how best to relate to other human beings. We differ in how conscious we are of these questions; how reflective we are about our own stances; whether we are aware of how these human virtues are threatened by critiques (philosophical, cultural) and by technologies (chiefly the digital media). A good educator should help us all to navigate our way in this tangled web of virtues.

Thanks to technology, what almost anybody can do has been multiplied a thousandfold, and our moral understanding about what we ought to do hasn't kept pace.