Rem Koolhaas Quotes

Communications devices were always used to effect change, to effect revolution. Telephone, telegraph - these all seemed like very big enhancements at the time.

People always think they're in the middle of a revolution while they tend not to realize the enormity of a change that has happened in the past. The telegraph was a revolution, but who looks at it that way these days? The telegraph sped up the transportation of messages over long distances by a huge factor.

… the telephone was only a convenience permitting Americans to do more orally and with less effort than what they had been doing before.

People's behavior will change with technology. I know very few young people who can't type out a text message on their phone with one thumb, for instance.

The locomotive is coming into contact with the framework of our institutions. In this country of simple government, the most powerful civilizing force which civilization has yet produced must … assume its relation to that political machinery which is to control and regulate it.

The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.

… post-industrial society

All around us are the consequences of the most significant technological, and hence cultural, revolution in generations

In the information age, when tradition, propriety, formality or culture clash with informational ease and utility, the traditional forms must … yield.

Technology can progress to an entire new generation in the time it takes one legislative committee to issue a report. Regulation of technology confronts us with two radically different time scales.

The coming of the wireless Era will make war impossible, because it will make war ridiculous.

The masses in highly industrialized countries like England, the United States, or France are largely de-Christianized. Technology, and the way of life it produces, undermines Christianity far more effectively than do violent measures.

Information technology and the Internet are rapidly transforming almost every aspect of our lives - some for better, some for worse.

Technology doesn't just do things for us. It does things to us, changing not just what we do but who we are.

Since Graham Bell came up with telephony, it took 100 years for the way the technology has impacted our lives, the way we perceive the world.

You can go overboard in how quickly you might expect new technologies to transform people's lives. But I very much believe the way software is used, the way information gets distributed, will be dramatically different within 10 years. There is fire to go with all this smoke.

Technology's become the great prism for what's going on in the world.

Technology transforms people's lives. From mitigating poverty to simplifying processes, ending corruption to providing better services, Technology is omnipresent. It has become the single-most important instrument of human progress.

The new media and technologies by which we amplify and extend ourselves constitute huge collective surgery carried out on the social body with complete disregard for antiseptics.

Technology evolves faster than people do, faster than biology does.

Technology by default became the thing that was a new thing that had swept in and was altering it everything.

Previous technologies have expanded communication. But the last round may be contracting it. The eloquence of letters has turned into the unnuanced spareness of texts; the intimacy of phone conversations has turned into the missed signals of mobile phone chat ... ('you're breaking up' is the cry of our time).

The Internet has been the most fundamental change during my lifetime and for hundreds of years. Someone the other day said, "It's the biggest thing since Gutenberg," and then someone else said "No, it's the biggest thing since the invention of writing."

To me technology used wisely is a catalyst to magically transforming the way we live.

Technology is a way of organizing the universe so that man doesn't have to experience it.