Vannevar Bush Quotes

Architecture is a service business. An architect is given a program, budget, place, and schedule. Sometimes the end product rises to art - or at least people call it that.

I myself believe that there will one day be time travel because when we find that something isn't forbidden by the over-arching laws of physics we usually eventually find a technological way of doing it.

There's a snobbery at work in architecture. The subject is too often treated as a fine art, delicately wrapped in mumbo-jumbo. In reality, it's an all-embracing discipline taking in science, art, maths, engineering, climate, nature, politics, economics.

Design has to work. Art does not.

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts.

We are dreamers, shapers, singers, and makers. We study the mysteries of laser and circuit, crystal and scanner, holographic demons and invocations of equations. These are the tools we employ, and we know many things.

It's useful because it's beautiful.

For all the great dreams profitlessly invested in the digital computer, it is nonetheless true that not since the framers of the American Constitution took seriously the idea that all men are created equal has an idea so transformed the material conditions of life, the expectations of the race.

From the union of power and money, from the union of power and secrecy, from the union of government and science, from the union of government and art, from the union of science and money, from the union of ambition and ignorance, from the union of genius and war, from the union of outer space and inner vacuity, the Mad Farmer walks quietly away.

Today's science is tomorrow's technology.

Nothing tends so much to the advancement of knowledge as the application of a new instrument.

Communication media enabled collective action on new scales, at new rates, among new groups of people, multiplied the power available to civilizations and enabled new forms of social interaction. The alphabet enabled empire and monotheism, the printing press enabled science and revolution, the telephone enabled bureaucracy and globalization, the internet enabled virtual communities and electronic markets, the mobile telephone enabled smart mobs and tribes of info-nomads.

There are things I admire, for example, about South Korea or Singapore. I admire their history, their development and how intensively they have invested in their people and in technology.

The steam-engine I call fire-demon and great; but it is nothing to the invention of fire.

Engraving then, is, in brief terms, the Art of Scratch.

This is a very exciting time in the world of information. It's not just that the personal computer has come along as a great tool. The whole pace of business is moving faster. Globalization is forcing companies to do things in new ways.

If people are being left behind, impoverished economically or even culturally, they will always be easily targeted by demagogues of any stripe, exploiting their hate and fear and making impossible promises. That impoverishment is more likely if we fight a doomed battle against automation and new technology, when what those people need most is the ambitious new tech that is the only proven way to create sustainable industries and jobs.

Both humanity's capacity to innovate and the incentives to innovate are greater today than at any other time in history.

All technological breakthroughs start with a small "elite". Think about cellphones, for example. Now just about everyone has one. The same will happen to innovations such as Twitter.

The function of the machine is to liberate man from brute burdens, and release his energies to the building of his intellectual and spiritual powers for conquests in the fields of thought and higher action.

Our fear of technology is really a fear of empowerment. We now have the ability to design the reality we live in, and we have to step up to the occasion.

Yes, yes, I see it all! — an enormous social activity, a mighty civilization, a profuseness of science, of art, of industry, of morality, and afterwords, when we have filled the world with industrial marvels, with great factories, with roads, museums and libraries, we shall fall exhausted at the foot of it all, and it will subsist — for whom? Was man made for science or was science made for man?

Our quest for a Digital India is all encompassing. It is going to touch your lives in several ways, making it easier.

Shall we have recourse to the art of printing? But this has not destroyed property or aristocracy or corporations or paper wealth in England or America, or diminished the influence of either; on the contrary, it has multiplied aristocracy and diminished democracy.

I have found among my papers a sheet . . . in which I call architecture frozen music.