Allen Ginsberg Quotes

That's really what SF is all about, you know: the big reality that pervades the real world we live in: the reality of change. Science fiction is the very literature of change. In fact, it is the only such literature we have.

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

Progress of any kind is always at variance with the old and established ideas and therefore with the codes inspired by them. Every step of progress is a change involving heavy risks.

A lot of people believe that you don't need to know the history and that creates newness. I disagree: we should always be informed and then destroy it.

Even IBM can't stand in the way of progress... for more than a decade.

Even some of the greatest technology-led revolutions, or allegedly technology-led, really were only made possible because of trends already present.

We are reinventing the world. We've set the ball spinning with little concern for where and how it's going to stop.

Digitization is certainly challenging the old ways of doing things, whether that's in publishing or politics. But it's not the end. In many ways, it is just the beginning.

If your goal is to change the world, you can't start by doing things the same old way because it sells better.

Today's shocks are tomorrow's conventions.

The idea of modernity is beginning to lose its vitality. It is losing it because modernity is no longer a critical attitude but an accepted, codified convention.

If you were a kid in 1955, you would pick up a copy of 'Popular Science' and it would say, 'This is the kind of car you're going to be driving in five years or in 20 years you'll be able to take a jet plane from New York to London in four hours,' or something like that. We actually got used to the idea that the future's going to be different.

This is the age of disruption.

If what we are doing is not seen by some people as science fiction, it's probably not transformative enough

What is noise to the old order is harmony to the new.

I've never regretted I was born too soon. I'm proud to be a child of the twentieth century. I'm satisfied to join its ranks on our side and fight for a new world.

One has to learn from history. Quite frankly, it is almost impossible to have a sense of vision without a sense of history. If history is learned, then it doesn't have to repeat itself over generations.

The future is unwritten. there are best case scenarios. There are worst-case scenarios. both of them are great fun to write about if you' re a science fiction novelist, but neither of them ever happens in the real world. What happens in the real world is always a sideways-case scenario. World-changing marvels to us, are only wallpaper to our children.

People who feared IBM were wrong, ... Technology is ever-changing.

The trouble with innovation is that truly innovative ideas often look like bad ideas at the time.

Society never progresses because the majority one day wakes up and says, “Let’s do things differently.” The majority didn’t wake up and say, “Oh, let’s just free the slaves.” ... Society always progressed because a relatively small group of people — usually considered outrageous radicals by the status quo of their time — had a better idea and articulated another way. That’s simply how evolution works; it’s the mutation — the member of the species who does things differently - that points the way to the future because they’re better adapted for survival.

Historical knowledge is indispensable for those who want to build a better world

At every level the greatest obstacle to transforming the world is that we lack the clarity and imagination to conceive that it could be different

Many people have tried to define science fiction. I like to call it the literature of exploration and change. While other genres obsess upon so-called eternal verities, SF deals with the possibility that our children may have different problems. They may, indeed, be different than we have been.

Science fiction is a field of writing where, month after month, every printed word implies to hundreds of thousands of people: 'There is change. Look, today's fantastic story is tomorrow's fact.