Franklin Foer Quotes

Our technological powers increase, but the side effects and potential hazards also escalate.

Our technology has already outstripped our ability to control it.

I don't think that technology is going to allow for greater subjugation of people. I think it's gonna give them more freedom.

A movie like 'Transcendence' may be pertinent in its political reverberations of all computer data held in a cloud and monitored by the NSA, but it also rails against the tools its makers so artfully employ.

The song 'Paradigm' talks about nanobots - and how they can potentially be used to cure diseases and help you live forever. But how much of a human being would you be at that point? If you're 70 percent machine and 30 percent human, are you going to lose yourself?

The challenge of modern freedom, or the combination of isolation and freedom which confronts you, is to make yourself up. The danger is that you may emerge from the process as a not-entirely-human creature. (Referenced in How to Lose Friends and Alienate People by Toby Young)

Choice is the essence of what I believe it is to be human.

I think the age we're living in is starting to get scary.

I don't see myself as a hero because what I'm doing is self-interested: I don't want to live in a world where there's no privacy and therefore no room for intellectual exploration and creativity.

The Matrix is top secret. There isn't much that can be said right now.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm a character being written, or if I'm writing myself.

I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.

I hate the fact that so much of our life is computerised rather than mechanised.

All I know is that when I go somewhere, I'm not an autobot. I am a human being. I am not an actor.

Is the system going to flatten you out and deny you your humanity, or are you going to be able to make use of the system to the attainment of human purposes?

Control is what gives you privacy.

If technology has finally caught up with individual liberty, why would anyone who loves freedom want to rethink that?

When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man.

When you write a high-tech thriller, and then people in the defense establishment start calling you - people I can't name - you feel you've hit a nerve.

Being a Sikh meant having to do what Mom and Dad said, and going to temple, and Mom and Dad choosing who I would marry. But going to an American school taught me that I was the one who's supposed to make those choices.

I just think that we're living in a world where the technology is advancing so rapidly. You're having cameras that are capable of more and more - the resolution on cameras is jumping up.

I've always felt that technology can be used to our benefit and should be used to our benefit.

Technology is an interesting subject, people thinking: how much good, and how much bad, does it inherently carry?

We cannot blindly embrace the benefits of technology.

Technology will save us if it doesn't wipe us out first.