Paul Virilio Quotes

Every notable advance in technique or organization has to be paid for, and in most cases the debit is more or less equivalent to the credit. Except of course when it's more than equivalent, as it has been with universal education, for example, or wireless, or these damned aeroplanes. In which case, of course, your progress is a step backwards and downwards.

The modern technologist is less 'sorcerer' and more 'sorcerer's apprentice'.

The computer is my favourite invention. I feel lucky to be part of the global village. I don't mean to brag, but I'm so fast with technology. People think it all seems too much, but we'll get used to it. I'm sure it all seemed too much when we were learning to walk.

Many people recognize that technology often comes with unintended and undesirable side effects.

Technology... is a queer thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other.

Technology causes problems as well as solves problems. Nobody has figured out a way to ensure that, as of tomorrow, technology won't create problems. Technology simply means increased power, which is why we have the global problems we face today.

It was a case of the technology catching up with the problem.

In a world being transformed by technology, good science is vital to good diplomacy.

We cannot blindly embrace the benefits of technology.

What can be done, will be done. Like a natural force technology is impossible to hold back.

Sociology almost always dominates technology. Ideas often lie unused because people do not want to use them.

Asians love technology. They see it as the path to a good life. This is not so in Europe where there is much skepticism about technology—maybe because of Nazi Germany and its use of technology.

The history of economic growth is the history of people making more with less and shifting into new jobs that were unheard of in the previous generation.

At the present time, when railways, the telegraph, the telephone, to say nothing of other inventions and improvements of importance, have simplified communication between all lands and nations to the last degree, there is scarcely any reason to fear either distance or the estrangement of the several parts of a single whole. Practically distance is almost nonexistent. What to our ancestors appeared simply near at hand now seems to lie immediately before our eyes

The computer of today is really in its infancy.

It’s important to embrace new technologies instead of fight them.

The advancement of the arts (technology) from year to year taxes our credulity, and seems to presage the arrival of that period when human improvement must end.

No particular technology lasts for long.

Who brings tomorrow into the present if not the scientists, technicians and engineers?

We cannot idealize technology. Technology is only and always the reflection of our own imagination, and its uses must be conditioned by our own values.

The engineer is the key figure in the material progress of the world. It is his engineering that makes a reality of the potential value of science by translating scientific knowledge into tools, resources, energy and labor to bring them to the service of man ... To make contribution of this kind the engineer requires the imagination to visualize the needs of society and to appreciate what is possible as well as the technological and broad social age understanding to bring his vision to reality

Man has mounted science, and is now run away with. I firmly believe that before many centuries more, science will be the master of men. The engines he will have invented will be beyond his strength to control. Someday science may have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide, by blowing up the world.

With science, technology and globalization, man is changing the world faster than his evolution can keep up with the new dangers.

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

Think back to the time when Agriculture was not labor efficient. We have lost all these jobs. But I don't think anyone is too sad about it.