Human Mastery Quotes

Law is the greatest human invention. All the rest give man mastery over his world, but law gives him mastery over himself.

Natural science is one of man's weapons in his fight for freedom .... man must ... conquer and change nature and thus attain freedom from nature.

There has never been in history another such culture as … Western civilization…a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, … is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.

Modern Man is the victim of the very instruments he values most. Every gain in power, every mastery of natural forces, every scientific addition to knowledge, has proved potentially dangerous, because it has not been accompanied by equal gains in self-understanding and self-discipline.

It is the triumph of civilization that at last communities have obtained such a mastery over natural laws that they drive and control them. The winds, the water, electricity, all aliens that in their wild form were dangerous, are now controlled by human will, and are made useful servants.

The will to mastery becomes all the more urgent the more technology threatens to slip from human control

Having rationally endeavored to control nature, is he not now becoming the slave of the objects which he makes?

Man has now become an adjunct to perfect and carry forward these conquests.

The idea of engineering is an idea of mastery. And today the role that we are being asked to play is a role based on informed humanity.

Inductive reason, which alone makes man master of his environment, is an achievement; and when once born it must be reinforced by inhibiting the growth of other modes of knowledge.

We have not yet seen what man can make of man.

Science has made us gods even before we are worthy of being men.

In the end the question is: Who is to be master, man or his machines? As long as the control over technology rests primarily on economic calculation, the victor is not likely to be man.

The greatest task before civilization at present is to make machines what they ought to be, the slaves, instead of the masters of men.

In the end, I expect we'll have AI that is better than we are at nearly every narrow task but which are still our tools, not our masters.

LAOCOON, n. A famous piece of antique scripture representing a priest of that name and his two sons in the folds of two enormous serpents. The skill and diligence with which the old man and lads support the serpents and keep them up to their work have been justly regarded as one of the noblest artistic illustrations of the mastery of human intelligence over brute inertia.

If all were as it seems, and men made the elements their servants for noble ends!

It will be seen that we contemplate a time when man's will shall be law to the physical world, and he shall no longer be deterredby such abstractions as time and space, height and depth, weight and hardness, but shall indeed be the lord of creation.