A Dark Age is not just a period in which people no longer know how to do things. The real key is that people no longer remember that certain things can be done at all.
It was our love of foreign cloth that ousted the wheel from its position of dignity.
The definition of a Dark Age is that we no longer remember what we once could do.
If humanity is being swallowed by a modern primitivism, imagination might be the thing that saves us all.
The cycle of the machine is now coming to an end. Man has learned much in the hard discipline and the shrewd, unflinching grasp of practical possibilities that the machine has provided in the last three centuries: but we can no more continue to live in the world of the machine than we could live successfully on the barren surface of the moon.
There's no doubt who was a leader in space after the Apollo Program. Nobody came close to us. And our education system, in science, technology, engineering and math, was at the top of the world. It's no longer there. We're descending rather rapidly.
You cannot buy an American telephone, TV set or VCR. This is a part of America that has gone abroad and will never come back again.
The 500 years following the fall of the Western Roman Empire were dubbed by the poet Petrarch 'dark.' Although the 14th-century Italian was referring to a literary decline, the term caught on to denote the seemingly backward turn the Western world took with regard to religious and technological developments.
Frankly, our technology is not up to date. We're letting it slip by.
Why commit technological suicide by restricting the flow of talent into the United States?
We are going backwards in a field that’s supposed to be all about moving forward
I don't think so-called high technology matters in death. I think they had high technology before Noah's Ark. And it got lost because that was the first Ice Age.
I rather think the cinema will die. Look at the energy being exerted to revive it - yesterday it was color, today three dimensions. I don't give it forty years more. Witness the decline of conversation. Only the Irish have remained incomparable conversationalists, maybe because technical progress has passed them by.
The story of technology seems to go up and then retract into simplicity again.
Like our bodies and like our desires, the machines we have devised are possessed of a heart which is slowly reduced to embers.
There is a growing awareness that we're losing our technological competitive edge. I think there's an awareness that we're losing our leadership, and that maybe our self image over the past several decades has been a little bit delusional.
The Long Emergency will be chiefly characterized as a "time out" from technology. It could plunge us into a dark age of superstition. My guess is that we will lose a lot of knowledge and skill. But I also believe the human race desperately needs this "time out."
