"Our inventions are wont to be pretty..." - Quote by Henry David Thoreau
Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.
More by Henry David Thoreau
More on Technology
“Now that we have learned to fly the air like birds, swim under water like fish, we lack one thing - to learn to live on earth as human beings.”
“We have genuflected before the god of science only to find that it has given us the atomic bomb, producing fears and anxieties that science can never mitigate.”
“I know there's a farmer out there somewhere who never wants a PC and that's fine with me.”
More on Progress
“The brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over we realize this: that the human race has been roughly handled, but that it has advanced.”
“Science is the tool of the Western mind and with it more doors can be opened than with bare hands.”
“The truth is we are not yet free; we have merely achieved the freedom to be free.”