Like nuclear power, genetic engineering is not a neutral technology. It is by its very nature too powerful for our present state o...f social and scientific development, no matter whose hands are controlling it. Just as we would say, especially after Chernobyl, that a nuclear power plant is just as dangerous in a socialist nation as it is in a capitalist one, so I would say the same thing for genetic engineering. It is inherently Eugenic in that it always requires someone to decide what is a good and a bad gene.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Women think that an engineer is a man in hip boots building a dam. They don't realize that 95 percent of engineering is done in a ...nice air-conditioned office.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
People are more likely to search for specific books in which they are actively interested and that justify all of that effort of r...eading them. Electronic images and sounds, however, thrust themselves into people's environments, and the messages are received with little effort. In a sense, people must go after print messages, but electronic messages reach out and touch people. People will expose themselves to information in electronic media that they would never bother to read about in a book.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Electronic aids, particularly domestic computers, will help the inner migration, the opting out of reality. Reality is no longer g...oing to be the stuff out there, but the stuff inside your head. It's going to be commercial and nasty at the same time.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The car as we know it is on the way out. To a large extent, I deplore its passing, for as a basically old- fashioned machine, it e...nshrines a basically old-fashioned idea: freedom. In terms of pollution, noise and human life, the price of that freedom may be high, but perhaps the car, by the very muddle and confusion it causes, may be holding back the remorseless spread of the regimented, electronic society.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The war was won on both sides: by the Vietnamese on the ground, by the Americans in the electronic mental space. And if the one si...de won an ideological and political victory, the other made Apocalypse Now and that has gone right around the world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Sometimes, because of its immediacy, television produces a kind of electronic parable. Berlin, for instance, on the day the Wall w...as opened. Rostropovich was playing his cello by the Wall that no longer cast a shadow, and a million East Berliners were thronging to the West to shop with an allowance given them by West German banks! At that moment the whole world saw how materialism had lost its awesome historic power and become a shopping list.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Do they merit vitriol, even a drop of it? Yes, because they corrupt the young, persuading them that the mature world, which produc...ed Beethoven and Schweitzer, sets an even higher value on the transient anodynes of youth than does youth itself.... They are the Hollow Men. They are electronic lice.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is never finality in the display terminal's screen, but an irresponsible whimsicality, as words, sentences, and paragraphs a...re negated at the touch of a key. The significance of the past, as expressed in the manuscript by a deleted word or an inserted correction, is annulled in idle gusts of electronic massacre.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Mining today is an affair of mathematics, of finance, of the latest in engineering skill. Cautious men behind polished desks in Sa...n Francisco figure out in advance the amount of metal to a cubic yard, the number of yards washed a day, the cost of each operation. They have no need of grubstakes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »