As a society, we've become suspicious of such acts. Out of ignorance or laziness or timidity, we've turned the Luddites into caricatures, emblems of backwardness. We assume that anyone who rejects a new tool in favor of an older one is guilty of nostalgia, of making choices sentimentally rather than rationally. But the real sentimental fallacy is the assumption that the new thing is always better suited to our purposes and intentions than the old thing. That's the view of a child, naive and pliable. What makes one tool superior to another has nothing to do with how new it is. What matters is how it enlarges us or diminishes us, how it shapes our experience of nature and culture and one another. To cede choices about the texture of our daily lives to a grand abstraction called progress is folly. Nicholas Carr
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
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George Bernard Shaw
No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere.
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Sigmund Freud
We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.
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Alan Turing
..[G]reat progress was evident in the last Congress of the American 'Labour Union' in that among other things, it treated working women with complete equality. While in this respect the English, and still more the gallant French, are burdened with a spirit of narrow-mindedness. Anybody...
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Karl Marx
Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.
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Frank Zappa
More Quotes By Nicholas Carr
[Patricia Greenfield] concluded that “every medium develops some cognitive skills at the expense of others.” Our growing use of the Net and other screen-based technologies has led to the “widespread and sophisticated development of visual-spatial skills.” We can, for example, rotate objects in our minds...
To remain vital, culture must be renewed in the minds of the members of every generation. Outsource memory, and culture withers.
Some of the test subjects were given cards that had both words printed in full, like this: Hot: ColdOthers used cards that showed only the first letter of the second word, like this: Hot: CThe people who used the cards with the missing letters performed...
We become, neurologically, what we think."(33)
Their words also make it a lot easier for people to justify that shift -- to convince themselves that surfing the Web is a suitable, even superior, substitute for deep reading and other forms of calm and attentive thought. In arguing that books are archaic...
