Echoes

This is only a foretaste of what is to come, and only the shadow of what is going to be. We have to have some experience with the machine before we really know its capabilities. It may take years before we settle down to the new possibilities, but I do not see why it should not enter any one of the fields normally covered by the human intellect, and eventually compete on equal terms.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

I cannot help fearing that men may reach a point where they look on every new theory as a danger, every innovation as a toilsome trouble, every social advance as a first step toward revolution, and that they may absolutely refuse to move at all.

Progress lies not in enhancing what is, but in advancing toward what will be.

The secret of change is to focus all of your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new.

I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.

The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly, and that the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today.

Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.

Nothing is so much to be feared as fear. Atheism may comparatively be popular with God himself.

Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement and success have no meaning.

Whenever one tries to suppress doubt, there is tyranny.

It is indeed foolish to be unhappy now because you may be unhappy at some future time.

We have only started on our development of our country — we have not as yet, with all our talk of wonderful progress, done more than scratch the surface. The progress has been wonderful enough — but when we compare what we have done with what there is to do, then our past accomplishments are as nothing. When we consider that more power is used merely in ploughing the soil than is used in all the industrial establishments of the country put together, an inkling comes of how much opportunity there is ahead. And now, with so many countries of the world in ferment and with so much unrest everywhere, is an excellent time to suggest something of the things that may be done — in the light of what has been done. When one speaks of increasing power, machinery, and industry there comes up a picture of a cold, metallic sort of world in which great factories will drive away the trees, the flowers, the birds, and the green fields. And that then we shall have a world composed of metal machines and human machines. With all of that I do not agree. I think that unless we know more about machines and their use, unless we better understand the mechanical portion of life, we cannot have the time to enjoy the trees, and the birds, and the flowers, and the green fields.

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that things are difficult.

The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.

I will build a motor car for the great multitude. It will be so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one — and enjoy with his family the blessing of hours of pleasure in God's great open spaces.

The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.

We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.

The torment of precautions often exceeds the dangers to be avoided.

When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do this will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket. We shall be able to witness and hear events—the inauguration of a President, the playing of a World Series game, the havoc of an earthquake or the terror of a battle—just as though we were present.

It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.

Many things which nature makes difficult become easy to the man who uses his brains.

The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.