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"The real ugliness lies in the relationship between people who produce the technology and the things they produce, which results in a similar relationship between the people who use the technology and the things they use."
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"While we are curling down in our comfort zone, the perverted talents of connectivity-designers drive us surreptitiously into a blind alley of addiction. If, however, we succeed in impeding mobiles' unlimited rule, we may be able to relish the fragrance of the 'moment' but also sense the vital spark and spirit of "otherness. ['Even if the world goes down, my mobile will save me']"

"When all is said and done, the invention of writing must be reckoned not only as a brilliant innovation but as a surpassing good for humanity. And assuming that we survive long enough to use their inventions wisely, I believe the same will be said of the modern Thoths and Prometheuses who are today devisingcomputers and programs at the edge of machine intelligence."

"To a man with an internet connection, every thought and every movement sounds like a tweet or status update."

"I think it's fair to say that personal computers have become the most empowering tool we've ever created. They're tools of communication, they're tools of creativity, and they can be shaped by their user."

"At the beginning of that interval a type-machine was a curiosity. The person who owned one was a curiosity, too. But now it is the other way about: the person who doesn't own one is a curiosity."

"Our television signals leave this planet and go out into space...the signals spread out from the earth in spherical waves, a little like ripples in a pond. They travel at the speed of light, 186,000 miles a second, and essentially go on forever. The better some other civilizations receivers are, the farther away they could be and still pick up our tv signals. Even we could detect a strong tv transmission from a planet going around the nearest star.' President: 'You mean everything? You mean to say all that crap on television - the car crashes, wrestling, the porno channels, the evening news?"

"Technology forced me to divorce a pixie and remarry a pixel."

"There are as many opinions as there are experts."

"A smartphone is an addictive device which traps a soul into a lifeless planet full of lives."

"Technophillia is our natural state: we love our object and follow where they lead."
Explore more quotes by Robert M. Pirsig


"He comments on how amazing it is that everything in the universe can be described by the twenty-six written characters with which they have been working. His (Korean) friends nod and smile and eat the food they've taken from tins and say no pleasantly."


"The range of human knowledge today is so great that we're all specialists and the distance between specializations has become so great that anyone who seeks to wander freely between them almost has to forego closeness with the people around him."


"Historically mystics have claimed that for a true understanding of reality metaphysics is too 'scientific. Metaphysics is not reality. Metaphysics is names about reality. Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty-thousand-page menu and no food."


"This larger goal wouldn't be the imitation of education in Universities today, glossed over and concealed by grades and degrees that give the appearance of something happening when, in fact, almost nothing is going on. It would be the real thing."


"We're living in topsy-turvy times, and I think that what causes the topsy-turvy feeling is inadequacy of old forms of thought to deal with new experiences. I've heard it said that the only real learning results from hang-ups, where instead of expanding the branches of what you already know, you have to stop and drift laterally for a while until you come across something that allows you to expand the roots of what you already know. Everyone's familiar with that. I think the same thing occurs with whole civilizations when expansion's needed at the roots."


"It was the ghost of rationality itself ... This is the ghost of normal everyday assumptions which declares that the ultimate purpose of life, which is to keep alive, is impossible, but that this is the ultimate purpose of life anyway, so that great minds struggle to cure diseases so that people may live longer, but only madmen ask why. One lives longer in order that he may live longer. There is no other purpose. That is what the ghost says."
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