A Quote by Albert Einstein

Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.

Albert Einstein

Quote Topics

Axe Hands Like Pathological Progress Technological Technological Progress

Quote Author

Albert Einstein
German - Physicist
March 14, 1879 - April 18, 1955

Our entire much-praised technological progress, and civilization generally, could be compared to an axe in the hand of a pathological criminal.

Albert Einstein

More and more I come to value charity and love of one's fellow being above everything else...All our lauded technological progress-our very civilization-is like the axe in the hand of the pathological criminal.

Albert Einstein

The Church welcomes technological progress and receives it with love, for it is an indubitable fact that technological progress comes from God and, therefore, can and must lead to Him.

Pope Pius XII

Once computers can program, they basically take over technological progress because already, today, the majority of technological progress is run by software, by programming.

Jaan Tallinn

In existing criminology there are concepts: a criminal man, a criminal profession, a criminal society, a criminal sect, and a criminal tribe, but there is no concept of a criminal state, or a criminal government, or criminal legislation. Consequently what is often regarded as "political" activity is in fact a criminal activity.

P.D. Ouspensky

The debt austerity would not be problems if we had technological progress. If you doubled the debt in the U.S., and the size of the economy doubled because of technological progress and growth, the two would roughly cancel out and it would all be a totally manageable situation.

Peter Thiel

[We] assume that social progress is like technological progress: one cannot uninvent the internal combustion engine, so how could one uninvent liberty?

Mark Steyn

The love of money as a possession-as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life-will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease

John Maynard Keynes

I'm in favor of free trade, but I think if you had to make a choice between having technological progress versus free trade, you had one or the other, you should always pick technological progress. I think it's an incredibly important variable for creating more prosperity.

Peter Thiel

Technological society leads to increasing numbers of people who cannot adapt to the inhuman rhythm of modern life with its emphasis on specialization. A class of people is growing up who are unexploitable because they are not worth employing even for the minimum wage. Technological progress makes whole categories of people useless without making it possible to support them with the wealth produced by the progress.

Jacques Ellul

Maybe the preoccupation with technological progress has overshadowed our concern with human progress.

Wynton Marsalis

Ultimately, what the tech industry really cares about is ushering in the future, but it conflates technological progress with societal progress.

Jenna Wortham

We might expect intelligent life and technological communities to have emerged in the universe billions of years ago. Given that human society is only a few thousand years old, and that human technological society is mere centuries old, the nature of a community with millions or even billions of years of technological and social progress cannot even be imagined. ... What would we make of a billion-year-old technological community?

Paul Davies

I do have a Viking axe by the bed if I need to whack someone... My wife bought me a Viking axe - the axe side curls down so you can grab the adversary around the neck and you can use it to climb walls, as a grappling hook.

Mike Leach

You can't just stop technological progress. Even if one country stops researching artificial intelligence, some other countries will continue to do it. The real question is what to do with the technology. You can use exactly the same technology for very different social and political purposes. So I think people shouldn't be focused on the question of how to stop technological progress because this is impossible. Instead the question should be what kind of usage to make of the new technology. And here we still have quite a lot of power to influence the direction it's taking.