Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985)
Context: A new technology sometimes creates more than it destroys. Sometimes, it destroys more than it creates. But it is never one-sided. The invention of the printing press is an excellent example. Printing fostered the modern idea of individuality but it destroyed the medieval sense of community and social integration. Printing created prose but made poetry into an exotic and elitist form of expression. Printing made modern science possible but transformed religious sensibility into an exercise in superstition. Printing assisted in the growth of the nation-state but, in so doing, made patriotism into a sordid if not a murderous emotion. Another way of saying this is that a new technology tends to favor some groups of people and harms other groups. School teachers, for example, will, in the long run, probably be made obsolete by television, as blacksmiths were made obsolete by the automobile, as balladeers were made obsolete by the printing press. Technological change, in other words, always results in winners and losers.
“The Medici created and destroyed me.”
The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), II Linear Perspective
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Leonardo Da Vinci 363
Italian Renaissance polymath 1452–1519Related quotes
The Evening and the Morning and the Night
Bloodchild and Other Stories (1995)
“Beliefs have the power to create and the power to destroy.”
Source: Awaken the Giant Within (1992), p. 75
Context: Beliefs have the power to create and the power to destroy. Human beings have the awesome ability to take any experience of their lives and create a meaning that disempowers them or one that can literally save their lives.
“You have created a monster and it will destroy you.”
Frankenstein, when it becomes apparent that the monster has run amok
Frankenstein (1931)
The Gander, in Book Seven : What Saraïde Wanted, Ch. XLV : The Gander Also Generalizes
The Silver Stallion (1926)
Context: I do not seek to copy nature. I, on the contrary, create to divert me such faith and dreams as living among men would tend to destroy. But as it is, my worshipers depart from me heartedly, in this grey corridor, and they are devoid of fear and parvanimity; for the effect of my singing, like that of all great singing, is to fill my hearers with a sentiment of their importance as moral beings and the greatness of their destinies.
“How many times have I created to destroy?”
Vita Nova
“Books have the power to create, destroy or change civilizations.”
"Humanity", Ch.II "Ideologies: A way to live", Part IV