Printing Press Quotes - Page 4

• The great dividing line between books that are made to be read and books that are made to be bought is not the purely modern thing it seems. We can trace it, if we try, back to the first printing-presses.

  Agnes Repplier

  Book, Trying, Lines

  Agnes Repplier (1908). “A Happy Half-century: And Other Essays”

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• What gunpowder did for war, the printing-press has done for the mind; and the statesman is no longer clad in the steel of special education, but every reading man is his judge.

  Wendell Phillips

  War, Reading, Men

  Wendell Phillips (1864). “Speeches, Lectures, and Letters”, p.40

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• They've been screaming about the death of literacy for years, but I think TV is the Gutenberg [printing] press. I think TV is the only thing that keeps us vaguely in democracy even if it's in the hands of the corporate culture. If you're an artist you write in your time. Moaning about the fact that maybe people read more books a hundred years ago - that's not true. I think the same percentage has always read.

  Sherman Alexie

  Book, Writing, Thinking

  Interview with Joelle Fraser, ir.uiowa.edu. 2000.

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• Architecture is the printing-press of all ages, and gives a history of the state of the society in which it was erected, from the cromlech of the Druids to those toy-shops of royal bad taste

  Sydney, Lady Morgan

  Giving, Age, Taste

  Lady Morgan (Sydney) (1859). “An Odd Volume Extracted from an Autobiography”, p.165

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• University printing presses exist, and are subsidised by the Government for the purpose of producing books which no one can read; and they are true to their high calling.

  Francis Cornford

  Book, Government, Calling

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• Anyone who has studied the history of technology knows that technological change is always a Faustian bargain: Technology giveth and technology taketh away, and not always in equal measure. 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.

  Neil Postman

  Technology, Technological Change, Ideas

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• The bank's product is debt, because the banks want to make sure that they can get paid for the debt. But ultimately the only party that can pay the debt is the government, because it runs the printing presses. So the debts ultimately either are paid by the government, or they're paid by a huge transfer of property from debtors to creditors - or, the debts are written off.

  Michael Hudson

  Running, Party, Government

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• Here we have the heart of the difference between Hayek and Keynes: one knew that markets work to give us the best of all possible worlds, while governments create and exacerbate malfunctions; the other imagined that governments were somehow capable of both perceiving and correcting malfunctions by means of the printing press, provided the right technocrats are in charge.

  Jeffrey Tucker

  Heart, Mean, Government

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• Once the idea is accepted that money is something whose supply is determined simply by the printing press, it becomes impossible for the politicians in power to resist the constant demands for further inflation.

  Henry Hazlitt

  Ideas, Demand, Determined

  Henry Hazlitt (1971). “Man Vs. the Welfare State”, p.162, Ludwig von Mises Institute

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• My take on the whole dot-com bubble was that a lot of people who wanted to make a lot of money got too excited and hyped up the commercial aspects of the Internet prematurely. I think the vision of the Internet as a democratizing medium - as everyone's printing press - is real. We got distracted from that by the mass hallucinations of the bubble.

  Craig Newmark

  Money, Business, Real

  "CRAIGSLIST / On the record: Craig Newmark". San Francisco Chronicle Interview, www.sfgate.com. August 15, 2004.

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• On our earth, before writing was invented, before the printing press was invented, poetry flourished. That is why we know that poetry is like bread; it should be shared by all, by scholars and by peasants, by all our vast, incredible, extraordinary family of humanity.

  Pablo Neruda

  Writing, Humanity, Earth

  Pablo Neruda, Mark Eisner (2004). “The essential Neruda: selected poems”, p.7, City Lights Books

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• Gutenberg, your printing press has been violated by this evil book, Mein Kampf!

  Friedrich Kellner

  Book, Evil, Gutenberg

  Friedrich Kellner (2017). “My Opposition”, p.452, Cambridge University Press

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• Technological change is discontinuous. The monks in their scriptoria did not invent the printing press, horse breeders did not invent the motorcar, and the music industry did not invent the iPod or launch iTunes.

  Jason Epstein

  Horse, Technological Change, Ipods

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• [The PlayStation 2 is a] historic, a mass-market appliance that fundamentally changes society in the way the printing press did.

  Trip Hawkins

  Way, Historic, Printing

  "Newsweek Catches On to PS2". IGN Interview, www.ign.com. February 28, 2000.

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• There are some bright spots, to be sure, but the internet is still in a Wild West phase, as was the case during the early age of the printing press as well.

  Al Gore

  Age, West, Phases

  "In The Age Of Fake News And Alternative Facts, Al Gore Remains Optimistic". "All Things Considered" with Ari Shapiro, www.npr.org. March 14, 2017.

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• I am surprised at all the people in the high-tech industry focused on "making money"... If that's all they want to do, they should have a $100 printing press in their basements and they will truly "make money." Instead, if we focus all that energy on innovation, we'll change the world for the best.

  Philippe Kahn

  Should Have, People, Focus

  Commencement speech for University of California Santa Cruz students, 1996.

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• Filmmaking materials are in the hands of more people now than ever before. I would like to think that the more people have these tools, the more people will learn how to use them, it's another argument I would argue for, personally, for art's education. Because there are kids who aren't that literate in screen language and they've got to know how people select shots, how people edit audio, how people combine things to make what they see on the screen. It would be like the 15th century or the 16th century in Germany, and somebody amends a printing press and you don't know how to read and write.

  Murray Horwitz

  Art, Kids, Writing

  Source: www.npr.org

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• Seldom can two such epoch-making events have occurred in successive years as happened then. In 1453 the Turks stormed Constantinople and finally destroyed the Greek Empire, driving out Greek scholars, who carried the knowledge of Greek language and literature to the western world; and in 1454 the first document known to us appeared from the printing press at Mainz.

  Frederic G. Kenyon

  Two, Years, Greek

  "The Story Of The Bible" by Frederic G. Kenyon. Ch. IV, From manuscript To Print, p. 41-42, 1949.

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• The American revolutionaries believed in the power of the word. But they had only word of mouth and the printing press. We have the Internet.

  Robert Darnton

  Mouths, American Revolution, Revolutionary

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• Both instruments are processors of information. Both appeared when nothing quite like them had existed before, and both began to make their effects felt immediately (a situation that isn't invariable with new technology). Both devices were less the result of a single breakthrough than of an evolving set of technologies. Like the computer, the printing press had no one certain inventor; it was a technology whose time had come.

  Pamela McCorduck

  Technology, Information, Computer

  Pamela McCorduck (1985). “The Universal Machine: Confessions of a Technological Optimist”, New York : McGraw-Hill

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• The quintessential exercise of free speech in a culture supposedly built on that concept and dedicated to it, the Internet's development is as historically important to humanity perhaps even more so as Gutenberg 's invention of the printing press.

  L. Neil Smith

  Exercise, Humanity, Important

  "Keep Your Filthy Hands Off The Internet". The Libertarian Enterprise, www.ncc-1776.org. June 20, 2010.

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• Think for a moment of the great agents and engines of our civilization, and then think what shadowy ideas they all once were. The wheels of the steamship turned as swiftly as they do now, but as silent and unsubstantial as the motions of the inventor's thought; and in the noiseless loom of his meditation were woven the sinews of the printing-press, whose thunder shakes the world.

  Edwin Hubbel Chapin

  Thinking, Civilization, Ideas

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• We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible, in order to cater to them with the products of our factories and printing presses and movie studios and all the rest.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Passion, Order

  Thomas Merton (1998). “The Seven Storey Mountain”, p.173, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• We are the children of a technological age. We have found streamlined ways of doing much of our routine work. Printing is no longer the only way of reproducing books. Reading them, however, has not changed.

  Lawrence Clark Powell

  Children, Book, Reading

  Lawrence Clark Powell (1985). “Books are basic: the essential Lawrence Clark Powell”, Univ of Arizona Pr

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• It did not take long after the rise of the commercial printing press before someone figured out that erotic novels were a good idea. ... It took people another 150 years to even think of the scientific journal.

  Clay Shirky

  Motivation, Inspiration, Thinking

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