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The invention of printing and the Reformation are and remain the two outstanding services of central Europe to the cause of humanity.
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Ch. 6

 

Thomas Mann

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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

 

How can we still speak of the salvation and reformation of Europe, when we have to ask Europe's destroyer for help?

 

Alfred Rosenberg

 

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.

 

Neil Postman

 

Many of our services cost more than do similar services in Europe, because, although we have a substantial quantitative deficiency of public services, the decision-takers and policy-makers, both inside and outside Government as I have said before today, being themselves from the better-off (to use a popular euphemism) sectors of our society, not only demand the highest standards of provision of public services to meet what they consider their own essential needs (for example, in public car parks); but also find it difficult to think of provision for the rest of the population in terms of standards relative to our real total resources.

 

John James Cowperthwaite

 

The invention of the printing press probably marks the beginning of the decline of civilization. Once you have it, science follows close behind. Next thing you know the idiots have better weaponry. Then atom bombs. Meantime, social organization becomes increasingly dependent on technology, which becomes increasingly vulnerable to error or sabotage. If we can judge by our own experience, it looks as if you get the printing press, then about a thousand years. After that it’s back to the trees.

 

Jack McDevitt