Power Of The Printing Press Quotes

A printer can do the same thing and much more. He can preserve the Law, but he can also preserve the words of madmen. And in many copies! The printer's art will serve everyone: the faithful and the unfaithful, the righteous and the wicked. And as you know from having read it, 'The wicked are like the tossing sea, for it cannot rest.' God grant that we won't have to regret this new invention. ~ Marek Halter

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

Up till now it has been thought that the growth of the Christian myths during the Roman Empire was possible only because printing was not yet invented. Precisely the contrary. The daily press and the telegraph, which in a moment spreads inventions over the whole earth, fabricate more myths (and the bourgeois cattle believe and enlarge upon them) in one day than could have formerly been done in a century. ~ Karl Marx

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

A printing press took the thoughts from someone's mind and inked them on to a piece of paper anyone might read. It was a kind of magic. A magic to alter the world. ~ Gita Trelease

Digital educators Salman Khan and Shantanu Sinha contend the world is on the verge of another "printing press moment," which will break the elite's grip on the essentials of education, making available to millions of aspiring learners online knowledge and ideas once restricted to the lecture halls of Harvard or Stanford. ~ McKinsey & Company

The approach to digital culture I abhor would indeed turn all the world's books into one book, just as Kevin (Kelly) suggested. It might start to happen in the next decade or so. Google and other companies are scanning library books into the cloud in a massive Manhattan Project of cultural digitization. What happens next is what's important. If the books in the cloud are accessed via user interfaces that encourage mashups of fragments that obscure the context and authorship of each fragment, there will be only one book. This is what happens today with a lot of content; often you don't know where a quoted fragment from a news story came from, who wrote a comment, or who shot a video. A continuation of the present trend will make us like various medieval religious empires, or like North Korea, a society with a single book.

The Bible can serve as a prototypical example. Like Wikipedia, the Bible's authorship was shared, largely anonymous, and cumulative, and the obscurity of the individual authors served to create an oracle-like ambience for the document as "the literal word of God." If we take a non-metaphysical view of the Bible, it serves as a link to our ancestors, a window. The ethereal, digital replacement technology for the printing press happens to have come of age in a time when the unfortunate ideology I'm criticizing dominates technological culture. Authorship - the very idea of the individual point of view - is not a priority of the new ideology. The digi ~ Jaron Lanier

There isn't a single government agency that can't function. There's more money in this federal government, there's more money allocated than these people can possibly spend. They have to concoct asinine ways to spend it, like advertising for new food stamp users. I've gotten to the point, I'm just so righteously indignant and offended at the very idea that our government could ever run out of money when we've got a printing press, for crying out loud. Printed three and a half trillion dollars over seven years and flooded Wall Street with it. ~ Rush Limbaugh

...did not choose to print the Wesson's Guide. Because a printing press was a manchine, and machines were technology, and because technology clouded minds, weakened the will, and took away the self-reliance of the Ancients--or so their Parliament said--such dangerous items could be used only by a special license. ~ Sharon Cameron

What these critics forget is that printing presses in themselves provide no guarantee of an enlightened outcome. People, not machines, made the Renaissance. The printing that takes place in North Korea today, for instance, is nothing more than propaganda for a personality cult. What is important about printing presses is not the mechanism, but the authors. ~ Jaron Lanier

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

We have now in our possession three instruments of civilization, unknown to antiquity. These are the art of printing; free representative government; and, lastly, a pure and spiritual religion, the deep fountain of generous enthusiasm, the mighty spring of bold and lofty designs, the great sanctuary of moral power. ~ Edward Everett

The three inventions that made the Renaissance possible, the compass, gunpowder, and the printing press, came from China. The Babylonians scooped Pythagoras by fifteen hundred years. Long before anyone else, the Indians knew the world was round, and had calculated its age. And better than anyone else, the Mayans knew the stars, eyes of the night, and the mysteries of time.
Such details were not worthy of Europe's attention. ~ Eduardo Galeano

Like gold, U.S. dollars have value only to the extent that they are strictly limited in supply. But the U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost. By increasing the number of U.S. dollars in circulation, or even by credibly threatening to do so, the U.S. government can also reduce the value of a dollar in terms of goods and services, which is equivalent to raising the prices in dollars of those goods and services. ~ Ben Bernanke

The coming of the printing press must have seemed as if it would turn the world upside down in the way it spread and, above all, democratized knowledge. Provide you could pay and read, what was on the shelves in the new bookshops was yours for the taking. The speed with which printing presses and their operators fanned out across Europe is extraordinary. From the single Mainz press of 1457, it took only twenty-three years to establish presses in 110 towns: 50 in Italy, 30 in Germany, 9 in France, 8 in Spain, 8 in Holland, 4 in England, and so on. ~ James E. Burke

Paper money is made of cotton, and I'm long cotton, by the way. One reason I'm long cotton is because Dr. Bernanke is out there running the printing presses as fast as he can. ~ Jim Rogers

Moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but the world's champions. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Everything great in science and art is simple. What can be less complicated than the greatest discoveries of humanity - gravitation, the compass, the printing press, the steam engine, the electric telegraph? ~ Jules Verne

One of the stories I love is how Gutenberg's printing press set off this interesting chain reaction, where all of a sudden people across Europe noticed for the first time that they were farsighted, and needed spectacles to read books (which they hadn't really noticed before books became part of everyday life); which THEN created a market for lens makers, which then created pools of expertise in crafting lenses, which then led people to tinker with those lenses and invent the telescope and microscope, which then revolutionized science in countless ways. ~ Steven Johnson

Now more than ever, journalists have a crucial role to perform in the society. You may say, haven't they been playing that role from the very beginning! Yes, they have been doing it for a long time, since the birth of printing press, but never in history, could their failure mean devastation in their community caused by their false and illegitimate counterparts. ~ Abhijit Naskar

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

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

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

Our enthusiasm for digital technology about which we have little understanding and over which we have little control leads us not toward greater agency, but toward less ... We have surrendered the unfolding of a new technological age to a small elite who have seized the capability on offer. But while Renaissance kings maintained their monopoly over the printing press by force, today's elite is depending on little more than our own disinterest. ~ Douglas Rushkoff

With the development of the printing press, not only could text be mass-produced quickly, it could also be mass-produced quickly and incorrectly. ~ The Bureau Chiefs

Over the last few millennia we've invented a series of technologies - from the alphabet to the scroll to the codex, the printing press, photography, the computer, the smartphone - that have made it progressively easier and easier for us to externalize our memories, for us to essentially outsource this fundamental human capacity. ~ Joshua Foer

The freedom of the press should be inviolate. ~ John Quincy Adams

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

Instead of wasting his time in Frankfurt and Tokyo, the finance minster should focus on Indian housewives and help them balance their budgets by reducing inflation and the fiscal deficit. Unfortunately, our housewives do not have access to the Nashik note printing press like our FM. The solution to India's problems lie inside, not in wooing FII and FDI inflows. ~ R. Vaidyanathan

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

Ink is the blood of the printing-press. ~ John Milton

Before the widespread rise of the Internet and easy publishing tools, influence was largely in the hands of those who could reach the widest audience, the people with printing presses or access to a wide audience on television or radio, all one-way mediums that concentrated power in the hands of the few. ~ Matt Mullenweg

As soon as the printing press started flooding Europe with books, people were complaining that there were too many books and that it was going to change philosophy and the course of human thought in ways that wouldn't necessarily be good. ~ James Gleick

At Facebook, we're inspired by technologies that have revolutionized how people spread and consume information. We often talk about inventions like the printing press and the television - by simply making communication more efficient, they led to a complete transformation of many important parts of society. They gave more people a voice. They encouraged progress. They changed the way society was organized. They brought us closer together. ~ Mark Zuckerberg