David Sedaris Quotes

Television, while chemically non-invasive, nevertheless is every bit as addicting and physiologically damaging as any other drug.

There's something really terrible about having your BlackBerry next to your bed or having your laptop in the living room when you're talking to someone. The biggest source of stress in my life is the screen, the blogging.

Technology is notorious for engrossing people so much that they don't always focus on balance and enjoy life at the same time.

Texting is addicting. Once you get emotionally involved with constant outside stimulation assaulting your brain, it is hard to stop looking at your machine every two minutes. Without rapid fire words appearing on a screen, you feel bored, not part of the action.

Google is addictive.

The Tamagotchi, I have realized, is everything that is wrong with our smartphone era. Is this what went wrong with millennials?

We're all severely addicted to our phones... it's not glamorous or always harrowing even, it's just damaging.

'In Another Time' talks about our addiction to technology.

Some people are on their darn computers all day long.

The history of society is the history of the inventive labors that man alter man, alter his desires, habits, outlook, relationships both to other men and to physical nature, with which man is in perpetual physical and technological metabolism.

I think, actually, that it's a really fascinating time in history because the development of modern technology and the photographs the satellites were taking from space were mapping the earth in a new way, making us feel like the globe we inhabit is much smaller than previously conceived of, in the human mind.

In an automobile civilization, which was one of constant motion and activity, there was almost no time to think; in a television one, there is small desire.

Somebody is going to find a way digitally that is just as innovative. In the end, the tools can change, but there is always someone who can think of something cool to do.

I don't think enough people have accepted that the machines have already taken over. They are patiently waiting for us to catch up with them. Our world is now interdependent with the machines, and more entrepreneurs should be working on the symbiosis between the two entities.

This is the 21st century, we are a highly evolved race, our capabilities are so great compared to what we are doing. We have been lulled into addiction and everything is built around it and you have to break out of it and think outside of the box.

The history of the Internet is, in part, a series of opportunities missed.

When I look at young kids today I just don't believe it, parents take away the Gameboy and they're suicidal. They cannot take the pressure.

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.

Mankind has invested more than four million years of evolution in the attempt to avoid physical exertion. Now a group of backward-thinking atavists mounted on foot-powered pairs of Hula-Hoops would have us pumping our legs, gritting our teeth, and searing our lungs as though we were being chased across the Pleistocene savanna by saber-toothed tigers. Think of the hopes, the dreams, the effort, the brilliance, the pure force of will that, over the eons, has gone into the creation of the Cadillac Coupe de Ville. Bicycle riders would have us throw all this on the ash heap of history.

Yeah, right. I don’t believe that one for a minute. What do you think? I fell off a turnip truck? (Simone) Honestly? All I was thinking about was how beautiful you are. How much I wanted to feel your skin against mine and how I’ve never been this attracted to a woman before. (Xypher)

With the only certainty in our daily existence being change, and a rate of change growing always faster in a kind of technological leapfrog game, speed helps people think they are catching up.

Television is, to my mind, the most insidious drug that the 20th Century has had to deal with.

I always cheerfully say, "Well, you know, the species is adapting, and whatever it needs to do, it'll do," but I do think it's maybe a little bit alarming. Everybody knows that one thing we really have to do is to be more wherever we are, more present, that's just kind of a commonplace. And the whole mobile phone thing is completely 100% the opposite - to never be where you are because you can always be somewhere else; and yet it's so fun and addictive.

You can deceive yourself into thinking that America is a technological leader, but if you don't see what anyone else is doing you have no accurate assessment - you can't make an accurate assessment of where you fit and why. I consider our moving frontier in space as the anecdote to that downward trend.

The crisis is not in the outward technological advancement, but rather in the way we think, and the way we live, and the way we feel. I think that is where a revolution must take place.