Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

The reduction in compassion that happens when we're all behind computer screens is not good for the world.

We're getting so pulled in by computers and technology, and our kids have their face in the computers all day. The human relationship is being diminished by this.

With everything that you can imagine at our fingertips, many of the social interactions that help tie people together in a community have faded away. Are communities traditionally built on relationships, trust and familiarity a thing of the past?

We have to wonder whether digital technology, rather than making it easier to communicate, is actually doing the opposite. We now sit alone at a keyboard, firing off zeros and ones into the ether. Offices are silent.

We didn't need the Internet for Nazi Germany to happen. But I feel like there's this lack of humanity because of it.

Some people fear that technology will become more engaging than live human interactions. That's silly; technology is already way more interesting than other people.

That's what the internet is: it's like bombarding your eyeballs with these myriad blinking colour lights. It's like trying to watch a movie on your phone in the middle of Times Square.

If we allow our self-congratulatory adoration of technology to distract us from our own contact with each other, then somehow the original agenda has been lost.

We need to be smarter than our smart phones and realize the people we are with are more important than the people we aren't with, and way more important than the strangers we hope will tweet and like and share and Instagram whatever we're sending out into the cybersphere.

The more we elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate.

I think we have the attention span of a gnat. You know, with cell phones and Twitter.

We live in a world where many of us have a lot of friends on Facebook but yet we have lost human connection.

Technological society has succeeded in multiplying the opportunities for pleasure, but it has great difficulty in generating joy.

Cell phones, alas, have pretty much ruined train travel, which I used to love. I could read or even sketch notes for what I was working on.

I know when I grew up, it was, if it was daylight outside, get outside. Well, now, with the technological age of computers and everything, everyone's inside virtually going everywhere they want to go, virtually having relationships, virtually traveling across the neighborhood, virtually going to that island.

As connected as we are with technology, it's also removed us from having to have human connection, made it more convenient to not be intimate.

I'm always wondering: Have all these time-saving devices actually saved us any time, or have they just created a million fetishes and obsessions that keep us from the quiet half hour we should be taking to sit and do nothing every day?

The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug.

We have cellphones and smartphones and iDevices and laptops and the ability to be perpetually connected. We never have to miss anything, significant or insignificant.

Ironically, while many of us spend hours every day using small mobile devices to increase our productivity and efficiency, interacting with these objects, even for short periods of time, might do just the opposite, reducing our assertiveness and undermining our productivity.

The more technologically advanced our society becomes, the more we need to go back to the basic fundamentals of human communication.

With all the abundance we have of computers and computing, what is scarce is human attention and time.

We go into restaurants, and people aren't talking anymore. They're texting. While they are sitting at a restaurant with each other. So we're losing this intimacy that we need to have as human beings.

Think about back in the day when we had Archie Bunker, 'The Jeffersons.' We had stuff to sit down and share and laugh at. The Internet has made it so we don't have to sit together anymore. It's so self-absorbed. No one has to talk to each other anymore, and people don't realize that that is killing us.

We think constant connection will make us feel less lonely. The opposite is true.