Printing press Quote by Kurt Andersen

“No new technology, during the thousand years between gunpowder and the steam engine, was as disruptive as the printing press,”

— Kurt Andersen

The three great elements of modern civilization, Gun powder, Printing, and the Protestant religion.

— Thomas Carlyle

The effect of the discovery of printing was evident in the savage religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Application of power to…

— Harold Innis

“Europe needed printing because it was bursting with creativity. New ideas in the arts and sciences, as well as in social justice and religion,…

— Mark Kurlansky

Technological change is discontinuous. The monks in their scriptoria did not invent the printing press, horse breeders did not invent the motorcar, and the…

— Jason Epstein

Anyone who has studied the history of technology knows that technological change is always a Faustian bargain: Technology giveth and technology taketh away, and…

— Neil Postman

“While the hardware of civilization - iron pots, blankets, guns - was welcomed by Native people, the software of Protestantism and Catholicism - original…

— Thomas King

“The emergence of the steam engine and its entire subsequent development was driven by market needs. The original need was to pump water out…

— Edward A. Hudson

“What these critics forget is that printing presses in themselves provide no guarantee of an enlightened outcome. People, not machines, made the Renaissance. The…

— Jaron Lanier

Gutenberg's invention of printing is the greatest event-the mother of revolution

— Victor Hugo

James Watt patented his steam engine on the eve of the American Revolution, consummating a relationship between coal and the new Promethean spirit of…

— Jeremy Rifkin

There are many points in the history of an invention which the inventor himself is apt to overlook as trifling, but in which posterity…

— David Brewster