Lying increases the creative faculties, expands the ego, and lessens the frictions of social contacts.
Technological man can't believe in anything that can't be measured, taped, or put into a computer.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote suggests that people who are heavily reliant on technology may struggle to believe in concepts that are not quantifiable.
Clare Boothe Luce's quote highlights a perspective on how modern technology influences human belief systems. It suggests that those immersed in the technological world often prioritize measurable and tangible data over abstract ideas or beliefs that cannot be quantified. This reliance on empirical evidence may limit their understanding or acceptance of deeper philosophical, emotional, or spiritual concepts that are essential to the human experience.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about the importance of faith in personal relationships, you might quote Luce to emphasize the limitations of a purely data-driven perspective.
More from Clare Boothe Luce
All quotes βIn the final analysis there is no other solution to man's progress but the day's honest work, the day's honest decision, the day's generous utterances, and the day's good deed.
Lying increases the creative faculties, expands the ego, lessens the friction of social contacts. . . . It is only in lies, wholeheartedly and bravely told, that human nature attains through words and speech the forebearance, the nobility, the romance, the idealism, that-being what it is-it falls so short of in fact and in deed.
I am for lifting everyone off the social bottom. In fact, I am for doing away with the social bottom altogether.
But if God had wanted us to think just with our wombs, why did He give us a brain?
Since the birth of our nation, the steady performance of the Marine Corps in fighting America's battles has made it the very symbol of military excellence. The Corps has come to be recognized worldwide as an elite force of fighting men, renowned for their physical endurance, for their high level of obedience, and for the fierce pride they take, as individuals, in the capacity for self discipline.
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We shall do a much better programming job, provided that we approach the task with a full appreciation of its tremendous difficulty, provided that we stick to modest and elegant programming languages, provided that we respect the intrinsic limitations of the human mind and approach the task as Very Humble Programmers.
We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.
I am all for everyone having a voice; I just don't think everyone has earned the microphone. And that's what the Internet has done.
Today many people are switching to free software for purely practical reasons. That is good, as far as it goes, but that isn't all we need to do! Attracting users to free software is not the whole job, just the first step.
Technology is, in many respects, an enabler for an open, transparent society. But it's also an enabler for supervision to a completely unforeseen degree. And for commercialising personal space to an unforeseen degree.
I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.