Science & Tech Quote by Andy Rooney

Andy Rooney, the wry conscience of 60 Minutes, had a knack for puncturing techno-optimism with common sense. His jab that computers save time while wasting paper targets the paradox of modern efficiency: when the effort and cost of producing documents plummet, the volume explodes, and meaning gets buried. The exaggerated 98 percent is a comedian’s number, but it lands because it reflects a familiar office reality, especially from the era of dot-matrix printers and green-bar paper when the paperless office was being promised with every new machine.

The line is less about paper than about value. Printing became a ritual of productivity, a way to signal work done. Reports thickened, memos multiplied, and spreadsheets metastasized, not necessarily to inform but to reassure. Rooney points to a timeless human tendency: once tools make output cheap, we produce more than anyone can use. The problem is not technology but indiscriminate use, where the low friction of printing or exporting transforms thought into noise.

There is an environmental subtext, too. Each unnecessary page costs trees, ink, energy, and storage, only to end up in recycling bins or file cabinets no one opens. But the critique is broader and more durable than the paper era. Today, the waste lives in inboxes, shared drives, and dashboards: unread PDFs, messages that create more messages, analytics for their own sake. The medium changed; the clutter stayed.

Rooney’s quip asks for discipline. If time-saving tools tempt us to generate more than we can absorb, the antidote is judgment: fewer pages, clearer pages, and a higher bar for what deserves to exist at all. Technology amplifies intent. Without intent, it amplifies filler. The real gain is not in printing faster but in deciding what should be printed, shared, or created in the first place.