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Science & Tech Quote by Simon Wiesenthal

"Technology without hatred can be a blessing. Technology with hatred is always a disaster"

About this Quote

Wiesenthal’s line refuses the comforting fantasy that evil is a glitch in the machine. He splits technology into two moral states not because gadgets carry souls, but because the people who build and deploy them do. The first sentence offers a conditional hope: tools can amplify care as easily as they amplify power. The second sentence snaps shut with absolute language - “always” - because Wiesenthal is speaking from a century that tested every loophole in our faith in progress and found them wanting.

The subtext is an accusation aimed at modernity’s favorite alibi: neutrality. “Technology” is often treated as an impersonal force, a weather system. Wiesenthal drags it back into the realm of intention. Hatred is the real operating system; technology is merely the interface that makes it scalable, efficient, and harder for participants to recognize themselves as perpetrators. That’s why the phrase “without hatred” matters more than “with love.” He’s not romanticizing human nature; he’s warning about the specific, organized emotion that turns bureaucracy into a weapon.

Context sharpens the warning. As a Holocaust survivor and tireless tracker of Nazi criminals, Wiesenthal understood that disaster doesn’t require monstrous innovation, only ordinary tools married to dehumanizing ideology: trains, ledgers, identification systems, paperwork. Read now, the quote lands as a critique of our era’s frictionless instruments - surveillance, algorithmic sorting, automated targeting - and the way animus can hide behind “optimization.” He’s insisting that the ethical question isn’t what technology can do, but what it is being asked to do on behalf of whom.

Quote Details

TopicTechnology
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Technology without hatred can be a blessing. Technology with hatred is always a disaster
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About the Author

Simon Wiesenthal

Simon Wiesenthal (December 31, 1908 - September 20, 2005) was a Activist from Austria.

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