Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.

The line expresses a characteristic Huxleyan skepticism about the moral neutrality of invention: new tools can amplify human capacities without improving human ends. “Progress” in technique may simply make it easier to repeat old errors—violence, domination, propaganda, or self-deception—at greater scale and speed. The paradox (“progress” enabling “going backwards”) critiques the modern tendency to equate material or scientific advance with ethical or civilizational improvement. Read this way, the quote warns that without corresponding growth in wisdom, restraint, and humane values, technology can become an accelerant for regression rather than a pathway to genuine betterment.