John Wyndham, ‘John Pawley’s Peepholes’ in The Seeds of Time (London: Penguin Books, 1959; 1956). pp. 96-120 (p. 100):
She turned on her disillusioned voice: ‘We've got two ways of using inventions,’ she said. ‘One is to kill more people more easily: the other is to enable sharp operators to make easy money out of suckers. Maybe there are a few exceptions like X-rays, but not many. Inventions! What we do with the product of genius is first of all ram it down to the lowest common denominator and then multiply it by the vulgarest possible fraction. What a century! What a world! When I think what other centuries are going to say about ours it makes me go hot all over.