Computers Quotes

“Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
― Rob Siltanen

“Two things you should know about me; The first is that I am deeply suspicious of people in general. It is my nature to expect the worst of them. And the second is that I am unexpectedly good with computers.”
― Veronica Roth, Divergent

“I still love books. Nothing a computer can do can compare to a book. You can't really put a book on the Internet. Three companies have offered to put books by me on the Net, and I said, 'If you can make something that has a nice jacket, nice paper with that nice smell, then we'll talk.' All the computer can give you is a manuscript. People don't want to read manuscripts. They want to read books. Books smell good. They look good. You can press it to your bosom. You can carry it in your pocket.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“I think computer viruses should count as life ... I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image.”
― Stephen Hawking

“The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”
― Rob Siltanen

“I know there's a proverb which that says 'To err is human,' but a human error is nothing to what a computer can do if it tries.”
― Agatha Christie, Hallowe'en Party

“Any idiot can put up a website.”
― Patricia Briggs, Blood Bound

“Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

“Don't explain computers to laymen. Simpler to explain sex to a virgin.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress

“Doing research on the Web is like using a library assembled piecemeal by pack rats and vandalized nightly. ”
― Roger Ebert

“Those who can imagine anything, can create the impossible.”
― Alan Turing

“Well, Mr. Frankel, who started this program, began to suffer from the computer disease that anybody who works with computers now knows about. It's a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is you *play* with them. They are so wonderful. You have these switches - if it's an even number you do this, if it's an odd number you do that - and pretty soon you can do more and more elaborate things if you are clever enough, on one machine.

After a while the whole system broke down. Frankel wasn't paying any attention; he wasn't supervising anybody. The system was going very, very slowly - while he was sitting in a room figuring out how to make one tabulator automatically print arc-tangent X, and then it would start and it would print columns and then bitsi, bitsi, bitsi, and calculate the arc-tangent automatically by integrating as it went along and make a whole table in one operation.

Absolutely useless. We *had* tables of arc-tangents. But if you've ever worked with computers, you understand the disease - the *delight* in being able to see how much you can do. But he got the disease for the first time, the poor fellow who invented the thing.”
― Richard P. Feynman, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

“No one messes around with a nerd’s computer and escapes unscathed.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly,

“Idiots emit bogons, causing machinery to malfunction in their presence. System administrators absorb bogons, letting machinery work again.”
― Charles Stross, The Atrocity Archives

“That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.”
― Larry Niven

“Now, 75 years [after To Kill a Mockingbird], in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books.

[Open Letter, O Magazine, July 2006]”
― Harper Lee

“There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary numerals, and those who don't.”
― Ian Stewart, Professor Stewart's Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities

“A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any other invention with the possible exceptions of handguns and Tequila.”
― Mitch Ratcliffe

“Whether we are based on carbon or on silicon makes no fundamental difference; we should each be treated with appropriate respect.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, 2010: Odyssey Two

“I am convinced that grandkids are inherently evil people who tell their grandparents to "just go to the library and open up an e-mail account - it's free and so simple.”
― Scott Douglas, Quiet, Please: Dispatches From A Public Librarian

“Computers don't kill books; people do.”
― Douglas Rushkoff

“I really didn't foresee the Internet. But then, neither did the computer industry. Not that that tells us very much of course--the computer industry didn't even foresee that the century was going to end.”
― Douglas Adams

“Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.”
― Frederick P. Brooks

“Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes”
― Edsger Wybe Dijkstra

“Emphasizing the crowd means de-emphasizing individual humans in the design of society, and when you ask people not to be people, they revert to bad, mob-like behaviors.”
― Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget

“I am not the only person who uses his computer mainly for the purpose of diddling with his computer.”
― Dave Barry

“All of a sudden, we’ve lost a lot of control,’ he said. ‘We can’t turn off our internet; we can’t turn off our smartphones; we can’t turn off our computers. You used to ask a smart person a question. Now, who do you ask? It starts with g-o, and it’s not God…”
― Steve Wozniak

“The fantastic advances in the field of electronic communication constitute a greater danger to the privacy of the individual.”
― Earl Warren

“For most people, home we represented by four walls and a roof. Not for Noa. She preferred a motherboard to a mother, a keyboard to house keys. Nothing was more comforting than the hum of a spinning hard drive.”
― Michelle Gagnon, Don't Turn Around

“Unix is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic: a living body of narrative that many people know by heart, and tell over and over again—making their own personal embellishments whenever it strikes their fancy. The bad embellishments are shouted down, the good ones picked up by others, polished, improved, and, over time, incorporated into the story. […] Thus Unix has slowly accreted around a simple kernel and acquired a kind of complexity and asymmetry about it that is organic, like the roots of a tree, or the branchings of a coronary artery. Understanding it is more like anatomy than physics.”
― Neal Stephenson