Quotes About Computers

“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.”
― Apple Inc.

“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

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

“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

“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

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

“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

“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!

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

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

“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

“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

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

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

“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

“Man is a slow, sloppy, and brilliant thinker; computers are fast, accurate, and stupid.”
― John Pfeiffer

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

“The best computer is a man, and it’s the only one that can be mass-produced by unskilled labor.”
― Wernher Von Braun

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

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

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

“The intentions of the cybernetic totalist tribe are good. They are simply following a path that was blazed in earlier times by well-meaning Freudians and Marxists - and I don't mean that in a pejorative way. I'm thinking of the earliest incarnations of Marxism, for instance, before
Stalinism and Maoism killed millions.

Movements associated with Freud and Marx both claimed foundations in rationality and the scientific understanding of the world. Both perceived themselves to be at war with the weird, manipulative fantasies of religions. And yet both invented their own fantasies that were just as weird.

The same thing is happening again. A self-proclaimed materialist movement that attempts to base itself on science starts to look like a religion rather quickly. It soon presents its own eschatology and its own revelations about what is really going on - portentous events that no one but the initiated can appreciate. The Singularity and the noosphere, the idea that a collective consciousness emerges from all the users on the web, echo Marxist social determinism and Freud's calculus of perversions. We rush ahead of skeptical, scientific inquiry at our peril, just like the Marxists and Freudians.”
― Jaron Lanier, You are Not a Gadget

“If the automobile had followed the same development as the computer, a Rolls Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year killing everyone inside. ”
― Robert Cringely

“This digital revolutionary still believes in most of the lovely deep ideals that energized our work so many years ago. At the core was a sweet faith in human nature. If we empowered individuals, we believed, more good than harm would result.

The way the internet has gone sour since then is truly perverse. The central faith of the web's early design has been superseded by a different faith in the centrality of imaginary entities epitomized by the idea that the internet as a whole is coming alive and turning into a superhuman creature.

The designs guided by this new, perverse kind of faith put people back in the shadows. The fad for anonymity has undone the great opening-of-everyone's-windows of the 1990s. While that reversal has empowered sadists to a degree, the worst effect is a degradation of ordinary people.”
― Jaron Lanier, You are Not a Gadget

“... we have created a man with not one brain but two. ... This new brain is intended to control the biological brain. ... The patient's biological brain is the peripheral terminal -- the only peripheral terminal -- for the new computer. ... And therefore the patient's biological brain, indeed his whole body, has become a terminal for the new computer. We have created a man who is one single, large, complex computer terminal. The patient is a read-out device for the new computer, and is helpless to control the readout as a TV screen is helpless to control the information presented on it.”
― Michael Crichton, The Terminal Man

“Our first computers were born not out of greed or ego, but in the revolutionary spirit of helping common people rise above the most powerful institutions.”
― Steve Wozniak

“Οι υπολογιστές είναι άχρηστοι, μόνο απαντήσεις μπορούν να δώσουν.”
― Pablo Picasso

“Social capital may turn out to be a prerequisite for, rather than a consequence of, effective computer-mediated communication.”
― Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community