Amy > Amy's Quotes

“The days are numbered for those bums over in England."
German Tank commander”
― Leo McKinstry, Operation Sea Lion: The Failed Nazi Invasion that Turned the Tide of War

“I am not very impressed with theological arguments whatever they may be used to support. Such arguments have often been found unsatisfactory in the past. In the time of Galileo it was argued that the texts, 'And the sun stood still... and hasted not to go down about a whole day' (Joshua x. 13) and 'He laid the foundations of the earth, that it should not move at any time' (Psalm cv. 5) were an adequate refutation of the Copernican theory.”
― Alan Turing, Computing machinery and intelligence

“If a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent.”
― Alan Turing

“For him, breaking the Enigma was much easier than the problem of dealing with other people, especially with those holding power.”
― Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma

“He developed a particularly annoying way of ignoring the teaching during the term and then coming top in the examination.”
― Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma

“Perhaps this was the most surprising thing about Alan Turing. Despite all he had done in the war, and all the struggles with stupidity, he still did not think of intellectuals or scientists as forming a superior class.”
― Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma

“The isolated man does not develop any intellectual power. It is necessary for him to be immersed in an environment of other men, whose techniques he absorbs during the first twenty years of his life. He may then perhaps do a little research of his own and make a very few discoveries which are passed on to other men. From this point of view the search for new techniques must be regarded as carried out by the human community as a whole, rather than by individuals.”
― Alan Turing

“Alan had become more prepared to go along with the system. It was not that he had ever rebelled, for he had only withdrawn; nor was it now a reconciliation, for he was still withdrawn. But he would take the ‘obvious duties’ as conventions rather than impositions, as long as they interfered with nothing important.”
― Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma

“He was one of those many people without a natural sense of left and right, and he made a little red spot on his left thumb, which he called ‘the knowing spot”
― Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma

“In 1950 he was hardly likely to be on trial for heresy. But he certainly felt himself up against an irrational, superstitious barrier, and his predisposition was to defy”
― Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma

“One of the most famous paradoxes ever articulated is often known by the title ‘the liar’s paradox’. At its simplest you can express it just by saying: ‘I am lying’. The liar’s paradox is a complicated business, discombobulating to think about because after all, if I’m lying, then my statement ‘I am lying’ must itself be a lie, unless I was actually telling the truth, in which case I would have been telling a lie.”
― David Boyle, Alan Turing: Unlocking the Enigma

“The point of what Einstein had done did not lie in this or that experiment. It lay, as Alan saw, in the ability to doubt, to take ideas seriously, and to follow them to a logical if upsetting conclusion.”
― Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma

“Alan had by this time developed a skilful technique for dealing with his family, and his mother in particular. They all thought of him as devoid of common sense, and he in turn would rise to the role of absent-minded professor. ‘Brilliant but unsound’, that was Alan to his mother, who undertook to keep him in touch with all those important matters of appearance and manners, such as buying a new suit every year (which he never wore), Christmas presents, aunts’ birthdays, and getting his hair cut.”
― Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma

“He was briefly a member of the Home Guard, but got bored of it in 1942 and stopped turning up. The commander tried to frighten him with military law, only to find that on his application form under the question: ‘do you understand that by enrolling in the Home Guard you place yourself liable to military law?’ Turing had written ‘No’.”
― David Boyle, Alan Turing: Unlocking the Enigma

“It would probably never have occurred to him that his own difficulties with the world were akin to those suffered by women-- as with the men's committee meetings held over his head, almost as if he were not there, and the way people took little notice of what he had said or written, but remained obsessed by details of manners or appearance. Women had to learn to compensate for these indignities by making a special effort, but Alan Turing made no such attempt. He expected the male world to work for him, and was baffled when it did not.”
― Andrew Hodges

“messages from the unseen” that the great Alan Turing left behind at his death: Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition.”
― Jim Holt, Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story

“A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”
― Mark Twain

“We all have our time machines, don't we. Those that take us back are memories...And those that carry us forward, are dreams.”
― H.G. Wells