Hackers Quotes

“Systems are organic, living creations: if people stop working on them and improving them, they die.”
― Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

“It’s your life story if you’re a mathematician: every time you discover something neat, you discover that Gauss or Newton knew it in his crib.”
― Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

“the Hacker Ethic, which instructs you to keep working until your hack tops previous efforts.”
― Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

“Every problem has a better solution when you start thinking about it differently than the normal way.”
― Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

“Hackers can do almost anything and be a hacker. You can be a hacker carpenter. It’s not necessarily high tech. I think it has to do with craftsmanship and caring about what you’re doing.”
― Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

“She noted the lack of female hardware hackers, and was enraged at the male hacker obsession with technological play and power.”
― Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

“You talk about deus ex machina, well, we're talking about deus in machina. You start by thinking there's a god in the box. And then you find there isn't anything in the box. You put the god in the box.”
― Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

“We believe that innovative authors are more likely to come from people who are independent and won’t work in a software ‘factory’ or ‘bureaucracy.”
― Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

“To Dick’s mind, the flow of information should be channeled with discretion, with an unambiguous interpretation controlled by the people at the top.”
― Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

“to absorb, explore, and expand the intricacies of those bewitching systems;”
― Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

“To hackers, a program was an organic entity that had a life independent from that of its author.”
― Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

“Because to hackers, passwords were even more odious than locked doors.”
― Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

“program,”
― Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

“Computer programming was not merely a technical pursuit, but an approach to the problems of living.”
― Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

“The man of the future. Hands on a keyboard, eyes on a CRT, in touch with the body of information and thought that the world had been storing since history began. It would all be accessible to Computational Man.”
― Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

“Burrell Smith, the designer of the Macintosh computer, said it as well as anyone in one of the sessions at the first Hacker Conference: “Hackers can do almost anything and be a hacker. You can be a hacker carpenter. It’s not necessarily high tech. I think it has to do with craftsmanship and caring about what you’re doing.”
― Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

“Acolyte: Oh machine, would you accept my offer of information so you may run my program and perhaps give me a computation? Priest (on behalf of the machine): We will try. We promise nothing.”
― Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

“I don’t know Stallman well. I know him well enough to know he is a hard man to like.” (And that was in the preface of Stallman’s own book!)”
― Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

“I think that hackers — dedicated, innovative, irreverent computer programmers — are the most interesting and effective body of intellectuals since the framers of the U.S. Constitution”
― Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

“fragile. So that to be able to defy a culture which states that ‘Thou shalt not touch this,’ and to defy that with one’s own creative powers is . . . the essence.” The essence, of course, of the Hacker Ethic.”
― Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

“Hacker Ethic: like lines of code in a systems program, compromise should be bummed to the minimum.”
― Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

“there were no artificial obstacles, things that are insisted upon that make it hard for people to get any work done — things like bureaucracy, security, refusals to share with other people.”
― Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

“Third-Generation hackers never had the sense of community of their predecessors, and early on they came to see healthy sales figures as essential to becoming winners.”
― Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

“When computers are sold like toasters, programs will be sold like toothpaste.”
― Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

“He had no sympathy for people who wanted to know how things worked, people who wanted to explore things, people who wanted to improve the systems they studied and dreamed about.”
― Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

“A computer gives the average person, a high school freshman, the power to do things in a week that all the mathematicians who ever lived until thirty years ago couldn’t do.”
― Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

“Years of working in the free-flow world of electronics had infused Marsh with the Hacker Ethic, and he saw school as an inefficient, repressive system. Even when he worked at a radical school with an open classroom, he thought it was a sham, still a jail.”
― Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

“Gosper had disdained NASA’s human-wave approach toward things. He had been adamant in defending the AI lab’s more individualistic form of hacker elegance in programming, and in computing style in general. But now he saw how the real world, when it got its mind made up, could have an astounding effect. NASA had not applied the Hacker Ethic, yet it had done something the lab, for all its pioneering, never could have done. Gosper realized that the ninth-floor hackers were in some sense deluding themselves, working on machines of relatively little power compared to the computers of the future — yet still trying to do it all, change the world right there in the lab. And”
― Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

“At one point a research firm was called in to do a study of the excessive, inescapable noise, and they concluded that the hum of the air conditioner was so bothersome because there weren’t enough competing noises — so they fixed the machines to make them give off a loud, continual hiss. In Greenblatt’s words, this change “was not a win,” and the constant hiss made the long hours on the ninth floor rather nerve-racking for some. Add”
― Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

“There’s nothing illegal about a Defense Department funding research. It’s certainly better than a Commerce Department or Education Department funding research . . . because that would lead to thought control. I would much rather have the military in charge of that . . . the military people make no bones about what they want, so we’re not under any subtle pressures. It’s clear what’s going on. The case of ARPA was unique, because they felt that what this country needed was people good in defense technology. In case we ever needed it, we’d have it.”
― Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution