Computers Quotes

“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

“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 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

“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

“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

“As an orangutan cannot embrace higher mathematics or comprehend the architecture and operation of a computer, we humans __ so good at loudly proclaiming our intelligence and applauding our own doltish displays of cerebral gymnastics __ cannot begin to understand the true structure and functioning of the Universe.”
― John Rachel, 12-12-12

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

“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

“now it’s computers and more computers
and soon everybody will have one,
3-year-olds will have computers
and everybody will know everything
about everybody else
long before they meet them.
nobody will want to meet anybody
else ever again
and everybody will be
a recluse
like I am now.”
― Charles Bukowski, The Continual Condition: Poems

“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

“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

“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

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

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

“It was one thing to use computers as a tool, quite another to let them do your thinking for you.”
― Tom Clancy, The Hunt for Red October

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

“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

“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

“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

“Animals walk around in a state of permanent religious intoxication. This is the natural condition of the mind and intellect, the moment-to-moment perception, of man as well. I heard some computer fool say that religion is the 'older virtual reality' experience, to justify his scam industry. No, the denuded state of the spirit and intellect, where you walk around 'demystified' and 'disenchanted' is the virtual reality condition, and a terrible condition at that.”
― Bronze Age Pervert, Bronze Age Mindset

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

“These problems have been here so long that the only way I’ve been able to function at all is by learning to ignore them. Else I would be in a constant state of panic, unable to think or act constructively.”
― Mark Bowden, Worm: The First Digital World War

“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 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

“... 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