quotations about computers
Man is still the most extraordinary computer of all.
JOHN F. KENNEDY
speech, May 21, 1963
Computers are like demigods in a box. They run on energy, store vast amounts of knowledge, and seem to have persnickety tendencies all their own. This demigod has a quintessential servant: the Internet.
PATRICIA TELESCO & SIRONA KNIGHT
The Wiccan Web: Surfing the Magic on the Internet
Compassion--that's the one thing no machine ever had. Maybe it's the one thing that keeps man ahead of them.
D.C. FONTANA
Star Trek: The Ultimate Computer
Sometimes I get so frustrated with my computer, I feel more like booting it OUT instead of booting it UP!
TOM WILSON
Ziggy, Jan. 3, 1998
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 Daily News, Aug. 4, 1994
Personal computing today is a rich ecosystem encompassing massive PC-based data centers, notebook and Tablet PCs, handheld devices, and smart cell phones. It has expanded from the desktop and the data center to wherever people need it -- at their desks, in a meeting, on the road or even in the air.
BILL GATES
Business Week, Mar. 22, 2005
I think part of a best friend's job should be to immediately clear your computer history if you die.
MACKEY MILLER
Mouse Attack 5!!!
The scientists think computers are like new babies, and we humans are the computer babies' parents. Other scientists think that if computers ever do come alive, they will be so different that they will be like aliens from another planet.
FRED D'IGNAZIO
The Star Wars Question & Answer Book About Computers
My boyfriend got me a computer three years ago. I'll admit it does make things a lot easier. When I was working on a typewriter and I whited out a line, often I would choose a word to go in the space just because it fit. Now I don't have to do that.
DAVID SEDARIS
Time Magazine, Jun. 2004
To our human minds, computers behave less like rocks and trees than they do like humans, so we unconsciously treat them like people.... In other words, humans have special instincts that tell them how to behave around other sentient beings, and as soon as any object exhibits sufficient cognitive function, those instincts kick in and we react as though we were interacting with another sentient human being.
ALAN COOPER
The Inmates Are Running the Asylum
We used to have lots of questions to which there were no answers. Now, with the computer, there are lots of answers to which we haven't thought up questions.
PETER USTINOV
Morrow's International Dictionary of Contemporary Quotations
There is a popular cliché ... which says that you cannot get out of computers any more than you put in. Other versions are that computers only do exactly what you tell them to, and that therefore computers are never creative. The cliché is true only in the crashingly trivial sense, the same sense in which Shakespeare never wrote anything except what his first schoolteacher taught him to write--words.
RICHARD DAWKINS
The Blind Watchmaker
The greatest task before civilization at present is to make machines what they ought to be, the slaves, instead of the masters of men.
HAVELOCK ELLIS
Little Essays on Love and Virtue
Computers creating art is an upsetting concept mostly because of what it means about humans.
JASON LEE MILLER
"Automated Content Will Unmake Existence"
We think that computers are the most remarkable tools that humankind has ever come up with, and we think that people are basically tool users. So if we can just get lots of computers to lots of people, it will make some qualitative difference to the world.
STEVE JOBS
Playboy, Feb. 1985
Like sex drives, card tricks, and the weather, computers tend to be discussed in terms of results rather than processes, which makes them rather scary.
MARTIN MAYER
attributed, Little Giant Encyclopedia: Toasts & Quotes
Computers are finite machines; when given the same input, they always produce the same output.
GREG M. PERRY
Sams Teach Yourself Beginning Programming in 24 Hours
It's not a fantasy to explore this question about making computers that are much, much, more powerful than the kind that we have sitting around now -- in which a grain of salt has all the computational powers of all the computers in the world.
SETH LLOYD
interview, Edge