Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.  JOSEPH CAMPBELL
R2-D2, you know better than to trust a strange computer.  \nC-3PO, Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back
Now they can do all these magic things with computers. So you think you get to do something in a movie and you find out you don't get to really do it.   \nANGELINA JOLIE, interview, May 23, 2003
The human brain has about 100 billion neurons. With an estimated average of one thousand connections between each neuron and its neighbors, we have about 100 trillion connections, each capable of a simultaneous calculation ... (but) only 200 calculations per second.... With 100 trillion connections, each computing at 200 calculations per second, we get 20 million billion calculations per second. \nThis is a conservatively high estimate.... In 1997, $2,000 of neural computer chips using only modest parallel processing could perform around 2 billion calculations per second.... \nThis capacity will double every twelve months. Thus by the year 2020, it will have doubled about twenty-three times, resulting in a speed of about 20 million billion neural connection calculations per second, which is equal to the human brain.  \nRAY KURZWEIL, The Age of Spiritual Machines
Considering what human beings do and have done to human beings (and to other living things as well) ... I can never imagine what the devil people think computers can add to the horrors.  \nISAAC ASIMOV, The Beginning and the End
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.    \nRICHARD DAWKINS, The Blind Watchmaker
Your computer is a backup of your soul, a multi-layered, menu-driven representation of who you are, who you care about, and how you sin.   \nMICHAEL MARSHALL, The Upright Man
A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history--with the possible exceptions of hand guns and tequila.   \nMITCH RATLIFFE, Reader's Digest, volume 157
Computers can figure out all kinds of problems, except the things in this world that just don't add up.     \nEVAN ESAR, 20,000 Quips and Quotes
Run for your lives--the computers are invading. Awesomely powerful computers tackling ever more important tasks with awkward, old-fashioned interfaces. As these machines leak into every corner of our lives, they will annoy us, infuriate us, and even kill a few of us. In turn, we will be tempted to kill our computers, but we won't dare because we are already utterly, irreversibly dependent on these hopeful monsters that make modern life possible.  \nALAN COOPER, introduction, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum
Sometimes dreams are all that separate us from the machines.   \nOne day ladies will take their computers for walks in the park and tell each other, "My little computer said such a funny thing this morning."     \nALAN TURING, Time Magazine, Mar. 29, 1999
Chess is one thing, but if we get to the point computers can best humans in the arts--those splendid, millennia-old expressions of the heart and soul of human existence--then why bother existing? to produce human art a computer would have to find, feel, absorb reality to the point it is overcome, to the point it sobs for release. A computer perhaps could replicate every possibility but could never transfer the energy art requires to exist in the first place.    \nJASON LEE MILLER, "Automated Content Will Unmake Existence"
One of the best things to come out of the home computer revolution could be the general and widespread understanding of how severely limited logic really is. \nFRANK HERBERT, Without Me Nothing
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.    \nPABLO PICASSO, Orange Coast Magazine, May 1986
Man is still the most extraordinary computer of all.    \nJOHN F. KENNEDY, speech, May 21, 1963
The computer saves man a lot of guesswork, but so does the bikini.   \nEVAN ESAR, 20,000 Quips and Quotes
Computers creating art is an upsetting concept mostly because of what it means about humans.   \nJASON LEE MILLER, "Automated Content Will Unmake Existence"
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.  \nPETER USTINOV, Morrow's International Dictionary of Contemporary Quotations
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.   \nALAN COOPER, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum
It is only when they go wrong that machines remind you how powerful they are.  \nCLIVE JAMES, The Crystal Bucket
Most people believe that computers are tools; at least this is the image conveyed by the dominant ideology. \nThis viewpoint has two main components. First, computers are inert objects that persons control. Due to the dumb docility of these machines, computers are assumed to operate in a neutral, value-free manner. \nBy processing data, these machines mechanically generate objective information. \nSecond, computers simply wait to be used. Like all tools, computers do what they are told, therefore there is nothing fundamentally diabolical or sinister about these machines. \nIn this sense, computers seem transparent--they do not have an agenda. \nAs the clichéd defense of technology suggests, though machines can be turned to good or evil ends, computers themselves are basically amoral. \nIf problems arise from this technology, then users are to blame.    \nVICENTE BERDAYES, Computers, Human Interaction, and Organizations
Computers are finite machines; when given the same input, they always produce the same output.  \nGREG M. PERRY, Sams Teach Yourself Beginning Programming in 24 Hours
The computer is incredibly fast, accurate, and stupid. Man is unbelievably slow, inaccurate, and brilliant. The marriage of the two is a force beyond calculation.   \nLEO CHERNE, attributed, The World of Work: Careers and the Future
With both people and computers on the job, computer error can be more quickly tracked down and corrected by people and, conversely, human error can be more quickly corrected by computers. What it amounts to is that nothing serious can happen unless human error and computer error take place simultaneously. And that hardly ever happens.     \nISAAC ASIMOV, Prelude to Foundation
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.    \nSTEVE JOBS, Playboy, Feb. 1985
Something else has happened with computers. What's happened with society is that we have created these devices, computers, which already can register and process huge amounts of information, which is a significant fraction of the amount of information that human beings themselves, as a species, can process. When I think of all the information being processed there, all the information being communicated back and forth over the Internet, or even just all the information that you and I can communicate back and forth by talking, I start to look at the total amount of information being processed by human beings — and their artifacts — we are at a very interesting point of human history, which is at the stage where our artifacts will soon be processing more information than we physically will be able to process.    \nSETH LLOYD, "How Fast, How Small, and How Powerful?"
Sometimes ... dreams are all that separate us from the machines.    \nDAN SIMMONS, The Fall of Hyperion
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   
The iron machines still exist, but they obey the orders of weightless bits.  \nITALO CALVINO and PATRICK CREAGH, Six Memos for the Next Millennium   
Computers will overtake humans with AI at some within the next 100 years. When that happens, we need to make sure the computers have goals aligned with ours. \nSTEPHEN HAWKING, remarks at Zeitgeist 2015 conference in London    
The computer will not make a good manager out of a bad manager. It makes a good manager better faster and a bad manager worse faster.   \nEDWARD M. ESBER, attributed, In Search of Stupidity    
Computers are Janus-faced, helping to create jobs even as they destroy jobs. \nFRANK LEVY, The New Division of Labor  
Programs are detailed because computers are machines. Machines do not have intelligence. A computer blindly follows your instructions, step by step. If you do not give detailed instructions, the computer can do nothing.  \nGREG M. PERRY, Sams Teach Yourself Beginning Programming in 24 Hours  
Computers no longer interface with humans--they interact, and the interaction will become steadily deeper, more subtle, and more crucial to our collective sanity and ultimate survival.   \nALAN COOPER, introduction, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum          
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.   \nMARTIN MAYER, attributed, Little Giant Encyclopedia: Toasts & Quotes   
Like the mind, the computer is useful because it produces information. Computers are also functional because they are able to produce a wide variety of responses that mimic human abilities. As the brain has been compared with the computer, the idea that the mind is a mechanical entity has become more plausible. For example, just as the computer operates on electricity, the brain is now described as an object comprised of electronically sensitive cells or neuron networks. Although the nervous system, which is the controlling agent for the body, continues to be shrouded in mystery, many investigators have found it attractive to equate the mind with the brain and to identify both with the computer.    \nVICENTE BERDAYES, Computers, Human Interaction, and Organizations
Computers are in essence millions of tiny simple machines coordinated and connected together to accomplish a useful purpose. Comparing a computer with the human brain puts the computer at a disadvantage. The brain is so complex it's not even fully understood! By contrast all the technology involved in computers is obviously understood and harnessed by humans. Both computers and the human brain are very different in the way they handle instructions. For instance the brain handles millions of bits of information simultaneously. Most computers though, can handle just 64 bits of information at the same time; it just does it in millionths of a second. The computer then is able to handle the few instructions it receives much faster.   \nDEAN ORMANDY, Conquering Computers
As science fiction writers began to get their first glimmerings of the kind of power that computers might someday control, their immediate reaction was one of panic. Even through the 1960s, this view of computers as powerful gods did not change; it only became more sophisticated. For instance, Arthur C. Clarke wrote a short story that began with every telephone on earth ringing at the same time. Over the course of the next few hours, there were an extraordinary number of plane crashes and accidents. The punch line of the story was that the communications network that linked every machine on the planet into one vast consciousness had finally "awakened." The ringing of the phones was the birth cry of the baby and the crash of the planes was its first attempt to play. And so on. The idea was this: When the consciousness wakes up, watch out.     \nDAVID GERROLD, InfoWorld, Jul. 5, 1982    
Computers are composed of nothing more than logic gates stretched out to the horizon in a vast numerical irrigation system.    \nSTAN AUGARTEN, State of the Art: A Photographic History of the Integrated Circuit      
Compassion--that's the one thing no machine ever had. Maybe it's the one thing that keeps man ahead of them.       \nD.C. FONTANA, Star Trek: The Ultimate Computer    
Because computers have memories, we imagine that they must be something like our human memories, but that is simply not true. Computer memories work in a manner alien to human memories. My memory lets me recognize the faces of my friends, whereas my own computer never even recognizes me. My computer's memory stores a million phone numbers with perfect accuracy, but I have to stop and think to recall my own.    \nALAN COOPER, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum
Computers are really very stupid multimillion-dollar collections of wires and transistors. Plug one in and it does nothing. Yell at it, curse, kick it--and still it remains mute. The reason: no instructions. But once people write instructions, the computer becomes a marvelous tool.     \nSTANLEY L. ENGLEBARDT, Popular Science, Jan. 1965   
Computers are like motorbikes. They're easy to crash, impossible to fit all the family on and passengers you do take can only look over your shoulder.    \nDEAN ORMANDY, Conquering Computers     
You have to remember that virtual reality won't be mature for everyday use for decades perhaps, and we don't know what the real situation will be like then. \nIt will undoubtedly be different, so to talk about how it can help, we have to talk about the present and talk about computers. I'll tell you how I think about the economic role of computers, and this might be a little cynical, but I think it's actually pretty accurate. \nIn the industrial revolution, which is still continuing in less developed parts of the world, machines were created that replaced human labor and created free time for people. But our economic system is based on earned capital, so that if you have this free time, you also don't earn any money to buy food. \nAnd this creates a crisis. The question is, if you're going to create all this leisure time with all these industrial machines, how do you justify paying people within a capitalist system so that they can survive? I think computers are the answer. \nI think computers are this sort of massive work program that keeps everybody busy manipulating information, and thus able to earn their bread.  \nJARON LANIER, Spin Magazine, Nov. 1995
It would be very discouraging if somewhere down the line you could ask a computer if the Riemann hypothesis is correct and it said, "Yes, it is true, but you won't be able to understand the proof."     RONALD GRAHAM, Scientific American, Oct. 1993
What a computer is to me is the most remarkable tool that we have ever come up with. It's the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.  STEVE JOBS, Memory and Imagination: New Pathways to the Library of Congress
The similarities between humans and computers are more numerous than the differences.   P. A. SCOTT, Global Ergonomics
The computer has evolved into a partner, a tool, and an environment--not just in science fiction, but in the public consciousness as well. Computers are no longer malevolent iron brains that manufacture tyrannical and oppressive answers; they are not a way to think, they are a place from which to think. The computer is an environment in which answers can be sought, created, manipulated and developed.     DAVID GERROLD, InfoWorld, Jul. 5, 1982
That computers are qualitative, representation-processors, making them primarily art tools, is wonderful. That we emasculate and objectify them before we've even begun is sad indeed.    \nSTUART MEALING, Computers and Art
Computers are machines and thus not subject to the biases and prejudices that distort human information processing and decision making--computers are objective in some absolute sense. In addition, computers are driven by purely logical mechanisms that are open to inspection; thus, computer-generated results must be totally rational and logical--they must be the "truth." Unfortunately (or is it fortunately?), the most utter rubbish and prejudice-saturated nonsense is as easily generated from logical mechanisms as by any other means. The use of a logical basis in no way guarantees correct and true conclusions. In fact, quite the contrary is the case. Simple classical logic is singularly ineffective in the empirical world of incomplete and poor quality information.... Thus, computers are, in general, no more infallible than you, or I, or the persons who programmed them.  \nDEREK PARTRIDGE, Artificial Intelligence and Business Management
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.    \nDAVID SEDARIS, Time Magazine, Jun. 2004
I think part of a best friend's job should be to immediately clear your computer history if you die.   \nMACKEY MILLER, Mouse Attack 5!!!
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.  \nBILL GATES, Business Week, Mar. 22, 2005
Computers do what they are told. They slavishly obey any instructions given in their own programming language. This is how they do useful things like word processing and spreadsheet calculations. But, as in inevitable by-product, they are equally robotic in obeying bad instructions. They have no way of telling whether an instruction will have a good effect or a bad. They simply obey, as soldiers are supposed to do. It is there unquestioning obedience that makes computers useful, and exactly the same thing makes them inescapably vulnerable to infection by software viruses and worms. A maliciously designed program that says, "Copy me and send me to every address that you find on this hard disk" will simply be obeyed, and then obeyed again by other computers down the line to which it is sent, in exponential expansion. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to design a computer which is usefully obedient and at the same time immune to infection.   \nRICHARD DAWKINS, The God Delusion
You'll see more and more perfection of that -- computer as servant. But the next thing is going to be computer as guide or agent. And what that means is that it's going to do more in terms of anticipating what we want and doing it for us, noticing connections and patterns in what we do, asking us if this is some sort of generic thing we'd like to do regularly, so that we're going to have, as an example, the concept of triggers. We're going to be able to ask our computers to monitor things for us, and when certain conditions happen, are triggered, the computers will take certain actions and inform us after the fact.     \nSTEVE JOBS, Playboy, Feb. 1985
The Star Trek computer doesn't seem that interesting. They ask it random questions, it thinks for a while. I think we can do better than that.   \nLARRY PAGE, Business Week, May 3, 2004
Sometimes I get so frustrated with my computer, I feel more like booting it OUT instead of booting it UP!   \nTOM 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.  \nSTEPHEN HAWKING, The Daily News, Aug. 4, 1994
A computer is the most incredible tool we've ever seen. It can be a writing tool, a communications center, a supercalculator, a planner, a filer and an artistic instrument all in one, just by being given new instructions, or software, to work from. There are no other tools that have the power and versatility of a computer. We have no idea how far it's going to go. Right now, computers make our lives easier. They do work for us in fractions of a second that would take us hours. They increase the quality of life, some of that by simply automating drudgery and some of that by broadening our possibilities. As things progress, they'll be doing more and more for us.    \nSTEVE JOBS, Playboy, Feb. 1985
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.   \nSETH LLOYD, Edge.org interview
Computers make it easier to do a lot of things but most of the things they make it easier to do don't need to be done.    \nANDY ROONEY, "A Few Words from Andy Rooney: A Face of America Commentary"
On the most basic level, computers in my books are simply a metaphor for human memory: I'm interested in the hows and whys of memory, the ways it defines who and what we are, in how easily memory is subject to revision. When I was writing Neuromancer, it was wonderful to be able to tie a lot of these interests into the computer metaphor. It wasn't until I could finally afford a computer of my own that I found out there's a drive mechanism inside — this little thing that spins around. I'd been expecting an exotic crystalline thing, a cyberspace deck or something, and what I got was a little piece of a Victorian engine that made noises like a scratchy old record player. That noise took away some of the mystique for me; it made computers less sexy. My ignorance had allowed me to romanticize them.    \nWILLIAM GIBSON, interview, Storming the Reality Studio
We should treat computers as fancy telephones, whose purpose is to connect people.... As long as we remember that we ourselves are the source of our value, our creativity, our sense of reality, then all of our work with computers will be worthwhile and beautiful.     \nJARON LANIER, Digerati: Encounters With the Cyber Elite
When it comes to their capacity to screw things up, computers are becoming more human every day.   \nSETH LLOYD, Programming the Universe
Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest.   \nISAAC ASIMOV, attributed, The Definitive Guide to Managing the Numbers
Once you can understand something in a way that you can shove it into a computer, you have cracked its code, transcended any particularity it might have at a given time. It was as if we had become the gods of vision and had effectively created all possible images, for they would merely be reshufflings of the bits in the computers we had before us, completely under our control.  \nJARON LANIER, "One Half of a Manifesto", The New Humanists: Science at the Edge
Home computers are being called upon to perform many new functions, including the consumption of homework formerly eaten by the dog.   \nDOUG LARSON, attributed, The Biteback Dictionary of Humorous Business Quotations
I have a real aversion to machines. I write with a pen. Then I read it to someone who writes it onto the computer. What are those computer letters made of anyway? Light? Too insubstantial. Paper, you can feel it. A pen. There's a connection. A pen goes exactly at your speed, whereas that machine jumps. And then, that machine is waiting for you, just humming "uh-huh, yes?" \nFRAN LEBOWITZ, The Paris Review, summer 1993
Dilbert: Wow! According to my computer simulation, it should be possible to create new life forms from common household chemicals   \nDogbert: This raises some thorny issues.   \nDilbert: You mean legal, ethical and religious issues? \nDogbert: I was thinking about parking spaces.   \n— Scott Adams  \nDilbert comic strip (31 May 1989).
A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history—with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila.   — Mitch Ratliffe
A fear of intellectual inadequacy, of powerlessness before the tireless electronic wizards, has given rise to dozens of science-fiction fantasies of computer takeovers. ... Other scientists too are apprehensive. D. Raj Reddy, a computer scientist at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie-Mellon University, fears that universally available microcomputers could turn into formidable weapons. Among other things, says Reddy, sophisticated computers in the wrong hands could begin subverting a society by tampering with people’s relationships with their own computers—instructing the other computers to cut off telephone, bank and other services, for example.     — Magazine    \nAn early prediction of DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service), viruses and worms like Stuxnet. As stated, without further citation, in 'The Age of Miracle Chips', Time (20 Feb 1978), 44. The article introduces a special section on 'The Computer Society.' Please contact Webmaster if you know a primary source.
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.    \n— Robert Heinlein   \nIn Time Enough for Love: The Lives of Lazarus Long (1987), 248.
A multidisciplinary study group ... estimated that it would be 1980 before developments in artificial intelligence make it possible for machines alone to do much thinking or problem solving of military significance. That would leave, say, five years to develop man-computer symbiosis and 15 years to use it. The 15 may be 10 or 500, but those years should be intellectually the most creative and exciting in the history of mankind.    \n— J.C.R. Licklider    \nFrom article 'Man-Computer Symbiosis', in IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics (Mar 1960), Vol. HFE-1, 4-11.
All sorts of computer errors are now turning up. You'd be surprised to know the number of doctors who claim they are treating pregnant men.  \n— Anonymous   \nOfficial of the Quebec Health Insurance Board, on Use of Computers in Quebec Province's Comprehensive Medical-care system. F. 19, 4:5. In Barbara Bennett and Linda Amster, Who Said What (and When, and Where, and How) in 1971: December-June, 1971 (1972), Vol. 1, 38. (Later sources cite Isaac Asimov.)
All stable processes we shall predict. All unstable processes we shall control. \nDescribing John von Neumann's aspiration for the application of computers sufficiently large to solve the problems of meteorology, despite the sensitivity of the weather to small perturbations.  \n— Freeman Dyson     \nInfinite in All Directions (2004), 182. Dyson wrote his recollection of a talk given by Neumann at Princeton around 1950. The words are not a direct quotation, merely Dyson's description of Neumann's idea.
Among the current discussions, the impact of new and sophisticated methods in the study of the past occupies an important place. The new 'scientific' or 'cliometric' history—born of the marriage contracted between historical problems and advanced statistical analysis, with economic theory as bridesmaid and the computer as best man—has made tremendous advances in the last generation.   \n— Robert William Fogel       \nCo-author with Geoffrey Rudolph Elton (1921-94), British historian. Which Road to the Past? Two Views of History (1983), 2.
Artificial intelligence is based on the assumption that the mind can be described as some kind of formal system manipulating symbols that stand for things in the world. Thus it doesn't matter what the brain is made of, or what it uses for tokens in the great game of thinking. Using an equivalent set of tokens and rules, we can do thinking with a digital computer, just as we can play chess using cups, salt and pepper shakers, knives, forks, and spoons. Using the right software, one system (the mind) can be mapped onto the other (the computer).    \n— George Johnson    \nMachinery of the Mind: Inside the New Science of Artificial Intelligence (1986), 250.
Besides electrical engineering theory of the transmission of messages, there is a larger field [cybernetics] which includes not only the study of language but the study of messages as a means of controlling machinery and society, the development of computing machines and other such automata, certain reflections upon psychology and the nervous system, and a tentative new theory of scientific method.     \n— Norbert Wiener       \nIn Cybernetics (1948).
Computers and rocket ships are examples of invention, not of understanding. … All that is needed to build machines is the knowledge that when one thing happens, another thing happens as a result. It’s an accumulation of simple patterns. A dog can learn patterns. There is no “why” in those examples. We don’t understand why electricity travels. We don’t know why light travels at a constant speed forever. All we can do is observe and record patterns.   \n— Scott Adams    \nIn God's Debris: A Thought Experiment (2004), 22.
Computers are better than we are at arithmetic, not because computers are so good at it, but because we are so bad at it.    \n— Isaac Asimov     \nEpigraph in Isaac Asimov’s Book of Science and Nature Quotations (1988), 51.
Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid. Human beings are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant. Together they are powerful beyond imagination.  \n— Albert Einstein
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. (1968)    \n— Pablo Picasso    \nAttributed (?). Although the quote is found in numerous books, it is always without citation. For example, in Anthony St Peter, The Greatest Quotations of All-Time (2010), 141. If you know the primary source, please contact the Webmaster.
Could Hamlet have been written by a committee, or the “Mona Lisa” painted by a club? Could the New Testament have been composed as a conference report? Creative ideas do not spring from groups. They spring from individuals. The divine spark leaps from the finger of God to the finger of Adam, whether it takes ultimate shape in a law of physics or a law of the land, a poem or a policy, a sonata or a mechanical computer.    \n— Alfred Whitney Griswold   \nBaccalaureate address (9 Jun 1957), Yale University. In In the University Tradition (1957), 156.
Earlier this week … scientists announced the completion of a task that once seemed unimaginable; and that is, the deciphering of the entire DNA sequence of the human genetic code. This amazing accomplishment is likely to affect the 21st century as profoundly as the invention of the computer or the splitting of the atom affected the 20th century. I believe that the 21st century will be the century of life sciences, and nothing makes that point more clearly than this momentous discovery. It will revolutionize medicine as we know it today.  \n— Ted Kennedy     \nSenate Session, Congressional Record (29 Jun 2000) Vol. 146, No 85, S6050.
Electronic aids, particularly domestic computers, will help the inner migration, the opting out of reality. Reality is no longer going to be the stuff out there, but the stuff inside your head. It's going to be commercial and nasty at the same time, like 'Rite of Spring' in Disney's Fantasia ... our internal devils may destroy and renew us through the technological overload we've invoked.  \n— J. G. Ballard    \nInterview in Heavy Metal (Apr 1971). Reprinted in Re/Search, No. 8/9 (1984).
First were mainframes, each shared by lots of people. Now we are in the personal computing era, person and machine staring uneasily at each other across the desktop. Next comes ubiquitous computing, or the age of calm technology, when technology recedes into the background of our lives.    \n— Mark David Weiser  \nFrom biography on University of California, Berkeley, website.
FORTRAN —’the infantile disorder’—, by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use. PL/I —’the fatal disease’— belongs more to the problem set than to the solution set. It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration. The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence. APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums.    \n— Edsger W. Dijkstra
FORTRAN, ‘the infantile disorder’, by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use.   \n— Edsger W. Dijkstra
From packaging materials, through fibers, foams and surface coatings, to continuous extrusions and large-scale moldings, plastics have transformed almost every aspect of life. Without them, much of modern medicine would be impossible and the consumer electronics and computer industries would disappear. Plastic sewage and water pipes alone have made an immeasurable contribution to public health worldwide.     \n— Norman C. Billingham    \n'Plastics—No Need To Apologize', Trends in Polymer Science (Jun 1996), 4, 172. In Paul C. Painter and Michael M. Coleman, Essentials of Polymer Science and Engineering (2008), 21.
Human personality resembles a coral reef: a large hard/dead structure built and inhabited by tiny soft/live animals. The hard/dead part of our personality consists of habits, memories, and compulsions and will probably be explained someday by some sort of extended computer metaphor. The soft/live part of personality consists of moment-to-moment direct experience of being. This aspect of personality is familiar but somewhat ineffable and has eluded all attempts at physical explanation.  \n— Nick Herbert  \nQuoted in article 'Nick Herbert', in Gale Cengage Learning, Contemporary Authors Online (2002).
I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.     \n— Isaac Asimov   \nAs quoted, without further citation, in 'The Age of Miracle Chips', Time (20 Feb 1978), 45. The article introduces a special section on 'The Computer Society.' Please contact Webmaster if you know an earlier, primary source.
I don't see why religion and science can't cooperate. What's wrong with using a computer to count our blessings?    \n— Robert Orben   \nIn Ashton Applewhite, William R. Evans and Andrew Frothingham, And I Quote (2003), 108.
I know few significant questions of public policy which can safely be confided to computers. In the end, the hard decisions inescapably involve imponderables of intuition, prudence, and judgment.   \n— John F. Kennedy    \nFrom Address to the Centennial Convocation of the National Academy of Sciences (22 Oct 1963), 'A Century of Scientific Conquest.' Online at The American Presidency Project.
I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.   \n— Stephen W. Hawking   \n'Stephen Hawking: "There is no heaven; it's a fairy story"', interview in newspaper The Guardian (15 May 2011).
I think that there is a world market for about five computers.    \n— Thomas John Watson, Sr.  \nQuoted in C. Cerf and V. Navasky (eds.), The Experts Speak (1984), 208.
I think there’s a world market for about five computers.    \n— Thomas Augustus Watson    \nThomas Watson (Founder of IBM)
I would like to emphasize strongly my belief that the era of computing chemists, when hundreds if not thousands of chemists will go to the computing machine instead of the laboratory for increasingly many facets of chemical information, is already at hand. There is only one obstacle, namely that someone must pay for the computing time.     \n— Robert Sanderson Mulliken   \n'Spectroscopy, Molecular Orbitals, and Chemical Bonding', Nobel Lecture (12 Dec 1966). In Nobel Lectures: Chemistry 1963-1970 (1972), 159.
If a train station is where the train stops, what is a work station?  \n— Anonymous         \nIn Andrew Davison, Humour the Computer (1995), 36.
If you don’t know anything about computers, just remember that they are machines that do exactly what you tell them but often surprise you in the result.  \n— Richard Dawkins    \nThe Blind Watchmaker (1996), 51.
In a few minutes a computer can make a mistake so great that it would have taken many men many months to equal.  \n— Anonymous   \nIn Civilization's Quotations: Life's Ideal (2002), 315.
In place of infinity we usually put some really big number, like 15.   \nPerhaps referring to the programmer’s hexadecimal counting scheme which has 16 digits (0-9 followed by digits A-F), useful in binary context as a power of 2.   \n— Anonymous    \nAttributed to a Computer Science Professor on various web pages. Webmaster has found no print source for this wording and comments, but its originality makes it worthy of inclusion here. Webmaster comments: perhaps one of those infinite number of monkeys typed it! Please make contact if you know a primary print source.
It always bothers me that according to the laws as we understand them today, it takes a computing machine an infinite number of logical operations to figure out what goes on in no matter how tiny a region of space and no matter how tiny a region of time … I have often made the hypothesis that ultimately physics will not require a mathematical statement, that in the end the machinery will be revealed and the laws will turn out to be simple, like the chequer board with all its apparent complexities. But this speculation is of the same nature as those other people make—“I like it”,“I don't like it”—and it is not good to be too prejudiced about these things.    \n— Richard P. Feynman   \nIn The Character of Physical Law (1965, 2001), 57.
It has been said that computing machines can only carry out the processes that they are instructed to do. This is certainly true in the sense that if they do something other than what they were instructed then they have just made some mistake. It is also true that the intention in constructing these machines in the first instance is to treat them as slaves, giving them only jobs which have been thought out in detail, jobs such that the user of the machine fully understands what in principle is going on all the time. Up till the present machines have only been used in this way. But is it necessary that they should always be used in such a manner? Let us suppose we have set up a machine with certain initial instruction tables, so constructed that these tables might on occasion, if good reason arose, modify those tables. One can imagine that after the machine had been operating for some time, the instructions would have altered out of all recognition, but nevertheless still be such that one would have to admit that the machine was still doing very worthwhile calculations. Possibly it might still be getting results of the type desired when the machine was first set up, but in a much more efficient manner. In such a case one would have to admit that the progress of the machine had not been foreseen when its original instructions were put in. It would be like a pupil who had learnt much from his master, but had added much more by his own work. When this happens I feel that one is obliged to regard the machine as showing intelligence.   \n— Alan M. Turing   \nLecture to the London Mathematical Society, 20 February 1947. Quoted in B. E. Carpenter and R. W. Doran (eds.), A. M. Turing's Ace Report of 1946 and Other Papers (1986), 122-3.
It is going to be necessary that everything that happens in a finite volume of space and time would have to be analyzable with a finite number of logical operations. The present theory of physics is not that way, apparently. It allows space to go down into infinitesimal distances, wavelengths to get infinitely great, terms to be summed in infinite order, and so forth; and therefore, if this proposition [that physics is computer-simulatable] is right, physical law is wrong.      \n— Richard P. Feynman     \nInternational Journal of Theoretical Physics (1982), 21 Nos. 6-7, 468. Quoted in Brian Rotman, Mathematics as Sign (2000), 82.
Man is not a machine, ... although man most certainly processes information, he does not necessarily process it in the way computers do. Computers and men are not species of the same genus. .... No other organism, and certainly no computer, can be made to confront genuine human problems in human terms. ... However much intelligence computers may attain, now or in the future, theirs must always be an intelligence alien to genuine human problems and concerns.  \n— Joesph Weizenbaum      \nComputer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, (1976) 203 and 223. Also excerpted in Ronald Chrisley (ed.), Artificial Intelligence: Critical Concepts (2000), Vol. 3, 313 and 321. Note that the second ellipsis spans 8 pages.
Man is still the most extraordinary computer of all.  \n— John F. Kennedy  \nRemarks upon presenting the NASA Distinguished Service Medal to astronaut L. Gordon Cooper, in the Flower Garden, at the White House, Washington, D.C. (21 May 1963). From John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project [online].
Mechanical Notation ... I look upon it as one of the most important additions I have made to human knowledge. It has placed the construction of machinery in the rank of a demonstrative science. The day will arrive when no school of mechanical drawing will be thought complete without teaching it.    \n— Charles Babbage     \nPassages From the Life of a Philosopher (1864), 452.
Men are noisy, narrow-band devices, but their nervous systems have very many parallel and simultaneously active channels. Relative to men, computing machines are very fast and very accurate, but they are constrained to perform only one or a few elementary operations at a time. Men are flexible, capable of “programming themselves contingently” on the basis of newly received information. Computing machines are single-minded, constrained by their “pre-programming.”     \n— J.C.R. Licklider   \nFrom article 'Man-Computer Symbiosis', in IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics (Mar 1960), Vol. HFE-1, 4-11.
Our current estimates are that in January ’98, there were 30 million computers on the Net, and about 70 million users. I’m projecting somewhere between 100 million and 200 million computers by the end of December 2000, and about 300 million users by that same time.    \n— Vinton G. Cerf   \nFrom interview with Jonathan Yenkin, 'An Internet Pioneer Finds The View Amazing As More Trails Are Cleared', Chicago Tribune (22 Apr 1998)
Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest.   \n— Isaac Asimov   \nIn Change! (1983). Quoted in Reader's Digest (1987), 131, Nos. 783-787, 1.
People in the computer industry use the term ‘user,’ which to them means ‘idiot.’.     \n— Dave Barry
Perhaps some day in the dim future it will be possible to advance the computations faster than the weather advances and at a cost less than the saving to mankind due to the information gained. But that is a dream.  \n— Lewis Fry Richardson    \nWeather Prediction by Numerical Process (1922), 66. Quoted in Peter Lynch, The Emergence of Numerical Weather Prediction (2006), vii.
Science has hitherto been proceeding without the guidance of any rational theory of logic, and has certainly made good progress. It is like a computer who is pursuing some method of arithmetical approximation. Even if he occasionally makes mistakes in his ciphering, yet if the process is a good one they will rectify themselves. But then he would approximate much more rapidly if he did not commit these errors; and in my opinion, the time has come when science ought to be provided with a logic. My theory satisfies me; I can see no flaw in it. According to that theory universality, necessity, exactitude, in the absolute sense of these words, are unattainable by us, and do not exist in nature. There is an ideal law to which nature approximates; but to express it would require an endless series of modifications, like the decimals expressing surd. Only when you have asked a question in so crude a shape that continuity is not involved, is a perfectly true answer attainable.   \n— Charles Sanders Peirce   \nLetter to G. F. Becker, 11 June 1893. Merrill Collection, Library of Congress. Quoted in Nathan Reingold, Science in Nineteenth-Century America: A Documentary History (1966), 231-2.
Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do.   \n— Donald E. Knuth
Simple molecules combine to make powerful chemicals. Simple cells combine to make powerful life-forms. Simple electronics combine to make powerful computers. Logically, all things are created by a combination of simpler, less capable components. Therefore, a supreme being must be in our future, not our origin. What if “God” is the consciousness that will be created when enough of us are connected by the Internet?!!    \n— Scott Adams     \nThoughts by character Dogbert in Dilbert cartoon strip (11 Feb 1996).
Speaking of libraries: A big open-stack academic or public library is no small pleasure to work in. You’re, say, trying to do a piece on something in Nevada, and you go down to C Floor, deep in the earth, and out to what a miner would call a remote working face. You find 10995.497S just where the card catalog and the online computer thought it would be, but that is only the initial nick. The book you knew about has led you to others you did not know about. To the ceiling the shelves are loaded with books about Nevada. You pull them down, one at a time, and sit on the floor and look them over until you are sitting on a pile five feet high, at which point you are late home for dinner and you get up and walk away. It’s an incomparable boon to research, all that; but it is also a reason why there are almost no large open-stack libraries left in the world.  \n— John McPhee
The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths. Its province is to assist us to making available what we are already acquainted with.   \n[Describing Charles Babbage's machine.]    \n— Countess of Lovelace Augusta Ada King    \nIn her notes as translator, following her translation of I. F. Menabrea, 'Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage, Esq.', (from Bibliothègue Universelle de Génève (Oct 1842), No. 82) in Richard Taylor (ed.), Scientific Memoirs (1843), 3, 722.
The automatic computing engine now being designed at N. P. L. [National Physics Laboratory] is atypical large scale electronic digital computing machine. In a single lecture it will not be possible to give much technical detail of this machine, and most of what I shall say will apply equally to any other machine of this type now being planned. From the point of view of the mathematician the property of being digital should be of greater interest than that of being electronic. That it is electronic is certainly important because these machines owe their high speed to this, and without the speed it is doubtful if financial support for their construction would be forthcoming. But this is virtually all that there is to be said on that subject. That the machine is digital however has more subtle significance. It means firstly that numbers are represented by sequences of digits which can be as long as one wishes. One can therefore work to any desired degree of accuracy. This accuracy is not obtained by more careful machining of parts, control of temperature variations, and such means, but by a slight increase in the amount of equipment in the machine.  \n— Alan M. Turing  \nLecture to the London Mathematical Society, 20 February 1947. Quoted in B. E. Carpenter and R. W. Doran (eds.), A. M. Turing's Ace Report of 1946 and Other Papers (1986), 106.
The automatic computing engine now being designed at N.P.L. [National Physics Laboratory] is atypical large scale electronic digital computing machine. In a single lecture it will not be possible to give much technical detail of this machine, and most of what I shall say will apply equally to any other machine of this type now being planned. From the point of view of the mathematician the property of being digital should be of greater interest than that of being electronic. That it is electronic is certainly important because these machines owe their high speed to this, and without the speed it is doubtful if financial support for their construction would be forthcoming. But this is virtually all that there is to be said on that subject. That the machine is digital however has more subtle significance. It means firstly that numbers are represented by sequences of digits which can be as long as one wishes. One can therefore work to any desired degree of accuracy. This accuracy is not obtained by more careful machining of parts, control of temperature variations, and such means, but by a slight increase in the amount of equipment in the machine.    \n— Alan M. Turing     \nLecture to the London Mathematical Society, 20 February 1947. Quoted in B. E. Carpenter and R. W. Doran (eds.), A. M. Turing's Ace Report of 1946 and Other Papers (1986), 106.
The burgeoning field of computer science has shifted our view of the physical world from that of a collection of interacting material particles to one of a seething network of information. In this way of looking at nature, the laws of physics are a form of software, or algorithm, while the material world—the hardware—plays the role of a gigantic computer.     \n— P.C.W. Davies   \n'Laying Down the Laws', New Scientist. In Clifford A. Pickover, Archimedes to Hawking: Laws of Science and the Great Minds Behind Them (2008), 183.
The cell phone has transformed public places into giant phone-a-thons in which callers exist within narcissistic cocoons of private conversations. Like faxes, computer modems and other modern gadgets that have clogged out lives with phony urgency, cell phones represent the 20th Century’s escalation of imaginary need. We didn’t need cell phones until we had them. Clearly, cell phones cause not only a breakdown of courtesy, but the atrophy of basic skills.     \n— Mary Schmich
The cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from Science, along with behaviour control, genetic engineering, transplanted heads, computer poetry and the unrestrained growth of plastic flowers.   \n— Lewis Thomas
The computer is a great invention. There are as many mistakes as ever, but now they're nobody's fault.   \n— Anonymous    \nIn E.C. McKenzie, 14,000 Quips and Quotes for Speakers, Writers, Editors, Preachers, and Teachers (1990), 338.
The computer is important, but not to mathematics.     \n— Paul R. Halmos   \nFrom interview (1981) with Donald J. Albers. In John H. Ewing and Frederick W. Gehring, Paul Halmos Celebrating 50 Years of Mathematics (1991), 3.
The computer takes up where psychoanalysis left off. It takes the ideas of a decentered self and makes it more concrete by modeling mind as a multiprocessing machine.     \n— Sherry Turkle    \nThe Second Self, ch. 9 (1984). Turkle was on the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's program in Science, Technology and Society.
The construction of an analogue computer or a supersonic airplane is simple when compared to the mixture of space and evolutionary eons represented by a cell.  \n— Charles A. Lindbergh        \nIn 'The Wisdom of Wilderness', Life (22 Dec 1967), 63, No. 25, 10.
The engineer is concerned to travel from the abstract to the concrete. He begins with an idea and ends with an object. He journeys from theory to practice. The scientist’s job is the precise opposite. He explores nature with his telescopes or microscopes, or much more sophisticated techniques, and feeds into a computer what he finds or sees in an attempt to define mathematically its significance and relationships. He travels from the real to the symbolic, from the concrete to the abstract. The scientist and the engineer are the mirror image of each other.       \n— Gordon Lindsay Glegg     \nIn The Development of Design (1981), 19-20.
The inside of a computer is as dumb as hell but it goes like mad!   \n— Richard P. Feynman      \nFeynman Lectures on Computation (1996), 7.
The NeXT Computer: The hardware makes it a PC, the software makes it a workstation, the unit sales makes it a mainframe.  \n— Anonymous
The protean nature of the computer is such that it can act like a machine or like a language to be shaped and exploited. \n— Alan C. Kay
The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do.   \n— B. F. Skinner        \nContingencies of Reinforcement (1969), 288.
The spectacular thing about Johnny [von Neumann] was not his power as a mathematician, which was great, or his insight and his clarity, but his rapidity; he was very, very fast. And like the modern computer, which no longer bothers to retrieve the logarithm of 11 from its memory (but, instead, computes the logarithm of 11 each time it is needed), Johnny didn't bother to remember things. He computed them. You asked him a question, and if he didn't know the answer, he thought for three seconds and would produce and answer.     \n— Paul R. Halmos       \nFrom interview with Donald J. Albers. In John H. Ewing and Frederick W. Gehring, Paul Halmos Celebrating 50 Years of Mathematics (1991), 9.
The strength of the computer lies in its being a logic machine. It does precisely what it is programed to do. This makes it fast and precise. It also makes it a total moron; for logic is essentially stupid.    \n— Peter Drucker   \nIn The Effective Executive (2006), 159.
The thoughts of Plato and Machiavelli... don't seem quite enough armor for a world beset with splitting the atoms, urban guerrillas, nineteen varieties of psychotherapists, amplified guitars, napalm, computers, astronauts, and an atmosphere polluted simultaneously with auto exhaust and TV commercials.    \n— Martin H. Fischer
The whole of the developments and operations of analysis are now capable of being executed by machinery ... As soon as an Analytical Engine exists, it will necessarily guide the future course of science.    \n— Charles Babbage    \nPassages From the Life of a Philosopher (1864), 136-137.
Theory provides the maps that turn an uncoordinated set of experiments or computer simulations into a cumulative exploration.   \n— David Goldberg
There is a popular cliché ... which says that you cannot get out of computers any more than you have put in..., that computers can only do exactly what you tell them to, and that therefore computers are never creative. This cliché is true only in a crashingly trivial sense, the same sense in which Shakespeare never wrote anything except what his first schoolteacher taught him to write—words.    \n— Richard Dawkins   \nIn The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design (1966, 1986), 64. Excerpted in Richard Dawkins, ‘Creation and Natural Selection’. New Scientist (25 Sep 1986), 111, 38.
There ought to be something about computers and artificial intelligence [in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations]. Surely somebody somewhere said something memorable.      \n— Justin Kaplan     \nQuoted in Boston Globe (3 Jan1989).
There’s my education in computers, right there; this is the whole thing, everything I took out of a book.    \n— Howard Hathaway Aiken  \nFrom talking with Howard Aiken, as quoted by author I. Bernard Cohen, in Howard Aiken: Portrait of a Computer Pioneer (2000), 66. Cohen list three particular books that Aiken said he read carefully: E. M. Horsburgh (ed.), Modem Instruments and Methods of Calculation: A Handbook of the Napier Tercentenary Exhibition (1914); D. Baxandall (ed.), Calculating Machines and Instruments: Catalogue of the Collections in the Science Museum (1926); and later, Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (1864).
Under pressure from the computer, the question of mind in relation to machine is becoming a central cultural preoccupation. It is becoming for us what sex was to the Victorians—threat and obsession, taboo and fascination.   \n— Sherry Turkle   \nIn The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (1984), 313.
Want to make your computer go really fast? Throw it out a window.   \n— Anonymous     \nIn L. R. Parenti, Durata Del Dramma: Life Of Drama (2005), 32.
We can found no scientific discipline, nor a hearty profession, on the technical mistakes of the Department of Defense and, mainly, one computer manufacturer.  \n— Edsger W. Dijkstra
When computers (people) are networked, their power multiplies geometrically. Not only can people share all that information inside their machines, but they can reach out and instantly tap the power of other machines (people), essentially making the entire network their computer.    \n— Scott Mcnealy
When I needed an apparatus to help me linger below the surface of the sea, Émile Gagnan and I used well-known scientific principles about compressed gases to invent the Aqualung; we applied science. The Aqualung is only a tool. The point of the Aqualung—of the computer, the CAT scan, the vaccine, radar, the rocket, the bomb, and all other applied science—is utility.   \n— Jacques-Yves Cousteau     \nIn Jacques Cousteau and Susan Schiefelbein, The Human, the Orchid, and the Octopus: Exploring and Conserving Our Natural World (2007), 181.
When I was 9, my parents gave me a Commodore 64, which was fun. At the time, the opportunity to program your own computer was easier than it is today. Today there are significantly larger barriers because of the complexity built into computing.     \n— Sergey Brin      \nFrom address at a conference on Google campus, co-hosted with Common Sense Media and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop 'Breakthrough Learning in the Digital Age'. As quoted in Technology blog report by Dan Fost, 'Google co-founder Sergey Brin wants more computers in schools', Los Angeles Times (28 Oct 2009). On latimesblogs.latimes.com website. As quoted, without citation, in Can Akdeniz, Fast MBA (2014), 280.
When we had no computers, we had no programming problem either. When we had a few computers, we had a mild programming problem. Confronted with machines a million times as powerful, we are faced with a gigantic programming problem.   \n— Edsger W. Dijkstra
Which is an astronaut’s favorite key on a computer keyboard?    \nThe space bar.   \n— Anonymous    \nOrigin uncertain, but in circulation at least as early as by Chris Salemka, in 'Think & Grin', Boy’s Life (Mar 1995), 61.
With thought comprising a non-computational element, computers can never do what we human beings can.    \n— Sir Roger Penrose   \nIn The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics (1989). As quoted in Stan Franklin, Artificial Minds (1997), 99.
WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a HyperText Project    \n— Tim Berners-Lee    \nTitle of an electronic document (1990) co-authored with Robert A Caillau. In Fred R. Shapiro, The Yale Book of Quotations (2006), 57.
You will be able to appreciate the influence of such an Engine on the future progress of science. I live in a country which is incapable of estimating it.  \n— Charles Babbage        \nTo an unidentified American, Burndy Library, as quoted inAnthony Hyman, Charles Babbage: Pioneer of the Computer (1985), 135.
[My favourite fellow of the Royal Society is the Reverend Thomas Bayes, an obscure 18th-century Kent clergyman and a brilliant mathematician who] devised a complex equation known as the Bayes theorem, which can be used to work out probability distributions. It had no practical application in his lifetime, but today, thanks to computers, is routinely used in the modelling of climate change, astrophysics and stock-market analysis.   \n— Bill Bryson    \nQuoted in Max Davidson, 'Bill Bryson: Have faith, science can solve our problems', Daily Telegraph (26 Sep 2010)
…comparing the capacity of computers to the capacity of the human brain, I’ve often wondered, where does our success come from? The answer is synthesis, the ability to combine creativity and calculation, art and science, into whole that is much greater than the sum of its parts.  \n— Garry Kasparov