55 Computer Quotes

In the realm of technology, computers have revolutionized the way we live, work, and connect. From their early days as hulking machines to the sleek, powerful devices we now carry in our pockets, computers have consistently pushed the boundaries of what's possible. As such, they've inspired a wealth of wisdom, insight, and humor from some of the greatest minds in tech and beyond. Whether you're a tech enthusiast, a professional in the field, or just someone who appreciates the impact of computing on modern life, you'll find plenty to ponder and enjoy in this curated collection of the top 55 computer quotes. Dive in and discover thoughts that range from profound reflections to light-hearted quips, all celebrating the remarkable journey and future of computers.

1. “In all large corporations, there is a pervasive fear that someone, somewhere is having fun with a computer on company time. Networks help alleviate that fear.” - John Dvorak

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

3. “Any idiot can put up a website.” - Patricia Briggs

4. “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

5. “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

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

7. “Immaterial as water, too vast for any mortal apprehension, the Web's outstanding qualities allow us to confuse the ungraspable with the eternal.” - Alberto Manguel

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

9. “If behind popular fascination with Freudian theory there was a nervous, often guilty preoccupation with the self as sexual, behind increasing interest in computational interpretations of mind is an equally nervous preoccupation with the self as machine.” - Sherry Turkle

10. “Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.” - Joseph Campbell

11. “... 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

12. “The best computer is a man, and it’s the only one that can be mass-produced by unskilled labor.” - Wernher Von Braun

13. “The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals. We cause accidents.” - Nathaniel Borenstein

14. “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

15. “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

16. “Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes” - Edsger Wybe Dijkstra

17. “Let us remember that the automatic machine is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor. Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic consequences of slave labor.” - Norbert Weiner

18. “There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary numerals, and those who don't.” - Ian Stewart

19. “If we are lucky, they were never retarded enough to create computer viruses and will have no such things as firewalls and security like we have. If they have never experienced a full blown computer failure we'll introduce them to the concept” - Thomas Wilson

20. “The I.B.M. machine has no ethic of its own; what it does is enable one or two people to do the computing work that formerly required many more people. If people often use it stupidly, it's their stupidity, not the machine's, and a return to the abacus would not exorcise the failing. People can be treated as drudges just as effectively without modern machines.” - William H. Whyte

21. “Forget UNIX - it will be gone in 5 years.” - Tom Jermoluk

22. “Asked about the fact that Apple's iTunes software for Windows computers was extremely popular, Jobs joked, 'It's like giving a glass of ice water to somebody in hell.” - Walter Isaacson

23. “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

24. “Technology offers us a unique opportunity, though rarely welcome, to practice patience.” - Allan Lokos

25. “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

26. “artificial intellegance is no match for natural stupidity” - Albert Einstein

27. “Computers are heaven-sent when they work and hell-spawn when they don't.There's just not much middle ground when it comes to technology.” - Dani Harper

28. “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

29. “... there was one new metallic monstrosity stacked in one corner that she hadn’t seen the last time she was a visitor to his strange chamber, it appeared to be a mass of hard drives all fused together, but they looked too sophisticated to be merely hard drives.“What on earth is that?” “That’s my Kung Fu,” he said proudly, patting the top of the futuristic-looking stack.“Is that what you wanted to show me?”“No, but it’s impressive, isn’t it?”“If you say so.”Steves sighed and shook his head, so few people could appreciate the intellectual complexity of an almost untraceable hacking device.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

30. “The computer focuses ruthlessly on things that can be represented in numbers. In so doing, it seduces people into thinking that other aspects of knowledge are either unreal or unimportant. The computer treats reason as an instrument for achieving things, not for contemplating things. It narrows dramatically what we know and intended by reason.” - George Friedman

31. “No one messes around with a nerd’s computer and escapes unscathed.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

32. “This digital revolutionary still believes in most of the lovely deep ideals that energized our work so many years ago. At the core was a sweet faith in human nature. If we empowered individuals, we believed, more good than harm would result. The way the internet has gone sour since then is truly perverse. The central faith of the web's early design has been superseded by a different faith in the centrality of imaginary entities epitomized by the idea that the internet as a whole is coming alive and turning into a superhuman creature. The designs guided by this new, perverse kind of faith put people back in the shadows. The fad for anonymity has undone the great opening-of-everyone's-windows of the 1990s. While that reversal has empowered sadists to a degree, the worst effect is a degradation of ordinary people.” - Jaron Lanier

33. “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

34. “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

35. “Spirituality is committing suicide. Consciousness is attempting to will itself out of existence.” - Jaron Lanier

36. “Information wants to be free.' So goes the saying. Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, seems to have said it first. I say that information doesn't deserve to be free. Cybernetic totalists love to think of the stuff as if it were alive and had its own ideas and ambitions. But what if information is inanimate? What if it's even less than inanimate, a mere artifact of human thought? What if only humans are real, and information is not?...Information is alienated experience.” - Jaron Lanier

37. “A file on a hard disk does indeed contain information of the kind that objectively exists. The fact that the bits are discernible instead of being scrambled into mush - the way heat scrambles things - is what makes them bits. But if the bits can potentially mean something to someone, they can only do so if they are experienced. When that happens, a commonality of culture is enacted between the storer and the retriever of the bits. Experience is the only process that can de-alienate information. Information of the kind that purportedly wants to be free is nothing but a shadow of our own minds, and wants nothing on its own. It will not suffer if it doesn't get what it wants. But if you want to make the transition from the old religion, where you hope God will give you an afterlife, to the new religion, where you hope to become immortal by getting uploaded into a computer, then you have to believe information is real and alive. So for you, it will be important to redesign human institutions like art, the economy, and the law to reinforce the perception that information is alive. You demand that the rest of us live in your new conception of a state religion. You need us to deify information to reinforce your faith.” - Jaron Lanier

38. “Turing presented his new offering in the form of a thought experiment, based on a popular Victorian parlor game. A man and a woman hide, and a judge is asked to determine which is which by relying only on the texts of notes passed back and forth.Turing replaced the woman with a computer. Can the judge tell which is the man? If not, is the computer conscious? Intelligent? Does it deserve equal rights?It's impossible for us to know what role the torture Turing was enduring at the time played in his formulation of the test. But it is undeniable that one of the key figures in the defeat of fascism was destroyed, by our side, after the war, because he was gay. No wonder his imagination pondered the rights of strange creatures.” - Jaron Lanier

39. “But the Turing test cuts both ways. You can't tell if a machine has gotten smarter or if you've just lowered your own standards of intelligence to such a degree that the machine seems smart. If you can have a conversation with a simulated person presented by an AI program, can you tell how far you've let your sense of personhood degrade in order to make the illusion work for you?People degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time. Before the crash, bankers believed in supposedly intelligent algorithms that could calculate credit risks before making bad loans. We ask teachers to teach to standardized tests so a student will look good to an algorithm. We have repeatedly demonstrated our species' bottomless ability to lower our standards to make information technology look good. Every instance of intelligence in a machine is ambiguous. The same ambiguity that motivated dubious academic AI projects in the past has been repackaged as mass culture today. Did that search engine really know what you want, or are you playing along, lowering your standards to make it seem clever? While it's to be expected that the human perspective will be changed by encounters with profound new technologies, the exercise of treating machine intelligence as real requires people to reduce their mooring to reality.” - Jaron Lanier

40. “The attribution of intelligence to machines, crowds of fragments, or other nerd deities obscures more than it illuminates. When people are told that a computer is intelligent, they become prone to changing themselves in order to make the computer appear to work better, instead of demanding that the computer be changed to become more useful.” - Jaron Lanier

41. “What about the contacts your mum had?” his dad asked.“I rang and spoke to four very polite computers who gave me all these options and then cut out on me. Then I tried the post office, because they were advertising, and I spoke to another computer. Very rude, that one. Don’t think it recognized ‘Are you shitting me?’ as an option.”“You know why that is?”“Why is that, Dominic?” Tom had asked drolly, because he knew he was going to be told why.“Because we don’t live in a society anymore, Tom. We live in an economy. We’re not citizens. We’re customers. That’s what this government’s done to us.” - Melina Marchetta

42. “A mind is a simulation that simulates itself.” - Erol Ozan

43. “I pat the brand new twenty-seven inch Macintosh computers Mr. Foley brought us. 'These boxes alone should make both of us scream like it's Christmas morning! Snap out of it. Santa came! Now we get to play with all of our toys!” - Anne Eliot

44. “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

45. “A computer does not smell ... if a book is new, it smells great. If a book is old, it smells even better… And it stays with you forever. But the computer doesn’t do that for you. I’m sorry.” - Ray Bradbury

46. “It can be argued that the computer is humanity’s attempt to replicate the human brain. This is perhaps an unattainable goal. However, unattainable goals often lead to outstanding accomplishment.” - Ammaar Shaukat Reshi

47. “Your grandma always was an advocate of thorough preparedness. She would strongly advise staying not only armed to the teeth, but well equipped in the computational department. You've been taught you should really carry no less than 5 computers on you at all times, like a sensible person.” - Andrew Hussie

48. “Most of Csongor's time in T'Rain had been spent blundering about in a state of hapless newbie confusion. Only his long experience as a system administrator, struggling with Byzantine software installations, had prevented hum from plummeting into despair and simply giving up. Not that any of the sysadmin's knowledge and skills were applicable here. The psychological stance was the thing: the implicit faith, a little naive and a little cocky, that by banging his head against the problem for long enough he'd be able to break through in the end.” - Neal Stephenson

49. “A few years ago a friend said that I use to hunt and fish and build houses and things but now my whole life revolved around my computer I replied "But my computer revolves around the world” - Stanley Victor Paskavich

50. “Abe said something interesting. He said that because everyone's so poor these days, the '90s will be a decade with no architectural legacy or style- everyone's too poor to put up new buildings. He said that code is the architecture of the '90s.” - Douglas Coupland

51. “The Googleplex Star Thinker is a super-computer from the Seventh Galaxy of Light and Ingenuity and has the ability to calculate the trajectory of every single dust particle during a five-week Dangrabad Beta sand blizzard.The Deep Thought computer call it a pocket calculator in comparison to itself.” - Douglas Adams

52. “It is no longer just engineers who dominate our technology leadership, because it is no longer the case that computers are so mysterious that only engineers can understand what they are capable of. There is an industry-wide shift toward more "product thinking" in leadership--leaders who understand the social and cultural contexts in which our technologies are deployed.Products must appeal to human beings, and a rigorously cultivated humanistic sensibility is a valued asset for this challenge. That is perhaps why a technology leader of the highest status--Steve Jobs--recently credited an appreciation for the liberal arts as key to his company's tremendous success with their various i-gadgets.” - Damon Horowitz

53. “Database Management System [Origin: Data + Latin basus "low, mean, vile, menial, degrading, ounterfeit."] A complex set of interrelational data structures allowing data to be lost in many convenient sequences while retaining a complete record of the logical relations between the missing items. -- From The Devil's DP Dictionary” - Stan Kelly Bootle

54. “Hot, short, thorough," I said. I hesitated before adding, "Please." It never pays to insult computers that are smart enough to form sentences. Not when they're in control of the locks, and especially when they have the capacity to boil you in bleach."Absolutely," said the shower.” - Mira Grant

55. “Whether we are based on carbon or on silicon makes no fundamental difference; we should each be treated with appropriate respect.” - Arthur C. Clarke