Chess Quotes

246 Sourced quotes

Omni: Will robots be complex enough to be friends of people?
Shannon: I think so. I myself could very easily imagine that happening. I see no limit to the capabilities of machines. As microchips get smaller and faster, I can see them getting better than we are. I can visualize a time in the future when we will be to robots as dogs are to humans.
[...]
Omni: Do you find it depressing that chess computers are getting so strong?
Shannon: I am not depressed by it. I am rooting for the machines! I have always been on the machines' side. Ha-ha!

Claude Elwood Shannon

Kasparov is a gangster, he is a disgrace to chess, he is a disgrace to the human race. He is not something Russia should be proud of. He should join Khodorkovsky in prison. He has committed a terrible fraud with all these prearranged games and matches.

I love the play between the conscious and unconscious minds in the creative moment, and for me chess and the martial arts are both about developing a rich working relationship with your intuition.

Joshua Waitzkin

There's so many lessons I get from chess, it's incredible, but I think the biggest thing for me has always been is that losing is learning.

Geniuses of certain kinds - mathematicians, chess players, computer programmers - seem, if not mad, at least lacking in the social skills most easily identified with sanity.

The improved performances at Commonwealth Games, London Olympics and world tournaments by chess, billiards, snooker badminton and tennis players are evidence of the improved progress that we have made.

He hated games they made the world look too simple. Chess, in particular, had always annoyed him. It was the dumb way the pawns went off and slaughtered their fellow pawns while the king lounged about doing nothing. If only the pawns would've united... the whole board could've been a republic in about a dozen moves.

Terry Pratchett

Yeah, there are too many Jews in chess. They seem to have taken away the class of the game. They don't seem to dress so nicely, you know. That's what I don't like.

Life on a lifeboat isn't much of a life. It is like an end game in chess, a game with few pieces. The elements couldn't be more simple, nor the stakes higher.

I am not some sort of freak. I might be very good at chess but I'm just a normal person.

Every good mathematician should also be a good chess player and vice versa.

Henri Poincaré

Chess is a great game. No matter how good one is, there is always somebody better. No matter how bad one is, there is always somebody worse.

Israel Albert Horowitz

Councillors of state sit plotting, and playing their high chess-game, whereof the pawns are men.

It is a well known fact that almost all the outstanding chess-players have been first-class analysts.

Mikhail Botvinnik

They're all weak, all women. They're stupid compared to men. They shouldn't play chess, you know. They're like beginners. They lose every single game against a man. There isn't a woman player in the world I can't give knight-odds to and still beat.

The biggest problem I see among people who want to excel in chess – and in business and in life in general – is not trusting their instincts enough.

For me, chess is a language, and if it's not my native tongue, it is one I learned via the immersion method at a young age.

Why do you have to use me to show off? If you want to show off, then why don't you learn to play chess." - Ch. 5

Chess is the Drosophila of artificial intelligence.

Alexander Kronrod

She looks at me out of the side of her uncovered eye. "Chess, Zombie: defending yourself from the move that hasn't happened yet. Does it matter that he doesn't light up through our eyepieces? That he missed us when he could have taken us own? If two possibilities are equally probable but mutually exclusive, which one matters the most? Which one do you bet your life on?

I have no fear of war, said Arthur Stuart. That's when kings get to show their mettle.
You're thinking of chess, said Margaret. In war, everyone has their chance to bleed.

Orson Scott Card

Too many times, people don't try their best. They don't have the keen spirit; the winning spirit. And once you make it you've got to guard your reputation - every day go in like an unknown to prove yourself. That's why I don't clown around. I don't believe in wasting time. My goal is to win the World Chess Championship; to beat the Russians. I take this very seriously.

The laws of chess are as beautiful as those governing the universe — and as deadly.

Katherine Neville

[Christian]... he felt very much like an uninitiated chess-player who sees that the pieces are in a peculiar position on the board, and might open the way for him to give checkmate, if he only knew how.

Seville never had a rich chess tradition. Valencia is entirely different, it is enough to say that one of the city squares is named after me.