Computer Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Pablo Picasso

Steve Jobs

Joseph Campbell

Tim Berners-Lee

Steven Levy

Ben Horowitz

Marvin Minsky

Of computers:

But they are useless. They can only give you answers.

Computers themselves, and software yet to be developed, will revolutionize the way we learn.

Nothing in life is certain except death, taxes and the second law of thermodynamics. All three are processes in which useful or accessible forms of some quantity, such as energy or money, are transformed into useless, inaccessible forms of the same quantity. That is not to say that these three processes don't have fringe benefits: taxes pay for roads and schools; the second law of thermodynamics drives cars, computers and metabolism; and death, at the very least, opens up tenured faculty positions.

The important thing about mobile is, everybody has a computer in their pocket. The implications of so many people connected to the Internet all the time from the standpoint of education is incredible.

Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.

Joseph Campbell

A computer shall not waste your time or require you to do more work than is strictly necessary.

A computer shall not harm your work or, through inaction, allow your work to come to harm.

When David Marr at MIT moved into computer vision, he generated a lot of excitement, but he hit up against the problem of knowledge representation; he had no good representations for knowledge in his vision systems.

Right now, computers, which are supposed to be our servant, are oppressing us.

I am rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that it would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand.

I was one of the first generations to watch television. That's technology. TV is like any other kind of tool. TV exposes people to news, to information, to knowledge, to entertainment. How is it bad? Computers are going to be even bigger. TVs are one-way. You sit there and you watch it. Computers, you interact with.

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.

There has never been an unexpectedly short debugging period in the history of computers.

Computing is not about computers any more. It is about living.

Nicholas Negroponte

Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do.

One of the most feared expressions in modern times is 'The computer is down.'

Norman R. Augustine

There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.

Much of my work has come from being lazy. I didn't like writing programs, and so, when I was working on the IBM 701 (an early computer), writing programs for computing missile trajectories, I started work on a programming system to make it easier to write programs.

Anyone who has lost track of time when using a computer knows the propensity to dream, the urge to make dreams come true and the tendency to miss lunch.

Tim Berners-Lee

Imagine if every Thursday your shoes exploded if you tied them the usual way. This happens to us all the time with computers, and nobody thinks of complaining.

A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human.

Creativity comes from looking for the unexpected and stepping outside your own experience. Computers simply cannot do that.

Eventually, I believe, current attempts to understand the mind by analogy with man-made computers that can perform superbly some of the same external tasks as conscious beings will be recognized as a gigantic waste of time.

We should treat computers as fancy telephones, whose purpose is to connect people. Information is alienated experience. Information is not something that exists. Indeed, computers don't really exist, exactly; they're only subject to human interpretation. This is a strong primary humanism I am promoting. 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.

Although computer memory is no longer expensive, there's always a finite size buffer somewhere. When a big piece of news arrives, everybody sends a message to everybody else, and the buffer fills

Benoît Mandelbrot