Computer Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Inside the envelope with the letter was a little Princess Leia action figure USB flash drive. (they make these?) For me to store my novel on, since he was right-I never back up my computer's hard drive. The sight of it-it's Princess Leia in her Hoth outfit, my favorite of her costumes (how had he remembered?) brought tears to my eyes.

Never forget I am not this silver body, Mahrai. I am not an animal brain, I am not even some attempt to produce an AI through software running on a computer. I am a Culture Mind. We are close to gods, and on the far side. We are quicker; we live faster and more completely than you do, with so many more senses, such a greater store of memories and at such a fine level of detail. We die more slowly, and we die more completely, too.

What is childhood without stories? And how will children fall in love with stories without bookstores? You can't get that from a computer.

When developers of digital technologies design a program that requires you to interact with a computer as if it were a person, they ask you to accept in some corner of your brain that you might also be conceived of as a program.

In a novel, two characters discuss the glitch in a computer which causes it to scroll an endless series of meaningless symbols: He sighs. "It casts serious doubt on the old theory that an infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of typewriters would eventually write the Great American Novel, doesn't it?"

The computer can help us find what we know is there. But the book remains our symbol and our resource for the unimagined question and the unwelcome answer.

Daniel J. Boorstin

If you want access to the files of valuable information in a computer, you must understand how to retrieve the data by asking for it with the proper commands. Likewise, what enables you to get anything you want from your own personal databanks is the commanding power of asking questions.

Anthony Robbins

The essential characteristic of digital information is that it can be manipulated easily and very rapidly by computer... Computational tools for transforming, combining, altering, and analyzing images are as essential to the digital artist as brushes and pigments to a painter.

William J. Mitchell

My worst personal problem is that my computer doesn't understand me.

Ashleigh Brilliant

The makers of Revenge of the Nerds know, as do millions who have seen it, that all scientists when young are undernourished sociophobics who relate best to a computer terminal through coke bottle eyeglasses after midnight in a basement laboratory.

The computer, being a mechanical moron, can handle only quantifiable data.

For seven and a half million years, Deep Thought computed and calculated, and in the end announced that the answer was in fact Forty-two - and so another, even bigger, computer had to be built to find out what the actual question was...

Bandwidth grows at least three times faster than computer power.

The computer brings out the uptight perfectionist in us - we start editing ideas before we have them.

If you do not love what you do, if you are not appropriately grateful for the chance to create something magical each time you sit down at the computer or with a pencil and paper in hand, somewhere along the way your writing will betray you.

Capital burns off the nuance in a culture. Foreign investment, global markets, corporate acquisitions, the flow of information through transnational media, the attenuating influence of money that's electronic and sex that's cyberspaced, untouched money and computer-safe sex, the convergence of consumer desire--not that people want the same things, necessarily, but that they want the same range of choices.

Institutions have the pathetic megalomania of the computer whose whole vision of the world is its own program.

The brain is a robot-computer perfectly designed to fabricate any reality we program it to construct.

I have met bright students in computer science who have never seen the source code of a large program. They may be good at writing small programs, but they can't begin to learn the different skills of writing large ones if they can't see how others have done it.

Richard Stallman

You turn the computer into the storyteller and the player into the audience, like in the old days when the storyteller would actually respond to the audience, rather than just having the audience respond to the storyteller. I had an enormous amount of fun, actually, working on that.

In this quest for simplification, mathematics stands to computer science as diamond mining to coal mining. The former is a search for gems.... The latter is permanently involved with bulldozing large masses of ore - extremely useful bulk material.

Jacob T. Schwartz

It is infinitely more useful for a child to hear a story told by a person than by computer. Because the greatest part of the learning experience lies not in the particular words of the story but in the involvement with the individual reading it.

Frank Smith (psycholinguist)

The present Luddism over genetic engineering may die a natural death as the computer-illiterate generation is superseded.... I fear that, if the green movement's high-amplitude warnings over GMOs turn out to be empty, people will be dangerously disinclined to listen to other and more serious warnings.

Richard Dawkins

The life-efficiency and adaptability of the computer must be questioned. Its judicious use depends upon the availability of its human employers quite literally to keep their own heads, not merely to scrutinize the programming but to reserve for themselves the right of ultimate decision. No automatic system can be intelligently run byautomatonsor by people who dare not assert human intuition, human autonomy, human purpose.

The corollary of constant change is ignorance. This is not often talked about: we computer experts barely know what we're doing. We're good at fussing and figuring out. We function well in a sea of unknowns. Our experience has only prepared us to deal with confusion. A programmer who denies this is probably lying, or else is densely unaware of himself.