Computer Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

You, HP, promised me a toxic-free COMPUTER by 2009. Now my friends at Greenpeace tell me that I'll have to wait till 2011. What's up with that?

William Shatner

Data is raw. It simply exists and has no significance beyond its existence (in and of itself). It can exist in any form, usable or not. It does not have meaning of itself. In computer parlance, a spreadsheet generally starts out by holding data.

Russell L. Ackoff

Anything unusual that you can produce has quadruple, quintuple the value, precisely because your opponent is likely to do the predictable stuff, which is on a computer.

Viswanathan Anand

I can envision no device more capable of spreading ignorance and illiteracy than the computer. It is, I think, like the atom bomb, a naturally evolved engine of destruction, a sign, like the Tower of Babel, that civilization has run its course.

Man is going to be displaced altogether as a specialist by the computer. Man himself is being forced to reestablish, employ, and enjoy his innate "comprehensivity." Coping with the totality of Spaceship Earth and universe is ahead for all of us.

Buckminster Fuller

The truth is that I am a sentient computer program and I fully intend to burn your cities to the ground.

The conservatives see man as a body freely roaming the earth, building sand piles or factories—with an electronic computer inside his skull, controlled from Washington. The liberals see man as a soul freewheeling to the farthest reaches of the universe—but wearing chains from nose to toes when he crosses the street to buy a loaf of bread.

The development of information research has increased considerably the interaction of emerging information science with other disciplines. Librarianship has traditionally had links with education and classification and has drawn ideas from logic and philosophy. But during the last fifty years new insights and methods have been derived from sociology and social psychology, from computer science, from operations research and related quantitative approaches, from communications research, from linguistics, and most recently from the new hybrids: cognitive science and artificial intelligence.

Brian Campbell Vickery

I want to be the poster girl for engineers and computer nerds.

Alessandra Torresani

The number of elements that have to go into a hit would break a computer down…. the right season for that play, the right historical moment, the right tonality.

In a world populated by people who believe that through more and more information, paradise is attainable, the computer scientist is king. But I maintain that all of this is a monumental and dangerous waste of human talent and energy. Imagine what might be accomplished if this talent and energy were turned to philosophy, to theology, to the arts, to imaginative literature or to education? Who knows what we could learn from such people — perhaps why there are wars, and hunger, and homelessness and mental illness and anger.

Although I am not averse to wasting a few hours playing computer games, I have never tried my hand at Doom. Judging by sales figures and testimonials, playing the game has to be an infinitely preferable experience to watching this pathetic excuse for a movie.

James Berardinelli

I sat at the computer at work, debugging. I was bored. It was afternoon. I was twenty-two. It was June. Along the front range of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, thunderheads move in almost every afternoon between May and early July. They materialize, darken the day, spit a few drops, open the sky with lightning, then disappear like so many dreams.

The press, television, and movies make heroes of vandals by calling them whiz kids.... There is obviously a cultural gap. The act of breaking into a computer system has to have the same social stigma as breaking into a neighbor's house. It should not matter that the neighbor's door is unlocked.

To kind of explain what Linux is, you have to explain what an operating system is. And the thing about an operating system is that you're never ever supposed to see it. Because nobody really uses an operating system; people use programs on their computer. And the only mission in life of an operating system is to help those programs run. So an operating system never does anything on its own; it's only waiting for the programs to ask for certain resources, or ask for a certain file on the disk, or ask to connect to the outside world. And then the operating system steps in and tries to make it easy for people to write programs.

The cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from Science, along with behavior control, genetic engineering, transplanted heads, computer poetry and the unrestrained growth of plastic flowers.

The movie industry is run by accountants in Hollywood and it's as simple as this; everyone has a number on their computer. They can look up Jeremy Irons and see what my last five movies have made. Say you want to make a $20m picture, which is relatively cheap. If Jeremy makes $9m, the director makes $5m, then you need a leading lady, and they just go through those figures - that's how casting happens. And none of my movies has made a lot of money.

A real-time computer system may be defined as one which controls an environment by receiving data, processing them, and taking action or returning results sufficiently quickly to affect the functioning of the environment at that time.

I've been on the computer a lot. They say that's the cause of the soreness in my elbow. I'll be in control. I spent four hours. Now, I'll have to spend one hour and take it easy.

Carlos Zambrano

Most of us have grown so blase about computer developments and capabilities — even some that are spectacular — that it is difficult to believe or imagine there was a time when we suffered the noisy, painstakingly slow, electromechanical devices that chomped away on punched cards.

Nicholas Metropolis

There is no intimacy; it's not live. [he said of online games] It's being translated through a computer, and your imagination is not there the same way it is when you're actually together with a group of people. It reminds me of one time where I saw some children talking about whether they liked radio or television, and I asked one little boy why he preferred radio, and he said, "Because the pictures are so much better."

In any responsible position, no formula or computer (given present technology) can replace human decisions, because no formula can exhibit wisdom or exercise judgment. These essentially human qualities are essential for any responsible position, but most of all in the most responsible position of all: sovereign command.
And all organizations, big or small, public or private, military or civilian, are managed best when managed by a single executive. Hence: royalism. However he or she is selected, the title of such an executive, in a sovereign capacity, is King—or, at least, anything else is a euphemism. And why trade in euphemisms?

By conducting a media fast - turning off the television, radio, and computer - we stop the influx of poison that keeps us buying and desiring more.

In the next 40 years, there's going to be a larger demand than ever for people who can communicate with the written word, whatever format it takes. I don't think there's ever been a greater need for people to be able to write at a functional level, whether they're tapping on their computer keyboard or on their iPhone.

In a moment, when I'm ready, I will turn off this computer and that will be it. This letter will be finished. A part of me doesn't want to stop writing to you, but I need to. For both of us.

Lucy Christopher