Grace Hopper Quotes

18 Sourced Quotes

I've received many honors and I'm grateful for them; but I've already received the highest award I'll ever receive, and that has been the privilege and honor of serving very proudly in the United States Navy.

Grace Hopper
If you do something once, people will call it an accident. If you do it twice, they call it a coincidence. But do it a third time and you've just proven a natural law!

Grace Hopper
At the end of about a week, I called back and said, "I need something to compare this to. Could I please have a microsecond?"

Grace Hopper
I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. … they carefully told me, computers could only do arithmetic; they could not do programs.

Grace Hopper
From then on, when anything went wrong with a computer, we said it had bugs in it.

Grace Hopper
When a farmer needs more ox power to plow his field, he doesn't get a bigger ox, he gets another one. Then he puts the oxen in parallel.

Grace Hopper
Life was simple before World War II. After that, we had systems.

Grace Hopper
Developing a compiler was a logical move; but in matters like this, you don't run against logic — you run against people who can't change their minds.

Grace Hopper
We must include in any language with which we hope to describe complex data-processing situations the capability for describing data.

Grace Hopper
At present, we're putting on paper a lot of stuff that never needed to be on paper. We do need to keep the records. But there isn't any reason for printing them. The next generation growing up with the computers will change that.

Grace Hopper
We're flooding people with information. We need to feed it through a processor. A human must turn information into intelligence or knowledge. We've tended to forget that no computer will ever ask a new question.

Grace Hopper
In total desperation, I called over to the engineering building, and I said, "Please cut off a nanosecond and send it over to me."

Grace Hopper
You manage things, you lead people. We went overboard on management and forgot about leadership. It might help if we ran the MBAs out of Washington.

Grace Hopper
There's something you learn in your first boot-camp, or training camp: If they put you down somewhere with nothing to do, go to sleep — you don't know when you'll get any more.

Grace Hopper
It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission.

Grace Hopper
I handed my passport to the immigration officer, and he looked at it and looked at me and said, "What are you?"

Grace Hopper
I've always been more interested in the future than in the past.

Grace Hopper
Humans are allergic to change. They love to say, "We've always done it this way." I try to fight that. That's why I have a clock on my wall that runs counter-clockwise.

Grace Hopper