Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Arthur C. Clarke, 1973

First, solve the problem. Then, write the code.

John Johnson

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

Grace Hopper

They have computers, and they may have other weapons of mass destruction.

Janet Reno, 1998

Considering the current sad state of our computer programs, software development is clearly still a black art, and cannot yet be called an engineering discipline.

Bill Clinton

Computing is not about computers anymore. It is about living.

Nicholas Negroponte, 1995

Truth is, I wouldn't know a gigabyte from a snakebite.

Dolly Parton

There are only two industries that refer to their customers as "users."

Edward Tufte

Man is the best computer we can put aboard a spacecraft... and the only one that can be mass produced with unskilled labor.

Werner von Braun, 1963
Talking with John F. Kennedy

Man is still the most extraordinary computer of all.

John F. Kennedy, 1963

Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest.

Isaac Asimov, 1981

Two years from now, spam will be solved.

Bill Gates, 2004

640K ought to be enough for anybody.

Bill Gates, 1981

Doing research on the Web is like using a library assembled piecemeal by pack rats and vandalized nightly.

Roger Ebert

The fantastic advances in the field of electronic communication constitute a great danger to the privacy of the individual.

Earl Warren, 1963
Lopez v US

There is practically no chance communications space satellites will be used to provide better telephone, telegraph, television, or radio service inside the United States.

T.A.M. Craven, 1961
FCC Commissioner

Getting out of the hospital is a lot like resigning from a book club. You're not out of it until the computer says you're out of it.

Erma Bombeck

Whether we are based on carbon or on silicon makes no fundamental difference; we should each be treated with appropriate respect.

Arthur C. Clarke, 1982
"2010: Odyssey Two"

Information is the oxygen of the modern age. It seeps through the walls topped by barbed wire, it wafts across the electrified borders.

Ronald Reagan, 1989

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.

Pablo Picasso

Any fool can use a computer. Many do.

Ted Nelson

Your site is your brand.

Lawrence Becker

The lesson of the Internet is that no audience is too small.

Randall L. Stephenson

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

Alan Turing

As it is an ancient truth that freedom cannot be legislated into existence, so it is no less obvious that freedom cannot be censored into existence.

Dwight David Eisenhower, 1953

It would appear that we have reached the limits of what it is possible to achieve with computer technology, although one should be careful with such statements, as they tend to sound pretty silly in 5 years.

John Von Neumann, 1949

Talk is cheap. Show me the code.

Linus Torvalds, 2000

The Internet has become the computer. The number of people who use computers is almost indistinguishable from people who use the Internet.

Lee Rainie

A computer will do what you tell it to do, but that may be much different from what you had in mind.

Joseph Weizenbaum

There's an old story about the person who wished his computer were as easy to use as his telephone. That wish has come true, since I no longer know how to use my telephone.

Bjarne Stroustrup

During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet.

Al Gore, 1999

The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis, but it has no power of anticipating any analytical revelations or truths. Its province is to assist us in making available what we are already acquainted with.

Ada Lovelace, 1843

Errors using inadequate data are much less than those using no data at all.

Charles Babbage

That's what's cool about working with computers. They don't argue, they remember everything, and they don't drink all your beer.

Paul Leary

If the presence of electricity can be made visible in any part of the circuit, I see no reason why intelligence may not be transmitted instantaneously by electricity.

Samuel Morse

We have to go see Bill Gates and a lot of different people that really understand what's happening. We have to talk to them, maybe in certain areas, closing that Internet up in some way. Somebody will say, "Oh, freedom of speech, freedom of speech." These are foolish people. We have a lot of foolish people.

Donald Trump

The city's central computer told you? R2D2, you know better than to trust a strange computer!

C3PO, 1977

On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog.

Peter Steiner
caption of one of his cartoons

The Net is the new underlying infrastructure for civilization itself.

David Searls

Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration.

Stan Kelly-Bootle

Computers are getting smarter all the time. Scientists tell us that soon they will be able to talk to us. (And by "they", I mean "computers." I doubt scientists will ever be able to talk to us.)

Dave Barry

The Internet? Is that thing still around?

Homer Simpson

If you don't know where you're going, you might end up some place else.

Yogi Berra

There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary numerals, and those who don't.

Ian Nicholas Stewart

The subscription model of buying music is bankrupt. I think you could make available the Second Coming in a subscription model and it might not be successful.

Steve Jobs, 2003

The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing until it's too late.

Seymour Cray

That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.

Larry Niven

I am not the only person who uses his computer mainly for the purpose of diddling with his computer.

Dave Barry

To iterate is human, to recurse divine.

L. Peter Deutsch

A wonderful thing about a book, in contrast to a computer screen, is that you can take it to bed with you.

Daniel J. Boorstin

I'd like to know what the Internet is going to look like in 2050. Thinking about it makes me wish I were eight years old.

Vinton Gray Cerf

The Internet didn't get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet. The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.

Barack Obama

The best websites are better than reality.

Jakob Nielsen

If Al Gore invented the Internet, I invented spell check.

Dan Quayle

Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster.

Nicklaus Wirth, 1995
"Wirth's Law"

Complexity kills. It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build and test, it introduces security challenges, and it causes end-user and administrator frustration.

Ray Ozzie

A user interface should be so simple that a beginner in an emergency can understand it within ten seconds.

Ted Nelson

One of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that lacking zero they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C programs.

Robert Firth

I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.

Thomas J. Watson, Jr., 1943

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

Ken Olsen, 1977

In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they're not.

Yogi Berra