computer quotes

The computer is a fast idiot, it has no imagination; it cannot originate action. It is, and will remain, only a tool to man.

-American LibraryAssociation
  Statement of the  American Library Association regarding the Univac computer exhibited at the NewYork World's Fair, 1964.

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts† A graphical representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity.Lines of light ranged inthenon- space of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.

-William Ford Gibson
  Neuromancer. This is the first recorded use of the term 'cyberspace'.

We've tended to forget that no computer will ever ask a new question.

- Grace Murray Hopper
Quoted in the OCLC Newsletter, no.167, Mar/ Apr1987.

Man is still the most extraordinary computer of all.

-John F(itzgerald) Kennedy
  Speech, 21 May.

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.

- Lewis Mumford
  The Myth of the Machine.

For reasons of high aesthetic principle, I do not write on a computer.

- P(atrick) J(ake) O'Rourke
  In Writers on Writing, Volume II: MoreCollected Essays from the NewYork Times.

The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably inthe circuits of a digital computeror thegears of a cycle transmission ashe does at thetop of a mountainor in the petals of a flower.

- Robert M(aynard) Pirsig
  Zen and theArt of Motorcycle Maintenance, pt.1, ch.1.