| Topic |
Quote |
Author |
|---|
| Technology | "I am a hard-core believer that the clean desktop is the way to go... At the same time, we told OEMs that if they were going to put a bunch of icons on the desktop, then so were we." | Allchin, Jim |
| Technology | "Microsoft is a bully. Microsoft is trying to hoodwink nontechnical people." | Alsop, Stewart |
| Technology | "Gates is the ultimate programming machine. He believes everything can be defined, examined, reduced to essentials, and rearranged into a logical sequence that will achieve a particular goal." | Alsop, Stewart |
| Technology | "Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation..." | Arp, Jean |
| Technology | "Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge." | Barlow, John Perry |
| Technology | "Relying on the government to protect your privacy is like asking a peeping tom to install your window blinds." | Barlow, John Perry |
| Technology | "You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions" | Barlow, John Perry |
| Technology | "In Cyberspace, the First Amendment is a local ordinance." | Barlow, John Perry |
| Technology | "One can imagine the government's problem. This is all pretty magical stuff to them. If I were trying to terminate the operations of a witch coven, I'd probably seize everything in sight. How would I tell the ordinary household brooms from the getaway vehicles?" | Barlow, John Perry |
| Technology | "The Internet treats censorship as a malfunction and routes around it." | Barlow, John Perry |
| Technology | "We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before." | Barlow, John Perry |
| Technology | "You affect the world by what you browse." | Berners-Lee, Tim |
| Technology | "Sites need to be able to interact in one single, universal space." | Berners-Lee, Tim |
| Technology | "Inventor: A person who makes an ingenious arrangement of wheels, levers and springs, and believes it civilization." | Bierce, Ambrose |
| Technology | "Telephone, n. An invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance." | Bierce, Ambrose |
| Technology | "Do you realize if it weren't for Edison we'd be watching TV by candlelight?" | Boliska, Al |
| Technology | "Technology is so much fun but we can drown in our technology. The fog of information can drive out knowledge." | Boorstin, Daniel J. |
| Technology | "The peculiar malaise of our day is air-conditioned unhappiness, the staleness and stuffiness of machine-made routine." | Borowitz, Eugene B. |
| Technology | "If we continue to develop our technology without wisdom or prudence, our servant may prove to be our executioner." | Bradley, Gen Omar N. |
| Technology | "Beware of computer programmers that carry screwdrivers." | Brandwein, Leonard |
| Technology | "For my confirmation, I didn't get a watch and my first pair of long pants, like most Lutheran boys. I got a telescope. My mother thought it would make the best gift." | Braun, Wernher von |
| Technology | "The Internet is so big, so powerful and pointless that for some people it is a complete substitute for life." | Brown, Andrew |
| Technology | "Through the magic of motion pictures, someone who's never left Peoria knows the softness of a Paris spring, the color of a Nile sunset, the sorts of vegetation one will find along the upper Amazon and that Big Ben has not yet gone digital." | Canby, Vincent |
| Technology | "We are there to serve our subscribers, not serve them up." | Caplan, Claudia |
| Technology | "Globalization, as defined by rich people like us, is a very nice thing... you are talking about the Internet, you are talking about cell phones, you are talking about computers. This doesn't affect two-thirds of the people of the world." | Carter, Jimmy |
| Technology | "The difference between e-mail and regular mail is that computers handle e-mail, and computers never decide to come to work one day and shoot all the other computers." | Cascio, Jamais |
| Technology | "I'm projecting somewhere between 100 million and 200 million computers [on the Net] by the end of December 2000, and about 300 million users by that same time." | Cerf, Vinton |
| Technology | "The Internet is not just one thing, it's a collection of things - of numerous communications networks that all speak the same digital language." | Clark, Jim |
| Technology | "URLs are the 800 numbers of the 1990's." | Clark, Chris |
| Technology | "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." | Clarke, Arthur C. |
| Technology | "There never was a chip, it is said, that Bill Gates couldn't slow down with a new batch of features." | Coates, James |
| Technology | "Calculations which required a $20 million machine eight years ago can be done on a Mac cluster costing about $11,000." | Dauger, Dean |
| Technology | "The internet is a great way to get on the net." | Dole, Bob |
| Technology | "Everything that can be invented, has been invented." | Duell, Charles H. |
| Technology | "It may not always be profitable at first for businesses to be online, but it is certainly going to be unprofitable not to be online." | Dyson, Esther |
| Technology | "Technology is a gift of God. After the gift of life it is perhaps the greatest of God's gifts. It is the mother of civilizations, of arts and of sciences." | Dyson, Freeman |
| Technology | "Encryption...is a powerful defensive weapon for free people. It offers a technical guarantee of privacy, regardless of who is running the government... It's hard to think of a more powerful, less dangerous tool for liberty." | Dyson, Esther |
| Technology | "Few influential people involved with the Internet claim that it is a good in and of itself. It is a powerful tool for solving social problems, just as it is a tool for making money, finding lost relatives, receiving medical advice, or, come to that, trading instructions for making bombs." | Dyson, Esther |
| Technology | "It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity." | Einstein, Albert |
| Technology | "Bill Gates is the pope of the personal computer industry. He decides who's going to build." | Ellison, Larry |
| Technology | "The digital revolution is far more significant than the invention of writing or even of printing." | Engelbart, Douglas |
| Technology | "I'm struck by the insidious, computer-driven tendency to take things out of the domain of muscular activity and put them into the domain of mental activity." | Eno, Brian |
| Technology | "The Internet is like a giant jellyfish. You can't step on it. You can't go around it. You've got to get through it." | Evans, John |
| Technology | "Surfing on the Internet is like sex; everyone boasts about doing more than they actually do. But in the case of the Internet, it's a lot more." | Fasulo, Tom |
| Technology | "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." | Feynman, Richard P. |
| Technology | "Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it." | Frisch, Max |
| Technology | "Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons." | Fuller, R. Buckminster |
| Technology | "I just invent, then wait until man comes around to needing what I've invented." | Fuller, R. Buckminster |
| Technology | "The most important and urgent problems of the technology of today are no longer the satisfactions of the primary needs or of archetypal wishes, but the reparation of the evils and damages by the technology of yesterday." | Gabor, Dennis |
| Technology | "A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked." | Gall, John |
| Technology | "The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency." | Gates, Bill |
| Technology | "For a smart material to be able to send out a more complex signal it needs to be nonlinear. If you hit a tuning fork twice as hard it will ring twice as loud but still at the same frequency. That's a linear response. If you hit a person twice as hard they're unlikely just to shout twice as loud. That property lets you learn more about the person than the tuning fork." | Gershenfeld, Neil |
| Technology | "It's impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information." | Gibson, William |
| Technology | "Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts..." | Gibson, William |
| Technology | "The 'Net is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it." | Gibson, William |
| Technology | "What the country needs are a few labor-making inventions." | Glasow, Arnold H. |
| Technology | "Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector. It encourages a man to be expansive, even reckless, while lie detectors are only a challenge to tell lies successfully." | Greene, Graham |
| Technology | "Just as we could have rode into the sunset, along came the Internet, and it tripled the significance of the PC." | Grove, Andy |
| Technology | "Leaders have to act more quickly today. The pressure comes much faster." | Grove, Andy |
| Technology | "Congress will pass a law restricting public comment on the Internet to individuals who have spent a minimum of one hour actually accomplishing a specific task while on line." | Grove, Andy |
| Technology | "I find sitting at a specially equipped desk in front of some pretty ugly plastics and staring at a little window is a very unnatural event." | Hambrose, Harold |
| Technology | "Microsoft is engaging in unlawful predatory practices that go well beyond the scope of fair competition." | Hatch, Orrin |
| Technology | "I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image." | Hawking, Stephen W. |
| Technology | "There are two ways of constructing a software design; one way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult." | Hoare, C. A. R. |
| Technology | "In total desperation, I called over to the engineering building, and I said, "Please cut off a nanosecond and send it over to me."" | Hopper, Rear Adm Grace Murray |
| Technology | "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?"" | Hopper, Rear Adm Grace Murray |
| Technology | "One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man." | Hubbard, Elbert |
| Technology | "Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards." | Huxley, Aldous |
| Technology | "It is only when they go wrong that machines remind you how powerful they are." | James, Clive |
| Technology | "My favorite thing about the Internet is that you get to go into the private world of real creeps without having to smell them." | Jillett, Penn |
| Technology | "Ours is the age which is proud of machines that think and suspicious of men who try to." | Jones, Howard Mumford |
| Technology | "For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of life, please press three." | Kahn, Alice |
| Technology | "Getting information off the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant." | Kapor, Mitchell |
| Technology | "The protean nature of the computer is such that it can act like a machine or like a language to be shaped and exploited." | Kay, Alan |
| Technology | "It [the computer] is the first metamedium, and as such it has degrees of freedom for representation and expression never before encountered and as yet barely investigated." | Kay, Alan |
| Technology | "The best way to predict the future is to invent it." | Kay, Alan |
| Technology | "All of the biggest technological inventions created by man - the airplane, the automobile, the computer - says little about his intelligence, but speaks volumes about his laziness." | Kennedy, Mark |
| Technology | "I am sorry to say that there is too much point to the wisecrack that life is extinct on other planets because their scientists were more advanced than ours." | Kennedy, John F. |
| Technology | "The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty, and all forms of human life." | Kennedy, John F. |
| Technology | "Big machines are the awe-inspiring cathedrals of the 20th century." | Kleppner, Daniel |
| Technology | "I think complexity is mostly sort of crummy stuff that is there because it's too expensive to change the interface." | Lanier, Jaron |
| Technology | "Style used to be an interaction between the human soul and tools that were limiting. In the digital era, it will have to come from the soul alone." | Lanier, Jaron |
| Technology | "We're making a major move of the Internet, and runway.polo.com is a natural extension of both polo.com and our collection business." | Lauren, Ralph |
| Technology | "Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's jobs with yesterday's tools." | McLuhan, Marshall |
| Technology | "The only thing that I'd rather own than Windows is English, because then I could charge you two hundred and forty-nine dollars for the right to speak it." | McNealy, Scott |
| Technology | "Computers shouldn't be unusable. You don't need to know how to work a telephone switch to make a phone call, or how to use the Hoover Dam to take a shower, or how to work a nuclear-power plant to turn on the lights." | McNealy, Scott |
| Technology | "It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being." | Mill, John Stuart |
| Technology | "I'm an enemy of what I call 'computer theology.' There's a class conflict out there. There's a techno-elite that lives in a different world." | Mossberg, Walter |
| Technology | "If you walked into Netscape headquarters with a plain old modem from CompUSA they'd think it was a garage-door opener." | Mossberg, Walter |
| Technology | "Western society has accepted as unquestionable a technological imperative that is quite as arbitrary as the most primitive taboo: not merely the duty to foster invention and constantly to create technological novelties, but equally the duty to surrender to these novelties unconditionally, just because they are offered, without respect to their human consequences." | Mumford, Lewis |
| Technology | "The newest computer can merely compound, at speed, the oldest problem in the relations between human beings, and in the end the communicator will be confronted with the old problem, of what to say and how to say it." | Murrow, Edward R. |
| Technology | "People are stunned to hear that one company has data files on 185 million Americans." | Nader, Ralph |
| Technology | "The purpose of medicine is to prevent significant disease, to decrease pain and to postpone death... Technology has to support these goals-if not, it may even be counterproductive." | Nobel, Dr. Joel J. |
| Technology | "Correct me if I'm wrong - the gizmo is connected to the flingflang connected to the watzis, watzis connected to the doo-dad connected to the ding dong." | Oliphant, Patrick B. |
| Technology | "Before we work on artificial intelligence why don't we do something about natural stupidity?" | Polyak, Steve |
| Technology | "There are three roads to ruin; women, gambling and technicians. The most pleasant is with women, the quickest is with gambling, but the surest is with technicians." | Pompidou, Georges |
| Technology | "We are the children of a technological age. We have found streamlined ways of doing much of our routine work. Printing is no longer the only way of reproducing books. Reading them, however, has not changed..." | Powell, Lawrence Clark |
| Technology | "Printing is no longer the only way of reproducing books. Reading them, however, has not changed; it is the same as it has always been, since Callimachus administered the great library in Alexandrea." | Powell, Lawrence Clark |
| Technology | "The Internet's been so great, and it's so nice to have fans do nice, elaborate websites, but I think the downside is some of the things... for real fans to go on and see that 90 percent of the information isn't true or to see pictures that aren't really me, or for them to be able to sell these things, that's one of the downsides, I think." | Richards, Denise |
| Technology | "I get Canadian porno - that's the extent of satellite service and Internet in my house." | Rock, Kid |
| Technology | "Since the invention of the microprocessor, the cost of moving a byte of information around has fallen on the order of 10-million-fold. Never before in the human history has any product or service gotten 10 million times cheaper-much less in the course of a couple decades. That's as if a 747 plane, once at $150 million a piece, could now be bought for about the price of a large pizza." | Rothschild, Michael |
| Technology | "All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value." | Sagan, Carl |
| Technology | "We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology." | Sagan, Carl |
| Technology | "The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them." | Saint-Exupery, Antoine de |
| Technology | "The cell phone has transformed public places into giant phone-a-thons in which callers exist within narcissistic cocoons of private conversations. Like faxes, computer modems and other modern gadgets that have clogged out lives with phony urgency, cell phones represent the 20th Century's escalation of imaginary need. We didn't need cell phones until we had them. Clearly, cell phones cause not only a breakdown of courtesy, but the atrophy of basic skills." | Schmich, Mary |
| Technology | "The system of nature, of which man is a part, tends to be self-balancing, self-adjusting, self-cleansing. Not so with technology." | Schumacher, E. F. |
| Technology | "Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage - to move in the opposite direction." | Schumacher, E. F. |
| Technology | "Looking at the proliferation of personal web pages on the net, it looks like very soon everyone on earth will have 15 Megabytes of fame." | Siriam, M. G. |
| Technology | "The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do." | Skinner, B. F. |
| Technology | "The robot is going to lose. Not by much. But when the final score is tallied, flesh and blood is going to beat the damn monster." | Smith, Adam |
| Technology | "Technology... is a queer thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other." | Snow, Carrie P. |
| Technology | "Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea - massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it." | Spafford, Gene |
| Technology | "The research rat of the future allows experimentation without manipulation of the real world. This is the cutting edge of modeling technology." | Spencer, John |
| Technology | "Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense." | Stein, Gertrude |
| Technology | "I used to think that cyberspace was fifty years away. What I thought was fifty years away, was only ten years away. And what I thought was ten years away... it was already here. I just wasn't aware of it yet." | Sterling, Bruce |
| Technology | "Spending an evening on the World Wide Web is much like sitting down to a dinner of Cheetos, two hours later your fingers are yellow and you're no longer hungry, but you haven't been nourished." | Stoll, Clifford |
| Technology | "Why is it drug addicts and computer afficionados are both called users?" | Stoll, Clifford |
| Technology | "The Internet is a telephone system that's gotten uppity." | Stoll, Clifford |
| Technology | "Men have become the tools of their tools." | Thoreau, Henry David |
| Technology | "Each year, it seems, larger and more daunting mountains of text rise from the lush lowlands of visual reproduction." | Tomkins, Calvin |
| Technology | "Microsoft isn't evil, they just make really crappy operating systems." | Torvalds, Linus |
| Technology | "The Linux philosophy is 'Laugh in the face of danger'. Oops. Wrong One. 'Do it yourself'. Yes, that's it." | Torvalds, Linus |
| Technology | "A friend called me up the other day and talked about investing in a dot-com that sells lobsters. Internet lobsters. Where will this end? The next day he sent me a huge package of lobsters on ice. How low can you stoop?" | Trump, Donald |
| Technology | "Real programmers can write assembly code in any language." | Wall, Larry |
| Technology | "Doing linear scans over an associative array is like trying to club someone to death with a loaded Uzi." | Wall, Larry |
| Technology | "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." | Watson, Thomas J. |
| Technology | "The computer programmer is a creator of universes for which he alone is responsible. Universes of virtually unlimited complexity can be created in the form of computer programs." | Weizenbaum, Joseph |
| Technology | "It's [the internet] like the flu - it just spreads like crazy." | Welch, Jack |
| Technology | "Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them." | Whitehead, Alfred North |
| Technology | "What's sort of interesting about the whole public relations disaster that is the Net, in some ways, is that the fundamentals are really good." | Whitman, Meg |
| Technology | "The typewriting machine, when played with expression, is no more annoying than the piano when played by a sister or near relation." | Wilde, Oscar |
| Technology | "We've heard that a million monkeys at a keyboard could produce the Complete Works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true." | Wilensky, Robert |
| Technology | "You can't expect to hit the jackpot if you don't put a few nickels in the machine." | Wilson, Flip |
| Technology | "If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger." | Wright, Frank Lloyd |
