Do you realize if it weren’t for Edison we’d be watching TV by candlelight?
Al Boliska
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.
Alan Kay
The protean nature of the computer is such that it can act like a machine or like a language to be shaped and exploited.
Alan Kay
I think it is inevitable that people program poorly. Training will not substantially help matters. We have to learn to live with it.
Alan Perlis
In software systems it is often the early bird that makes the worm.
Alan Perlis
It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.
Albert Einstein
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
Aldous Huxley
Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.
Alfred North Whitehead
Our technological powers increase, but the side effects and potential hazards also escalate.
Alvin Toffler
Inventor: A person who makes an ingenious arrangement of wheels, levers and springs, and believes it civilization.
Ambrose Bierce
Telephone, n. An invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance.
Ambrose Bierce
The Internet is so big, so powerful and pointless that for some people it is a complete substitute for life.
Andrew Brown
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.
Andy Grove
Just as we could have rode into the sunset, along came the Internet, and it tripled the significance of the PC.
Andy Grove
Leaders have to act more quickly today. The pressure comes much faster.
Andy Grove
Making duplicate copies and computer printouts of things no one wanted even one of in the first place is giving America a new sense of purpose.
Andy Rooney
The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Arthur C. Clarke
The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.
B. F. Skinner
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.
Bill Gates
The internet is a great way to get on the net.
Bob Dole
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.
Bruce Sterling
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.
Carl Sagan
Technology… is a queer thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other.
Carrie P. Snow
The Internet is a telephone system that’s gotten uppity.
Clifford Stoll
It is only when they go wrong that machines remind you how powerful they are.
Clive James
I have an almost religious zeal… not for technology per se, but for the Internet which is for me, the nervous system of mother Earth, which I see as a living creature, linking up.
Dan Millman
Technology is so much fun but we can drown in our technology. The fog of information can drive out knowledge.
Daniel J. Boorstin
Bill Gates is a very rich man today… and do you want to know why? The answer is one word: versions.
Dave Barry
The Internet is the most important single development in the history of human communication since the invention of call waiting.
Dave Barry
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.
Dennis Gabor
The system of nature, of which man is a part, tends to be self-balancing, self-adjusting, self-cleansing. Not so with technology.
E. F. Schumacher
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.
Edward R. Murrow
One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.
Elbert Hubbard
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.
Esther Dyson
If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger.
Frank Lloyd Wright
Television is a medium because anything well done is rare.
Fred Allen
Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.
Gertrude Stein
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.
Graham Greene
Men have become the tools of their tools.
Henry David Thoreau
Technology has to be invented or adopted.
Jared Diamond
I think complexity is mostly sort of crummy stuff that is there because it’s too expensive to change the interface.
Jaron Lanier
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.
Jaron Lanier
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.
Jean Arp
Building technical systems involves a lot of hard work and specialized knowledge: languages and protocols, coding and debugging, testing and refactoring.
Jesse James Garrett
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.
Jimmy Carter
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.
John F. Kennedy
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.
John F. Kennedy
Relying on the government to protect your privacy is like asking a peeping tom to install your window blinds.
John Perry Barlow
The Internet treats censorship as a malfunction and routes around it.
John Perry Barlow
The research rat of the future allows experimentation without manipulation of the real world. This is the cutting edge of modeling technology.
John Spencer
It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being.
John Stuart Mill
Building one space station for everyone was and is insane: we should have built a dozen.
Larry Niven
Doing linear scans over an associative array is like trying to club someone to death with a loaded Uzi.
Larry Wall
Real programmers can write assembly code in any language.
Larry Wall
Microsoft isn’t evil, they just make really crappy operating systems.
Linus Torvalds
The Linux philosophy is ‘Laugh in the face of danger’. Oops. Wrong One. ‘Do it yourself’. Yes, that’s it.
Linus Torvalds
Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it.
Max Frisch
I think people have a vague sense that the television system is changing.
Michael K. Powell
Getting information off the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant.
Mitchell Kapor
The telephone is a 100-year-old technology. It’s time for a change. Charging for phone calls is something you did last century.
Niklas Zennstrom
If we continue to develop our technology without wisdom or prudence, our servant may prove to be our executioner.
Omar N. Bradley
Microsoft is engaging in unlawful predatory practices that go well beyond the scope of fair competition.
Orrin Hatch
The typewriting machine, when played with expression, is no more annoying than the piano when played by a sister or near relation.
Oscar Wilde
Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.
R. Buckminster Fuller
I just invent, then wait until man comes around to needing what I’ve invented.
R. Buckminster Fuller
People are stunned to hear that one company has data files on 185 million Americans.
Ralph Nader
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.
Richard P. Feynman
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.
Scott McNealy
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.
Stewart Alsop
Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men.
Theodor Adorno
The march of science and technology does not imply growing intellectual complexity in the lives of most people. It often means the opposite.
Thomas Sowell
Sites need to be able to interact in one single, universal space.
Tim Berners-Lee
The Web as I envisaged it, we have not seen it yet. The future is still so much bigger than the past.
Tim Berners-Lee
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.
Wernher von Braun
Defect-free software does not exist.
Wietse Venema
Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts.
William Gibson
It’s impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information.
William Gibson
The ‘Net is a waste of time, and that’s exactly what’s right about it.
William Gibson