Our Favorite Technology Quotations

These are some of our favorite quotations about computers, the Internet, and technology in general. We find it very useful to have a selection of quotations to use when we're preparing presentations and handouts. Do you know of a quote we should include in our list? Please let us know!

I heard there's rumors on the Internets that we're going to have a draft. —President George W. Bush, during the second presidential debate

The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from. - Andrew S. Tannenbaum

Where is all the knowledge we lost with information? - T.S. Elliot

The telephone wire, as we know it, has become too slow and too small to handle Internet traffic. It took 75 years for telephones to be used by 50 million customers, but it took only four years for the Internet to reach that many users. - Lori Valigra

640K ought to be enough for anybody. - Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates,1981

The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do. - B. F. Skinner

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. - George Pompidou

Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage, and those who manage what they do not understand. - Archibald Putt

For years there has been a theory that millions of monkeys typing at random on millions of typewriters would reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. The Internet has proven this theory to be untrue. - Anonymous

Computers make it easier to do a lot of things, but most of the things they make it easier to do don't need to be done. - Andy Rooney

In the old days, people robbed stagecoaches and knocked off armored trucks. Now they're knocking off servers. - Richard Power

I think there is a world market for maybe five computers. - IBM Chairman Thomas Watson, 1943

If you have any trouble sounding condescending, find a Unix user to show you how it's done. - ScottAdams

In a few minutes a computer can make a mistake so great that it would have taken many men many months to equal it. - Anonymous

If computers get too powerful, we can organize them into a committee. That will do them in. - Bradley'sBromide

The Internet is the Viagra of big business. - Jack Welch, Chairman and CEO, General Electric

At some point...we must have faith in the intelligence of the end user. - Anonymous

There are two major products that came out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence. - Jeremy S. Anderson

One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man. - Elbert Hubbard

Any teacher that can be replaced by a computer, deserves to be. - David Thornburg

Those parts of the system that you can hit with a hammer are called hardware; those program instructions that you can only curse at are called software. - Anonymous

Save early, save often. - Alwin Lee and everyone else who uses Microsoft Word

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology. - Carl Sagan

If you tried to read every document on the web, then for each day's effort you would be a year further behind in your goal. - Anonymous

There might be new technology, but technological progress itself was nothing new - and over the years it had not destroyed jobs, but created them. - Margaret Thatcher

The last good thing written in C++ was the Pachelbel Canon. - Jerry Olson

The most overlooked advantage to owning a computer is that if they foul up there's no law against whacking them around a little. - Porterfield

Build early and build often. - Proprietary developer adage

Release early and release often. - Open source developer adage

Everything that can be invented has been invented. - Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents,1899

Computers are magnificent tools for the realization of our dreams, but no machine can replace the human spark of spirit, compassion, love, and understanding. - Louis Gerstner, CEO, IBM

GARBAGE IN---GOSPEL OUT - Fairchild Research and Development, 1969

Any science or technology which is sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic. - Arthur C. Clarke

Any technology that is distinguishable from magic is not sufficiently advanced. - Gregory Benford

Never let a computer know you're in a hurry. - Anonymous

A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God. - Alan J. Perlis

I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work. - Thomas Edison

Get your feet off my desk, get out of here, you stink, and we're not going to buy your product. - Joe Keenan, President of Atari (1976), responding to Steve Jobs' offer to sell him rights to the new personal computer he and Steve Wozniak developed.

The Internet is a great way to get on the net. - Senator Bob Dole

Computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps only weigh 1 1/2 tons. - Popular Mechanics, 1949

From then on, when anything went wrong with a computer, we said it had bugs in it. - Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, US Navy

Technology is like fish. The longer it stays on the shelf, the less desirable it becomes. - Andrew Heller, IBM

AOL is like the cockroach left after the nuclear bomb hits. They know how to survive. - Jan Horsfall, VP of marketing for Lycos

How could this be a problem in a country where we have Intel and Microsoft? - Al Gore on Y2K

The modern computer hovers between the obsolescent and the nonexistent. - Sydney Brenner in 1927

The Linux philosophy is 'Laugh in the face of danger.' Oops. Wrong One. 'Do it yourself.' Yes, that's it. - Linus Torvalds

To be a nemesis, you have to actively try to destroy something, don't you? Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect. - Linus Torvalds

Windows is just DOS in drag. - Anonymous

There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home. - Ken Olson (President of Digital Equipment Corporation) at the Convention of the World Future Society in Boston in 1977.

A good programmer is someone who always looks both ways before crossing a one-way street. Doug Linder

During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. - Al Gore describing his 1986 legislation to interconnect five supercomputer centers (17 years after the first Internet servers hooked up).

If Gore invented the Internet, I invented spell-check. - Former Vice President J. Danforth Quayle

The day I made that statement, I was tired because I'd been up all night inventing the Camcorder. - Al Gore, attempting damage control.

Interested in finding more quotations for your presentation? We recommend you visit About.com's collection of quotations for just about any subject you can think of!

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