All Quotes

"Peculiar Travel Suggestions are Dancing Lessons From God"

"Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly; Man got to sit and wonder 'why, why, why?' Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land; Man got to tell himself he understand."

"Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before."

"Thus did a handful of rapacious citizens come to control all that was worth controlling in America. Thus was the savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate and unnecessary and humorless American class system created. Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as bloodsuckers, if they asked to be paid a living wage. And they saw that praise was reserved henceforth for those who devised means of getting paid enormously for committing crimes against which no laws had been passed. Thus the American dream turned belly up, turned green, bobbed to the scummy surface of cupidity unlimited, filled with gas, went bang in the noonday sun."

"I love you sons of bitches. You're all I read any more. You're the only ones who'll talk all about the really terrific changes going on, the only ones crazy enough to know that life is a space voyage, and not a short one, either, but one that'll last for billions of years. You're the only ones with guts enough to really care about the future, who really notice what machines do to us, what wars do to us, what cities do to us, what big, simple ideas do to us, what tremendous misunderstanding, mistakes, accidents, catastrophes do to us. You're the only ones zany enough to agonize over time and distance without limit, over mysteries that will never die, over the fact that we are right now determining whether the space voyage for the next billion years or so is going to be Heaven or Hell."

"We few, we happy few, we band of brothers — joined in the serious business of keeping our food, shelter, clothing and loved ones from combining with oxygen."

"You must all take instructions from me!" the conscience shrieks, in effect, to all the other mental processes. The other processes try it for a while, note that the conscience is unappeased, that it continues to shriek, and they note, too, that the outside world has not been even microscopically improved by the unselfish acts the conscience has demanded. They rebel at last. They pitch the tyrannous conscience down an oubliette, weld shut the manhole cover of that dark dungeon. They can hear the conscience no more. In the sweet silence, the mental processes look about for a new leader, and the leader most prompt to appear whenever the conscience is stilled, Enlightened Self-interest, does appear. Enlightened Self-interest gives them a flag, which they adore on sight. It is essentially the black and white Jolly Roger, with these words written beneath the skull and crossbones, 'The hell with you, Jack, I've got mine!"

"Like all real heroes, Charley had a fatal flaw. He refused to believe that he had gonorrhea, whereas the truth was that he did."

"He alienated his friends in the sciences by thanking them extravagantly for scientific advances he had read about in the recent newspapers and magazines, by assuring them, with a perfectly straight face, that life was getting better and better, thanks to scientific thinking."

"A sum of money is a leading character in this tale about people, just as a sum of honey might properly be a leading character in a tale about bees."

"She was an alcoholic. I didn't blame myself for that. The worst problem in the life of any alcoholic is alcohol."

"Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies — "God damn it, you've got to be kind.""

"We don't piss in your ashtrays, So please don't throw cigarettes in our urinals."

"Pretend to be good always, and even God will be fooled."

"The public health authorities never mention the main reason many Americans have for smoking heavily, which is that smoking is a fairly sure, fairly honorable form of suicide."

"I never knew a writer's wife who wasn't beautiful."

"The village would never accept it. It has a policy of never accepting anything. As a happy consequence, it changes about as fast as the rules of chess."

"The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General."

"It was then that Diana Moon Glampers, the Handicapper General, came into the studio with a double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun. She fired twice, and the Emperor and the Empress were dead before they hit the floor."

"The world can't afford sex anymore." "Of course it can afford sex," said Billy. "All it can't afford anymore is reproduction." "Then why the laws?" "They're bad laws," said Billy. "If you go back through history, you'll find that the people who have been most eager to rule, to make the laws, to enforce the laws and to tell everybody exactly how God Almighty wants things here on earth—those people have forgiven themselves and their friends for anything and everything. But they have been absolutely disgusted and terrified by the natural sexuality of common men and women."

"He faced the problem that complicates the lives of cannibals—namely: that a single victim cannot be used over and over."

"He had only two moods: one suspicious and self-pitying, the other arrogant and boastful. The first mood applied when he was losing money. The second mood applied when he was making it."

"So it goes."

"I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone. I get drunk, and I drive my wife away with a breath like mustard gas and roses. And then, speaking gravely and elegantly into the telephone, I ask the telephone operators to connect me with this friend or that one, from whom I have not heard in years."

"The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever. When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is "So it goes.""

"A digital computer can usually be regarded as consisting of three parts: (i) Store. (ii) Executive unit. (iii) Control. ...The executive unit is the part which carries out the various individual operations involved in a calculation. ...It is the duty of the control to see that...[the table of] instructions are obeyed correctly and in the right order. ...A typical instruction might say—"Add the number stored in position 6809 to that in 4302 and put the result back into the latter storage position." Needless to say it would not occur in the machine expressed in English. It would more likely be coded in a form such as 6809430217. Here 17 says which of various possible operations [add] is to be performed on the two numbers. ...It will be noticed that the instruction takes up 10 digits and so forms one packet of information..."

"Suppose Mother wants Tommy to call at the cobbler's every morning on his way to school to see if her shoes are done, she can ask him afresh every morning. Alternatively she can stick up a notice once and for all in the hall which he will see when he leaves for school and which tells him to call for the shoes, and also to destroy the notice when he comes back if he has the shoes with him."

"If one wants to make a machine mimic the behaviour of the human computer in some complex operation one has to ask him how it is done, and then translate the answer into the form of an instruction table. Constructing instruction tables is usually described as "programming.""

"I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted."

"I am not very impressed with theological arguments whatever they may be used to support. Such arguments have often been found unsatisfactory in the past. In the time of Galileo it was argued that the texts, "And the sun stood still... and hasted not to go down about a whole day" (Joshua x. 13) and "He laid the foundations of the earth, that it should not move at any time" (Psalm cv. 5) were an adequate refutation of the Copernican theory."

"Machines take me by surprise with great frequency."

"The view that machines cannot give rise to surprises is due, I believe, to a fallacy to which philosophers and mathematicians are particularly subject. This is the assumption that as soon as a fact is presented to a mind all consequences of that fact spring into the mind simultaneously with it. It is a very useful assumption under many circumstances, but one too easily forgets that it is false. A natural consequence of doing so is that one then assumes that there is no virtue in the mere working out of consequences from data and general principles."

"Another simile would be an atomic pile of less than critical size: an injected idea is to correspond to a neutron entering the pile from without. Each such neutron will cause a certain disturbance which eventually dies away. If, however, the size of the pile is sufficiently increased, the disturbance caused by such an incoming neutron will very likely go on and on increasing until the whole pile is destroyed. Is there a corresponding phenomenon for minds, and is there one for machines? There does seem to be one for the human mind. The majority of them seem to be "sub-critical," i.e., to correspond in this analogy to piles of sub-critical size. An idea presented to such a mind will on average give rise to less than one idea in reply. A smallish proportion are super-critical. An idea presented to such a mind may give rise to a whole "theory" consisting of secondary, tertiary and more remote ideas. Animals minds seem to be very definitely sub-critical. Adhering to this analogy we ask, "Can a machine be made to be super-critical?""

"Presumably the child-brain is something like a note-book as one buys it from the stationer's. Rather little mechanism, and lots of blank sheets."

"We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done."

"It is customary... to offer a grain of comfort, in the form of a statement that some peculiarly human characteristic could never be imitated by a machine. ... I cannot offer any such comfort, for I believe that no such bounds can be set."

"Alan Turing was the first to make a careful analysis of the potential capabilities of machines, inventing his famous "Turing machines" for the purpose. He argued that if any machine could perform a computation, then some Turing machine could perform it. The argument focuses on the assertion that any machine's operations could be simulated, one step at a time, by certain simple operations, and that Turing machines were capable of those simple operations. Turing's first fame resulted from applying this analysis to a problem posed earlier by Hilbert, which concerned the possibility of mechanizing mathematics. Turing showed that in a certain sense, it is impossible to mechanize mathematics: We shall never be able to build an "oracle" machine that can correctly answer all mathematical questions presented to it with a "yes" or "no" answer. In another famous paper Turing went on to consider the somewhat different question, "Can machines think?." It is a different question, because perhaps machines can think, but they might not be any better at mathematics than humans are; or perhaps they might be better at mathematics than humans are, but not by thinking, just by brute-force calculation power. These two papers of Turing lie near the roots of the subjects today known as automated deduction and artificial intelligence."

"I’d keep hearing: 'Oh, Alan Turing? Wasn’t he something to do with Bletchley Park? Didn’t he create the Apple logo? Didn’t he bite an apple?' But not many people know the whole story, that he invented the computer, broke the Enigma code, was prosecuted for being a homosexual and underwent a year of oestrogen injections before dying in 1954. The irony and sickness of it was extraordinary! He wasn’t shouting from the rooftops or trying to start a cause, he was just a man who was gay. He’s such a quiet hero."

"Beyond any doubt, the most important thing that has happened in cognitive science was Turing’s invention of the notion of mechanical rationality."

"And if the physicists who understood its potential had not told their generals and politicians, these would certainly have remained in ignorance, unless they were themselves postgraduate physicists, which was very unlikely. Again, Alan Turing's celebrated paper of 1935, which was to provide the foundation of modern computer theory, was originally written as a speculative exploration for mathematical logicians. The war gave him and others the occasion to translate theory into the beginnings of practice for the purpose of code-breaking, but when it appeared nobody except a handful of mathematicians even read, let alone took notice of Turing's paper. Even in his own college this clumsy-looking pale-faced genius, then a junior fellow with a taste for jogging, who posthumously became a sort of icon among homosexuals, was not a figure of any prominence; at least I do not remember him as such."

"Actually, with one alleged exception, the links of King’s dons with intelligence were with the British rather than the Soviet secret services. Kingsmen, headed by the small, roly-poly later professor of ancient history, F. E. Adcock, had set up the British codebreaking establishment in the First World War, and at least seventeen King’s dons were recruited by Adcock for the much more famous establishment at Bletchley during the Second World War, including probably the only genius at King’s in my undergraduate years, the mathematical logician Alan Turing, whom I recall as a clumsy-looking, pale-faced young fellow given to what would today be called jogging."

"[When asked if he is going to go to his high school reunion] "Yeah, I can't wait. I'm going to show up in a helicopter.""

"This speech will be very short. After all, you asked me to come here — I didn't ask you."

"The thing I just wrote [Slaughterhouse Five] is my masterpiece. The rest of it is going to be crap from now on."

"From a very young age, I knew about the legend of Alan Turing – among awkward, nerdy teenagers, he is a patron saint. He never fit in, but accomplished these wonderful things, as part of a secret queer history of computer science. And so I always dreamt of writing something about him, and I thought that there had never been a proper narrative treatment of his life, that he deserved. I by chance met the producers of the film at a party, and one of them told me they had optioned a biography. When I asked who it was, they said, ‘it’s a mathematician that you’ve never heard of.’ When they told me it was Alan Turing, I almost tackled them, and I told them I’d do anything to write this film, I’d write it for free. It was all about luck and passion."

"Here’s the thing. Alan Turing never got to stand on a stage like this and look out at all of these disconcertingly attractive faces. I do. And that’s the most unfair thing I’ve ever heard. So in this brief time here, what I wanted to do was say this: When I was 16-years-old, I tried to kill myself because I felt weird and I felt different, and I felt like I did not belong. And now I’m standing here — and so I would like this moment to be for this kid out there who feels like she’s weird or she’s different or she doesn’t fit in anywhere: Yes, you do. I promise you do. Stay weird, stay different — and then, when it’s your turn, and you are standing on this stage, please pass the same message to the next person who comes along."

"I’m not gay, but I don’t think you have to be gay to have a gay hero. Growing up, Alan Turing was certainly mine. … I’m also not the greatest mathematician of my generation. We have lots of biographical differences, but nonetheless I always identified with him so much."

"His high-pitched voice already stood out above the general murmur of well-behaved junior executives grooming themselves for promotion within the Bell corporation. Then he was suddenly heard to say: "No, I'm not interested in developing a powerful brain. All I'm after is just a mediocre brain, something like the President of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company.""

"He wondered what one might ask in a structured conversation to decide if one's interlocutor was a human being or a computer. ...but the ultimate Turing test might be to pose the question "How would a guilt-stricken homosexual commit suicide?" Would a computer ever conceive of eating an apple laced with cyanide?"

"Although a mathematician, Turing took quite an interest in the engineering side of computer design. There was some discussion in 1947 as to whether a cheaper substance than mercury could not be found for use as an ultrasonic delay medium. Turing's contribution to this discussion was to advocate the use of gin, which he said contained alcohol and water in just the right proportions to give a zero temperature coefficient of propagation velocity at room temperature."