"It used to be said of a man who had suffered a catastrophic setback in his line of work that he had been handed his head on a platter. We are being handed our heads with tweezers now."

"The danger of computers becoming like humans is not as great as the danger of humans becoming like computers."

"Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X' label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network."

"Einstein argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer."

"Interviewer: Is studying computer science the best way to prepare to be a programmer? Bill Gates: No. the best way to prepare is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating system. You got to be willing to read other people's code, then write your own, then have other people review your code. You've got to want to be in this incredible feedback loop where you get the world-class people to tell you what you're doing wrong."

"Around computers it is difficult to find the correct unit of time to measure progress. Some cathedrals took a century to complete. Can you imagine the grandeur and scope of a program that would take as long?"

"While technical instruments are generally the result of more or less fortuitous discoveries, which are perfected and refined over time through the accumulation of practical experience, machines have a distinctive feature: they are invented, i.e. designed in advance, and we know how they will be structured, how they will work and why they will work in a certain way before they are actually built. All this amounts to saying that there is nothing mysterious about a machine, that everything is, in principle, clear and distinct."

"Anything that was in the world when you were born is normal and natural. Anything invented between when you were 15 and 35 is new and revolutionary and exciting, and you'll probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're 35 is against the natural order of things."

"High technology has done us one great service: It has retaught us the delight of performing simple and primordial tasks—chopping wood, building a fire, drawing water from a spring."

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."

"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?"...I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."

"The only legitimate use of a computer is to play games."

"The primary duty of an exception handler is to get the error out of the lap of the programmer and into the surprised face of the user."

"Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology."

"Man has created a grandiose world of technology, of which dread and fear are often the result... Fortunately, events in the world and our way of life are not determined by technology alone."

"I’ve heard it said that technology makes a good person better, and it makes a bad person worse. That’s okay with me. I say we keep building new versions of ourselves, keep exploring the unknown, and keep growing. We’re gonna be fine. Different, but fine. Because most people are good. Right?"