It's the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting.

- The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, 1988.

A man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling it would rather be a man - a man of restless and versatile intellect - who… plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice.

- Thomas Henry Huxley, replying to Bishop Samuel Wilberforce during a debate on Darwin's theory of evolution at the meeting of the British Association at Oxford, June 30, 1860.

The computer is only a fast idiot, it has no imagination; it cannot originate action. It is, and will remain, only a tool to man.

- The American Library Association on the Univac exhibited at the 1964 World's Fair

The mind can store an estimated 100 trillion bits of information-compared with which a computer’s mere billions are virtually amnesiac.

- "Memory: Science Achieves Important New Insights into the Mother of the Muses," Newsweek. September 29, 1986

In the cybernetic age, the individual becomes increasingly subject to manipulation. His work, his consumption, and his leisure are manipulated by advertising, by ideologies, by what Skinner calls "positive reinforcements." The individuals loses his active, responsible role in the social process; he becomes completely "adjusted" and learns that any behavior, act, thought, or feeling which does not fit into the general scheme puts him at a severe disadvantage; in fact he is what he is supposed to be… What has happened in modern industrial society is that traditions, and common values, and genuine social personal ties with others have largely disappeared. The modern mass man is isolated and lonely, even though he is part of a crowd; he has no convictions which he could share with others, only slogans and ideologies he gets from the communications media.

- The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness by Erich Fromm, February 15, 1992.

'How do you know so much about everything?' was asked of a very wise and intelligent man; and the answer was 'By never being afraid or ashamed to ask questions as to anything of which I was ignorant.'

- John Abbott

To understand the place of humans in the universe is to solve a complex problem. Therefore I find it impossible to believe that an understanding based entirely on science or one based entirely on religion can be correct.

- Wilton Robert Abbott, aerospace engineer. Who's Who in America, 43rd Edition 1984-85

Good books tell the truth, even when they're about things that never have been and never will be. They're truthful in a different way.

- "Pirx's Tale" in More Tales of Pirx the Pilot by Stanisław Lem, 1983.

I guess I should warn you, if I turn out to be particularly clear, you've probably misunderstood what I've said.

- Alan Greenspan

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

- Fred Brooks, in the essay "No Silver Bullet," 1987

If I would've asked people what they wanted, they would've said 'faster horses.'

- Henry Ford

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?

- "Epigrams in Programming," SIGPLAN, Association for Computing Machinery, September 1982

People think dreams aren't real just because they aren't made of matter, of particles. Dreams are real. But they are made of viewpoints, of images, of memories and puns and lost hopes.

- The Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes by Neil Gaiman, 1989.

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?

- "Epigrams in Programming," SIGPLAN, Association for Computing Machinery, September 1982

When we all think alike, no one thinks very much.

- Walter Lippmann

Mapping the human genome has been compared with putting a man on the moon, but I believe it is more than that. This is the outstanding achievement not only of our lifetime, but in terms of human history. A few months ago I compared the project to the invention of the wheel. On reflection, it is more than that. I can well imagine technology making the wheel obsolete. But this code is the essence of mankind, and as long as humans exists, this code is going to be important and will be used.

- Thomas Michael Dexter, as quoted in the Sanger Institute press release "The first draft of the Book of Humankind has been read," June 2000.

What is the use of a house
if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?
- If you cannot tolerate the planet that it is on?

- Henry David Thoreau
From a letter to Harrison Blake May 20, 1860 later published in "Familiar Letters," 1865

It's how creativity works. Especially in humans. For every good idea, ten thousand idiotic ones must first be posed, sifted, tried out, and discarded. A mind that's afraid to toy with the ridiculous will never come up with the brilliantly original.

- Brightness Reef by David Brin, 1995.

An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.

- Niels Bohr

Playfully doing something difficult, whether useful or not, that is hacking.

- Richard Stallman, "On Hacking"

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'

- Isaac Asimov First published in Newsweek, 1980.

Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is to not stop questioning.

- Albert Einstein

I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes. That way I wouldn't have to have any goddam stupid useless conversations with anybody. If anybody wanted to tell me something, they'd have to write it on a piece of paper and shove it over to me. They'd get bored as hell doing that after a while, and then I'd be through with having conversations for the rest of my life.

The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger, Chapter 25

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars - mere globs of gas atoms. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination - stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern - of which I am a part… What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?

- Richard Feynman, as quoted in Sparks of Genius, 2001.

Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.

- Buddha, roughly 2500 years ago.

It's a truism in technological development that no silver lining comes without its cloud.

- Bruce Sterling on the "National Research and Education Network" A speech before the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and Finance, April 29, 1993

So the thing to remember is this: the web is huge and very important, but it’s just one of the many things that run on the internet. The net is much bigger and far more important than anything that travels on it. Understand this simple distinction and you're halfway to wisdom.

- "The internet: Everything you ever need to know" by John Naughton, June 20, 2010.

Most people don't realize how important librarians are. I ran across a book recently which suggested that the peace and prosperity of a culture was solely related to how many librarians it contained. Possibly a slight overstatement. But a culture that doesn't value its librarians doesn't value ideas and without ideas, well, where are we?

- The Sandman by Neil Gaiman Character: Lucien, Librarian of the Dreaming.

All life is an experiment.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Philosopher

Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups... So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.

- "How To Build A Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later" by Philip K. Dick, 1978.

Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world.

- Harriet Tubman

Do not try the patience of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger.

- Galen, "The Geometry of Shadows," Babylon 5 by J. Michael Straczynski

What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.

- Carl Sagan in Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, Episode 11: The Persistence of Memory. First aired December 7, 1980.

There is nothing more dreadful than imagination without taste.

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Any fool can use a computer. Many do.

- Ted Nelson, Information technology pioneer

We are star stuff which has taken its destiny into its own hands. The loom of time and space works the most astonishing transformations of matter.

- Carl Sagan in the Cosmos: A Personal Voyage documentary, 1980.

If at first, the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.

- Albert Einstein

Technology is a word that describes something that doesn't work yet.

- Douglas Adams, in his JavaOne keynote address in 1999

The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home. In a cosmic perspective, most human concerns seem insignificant, even petty. And yet our species is young and curious and brave and shows much promise. In the last few millennia we have made the most astonishing and unexpected discoveries about the Cosmos and our place within it, explorations that are exhilarating to consider. They remind us that humans have evolved to wonder, that understanding is a joy, that knowledge is prerequisite to survival. I believe our future depends powerfully on how well we understand this Cosmos in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky.

- Cosmos by Carl Sagan, 1980.

In view of the kind of matter we work with, it will never be possible to avoid little laboratory explosions.

- Sigmund Freud in a letter to Carl Jung, June 18, 1909.

It came to me then, as if I was making it up; but I may have heard it long ago. Certainly it reminds me very much of Bilbo in the last years, before he went away. He used often to say there was only one Road; that it was like a great river: its springs were at every doorstep, and every path was its tributary. "It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door," he used to say. "You step into the Road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to. Do you realize that this is the very path that goes through Mirkwood, and that if you let it, it might take you to the Lonely Mountain or even further and to worse places?"

- Frodo Baggins, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien

Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors. The library connects us with the insights and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all of our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species. Public libraries depend on voluntary contributions. I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries.

- Cosmos by Carl Sagan, 1980.

In science, self-satisfaction is death. Personal self-satisfaction is the death of the scientist. Collective self-satisfaction is the death of the research. It is restlessness, anxiety, dissatisfaction, agony of mind that nourish science.

- Jacques Monod in New Scientist, June 17, 1976.

Science is facts; just as houses are made of stones, so is science made of facts; but a pile of stones is not a house and a collection of facts is not necessarily science.

- Henri Poincaré, French mathematician

Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.

- Cosmos by Carl Sagan, 1980.

A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted. You should live several lives while reading it.

- William Styron in an interview in Writers at Work, First Series, 1958.

It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.

- Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, "Good Omens"

The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us - there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation of a distant memory, as if we were falling from a great height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.

- Cosmos by Carl Sagan, 1980.

It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.

- Valis by Philip K. Dick, 1981.

To be nobody-but-myself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make me everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.

- E.E. Cummings, Poet

I often find that a novel, even a well-written and compelling novel, can become a blur to me soon after I've finished reading it. I recollect perfectly the feeling of reading it, the mood I occupied, but I am less sure about the narrative details. It is almost as if the book were, as Wittgenstein said of his propositions, a ladder to be climbed and then discarded after it has served its purpose.

- " The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age" by Sven Birkerts, 1994.

Seize the moment of excited curiosity on any subject to solve your doubts; for if you let it pass, the desire may never return, and you may remain in ignorance.

- William Wirt

...the Internet is the government in the broad sense of "the thing that governs or dictates policy." The Internet is the new kind of awareness. It’s not something you look at. It is the way or means through which you look at things. So it becomes the basis of your whole way of thinking — your new way of imagining things — and this process is largely unconscious.

- "Eric McLuhan: The End of Geography" by Blake Harris Published in The X-Journals, November 11, 2008.

Technology inspires art, and art challenges technology.

- John Lasseter

Perhaps some future [D&D] variation may even take a cue from recursive movies like "Being John Malkovich" and the "Scream" series. In it, you'd play a game-company vice president with the Bard-like name of Dancey. To win, you'd need to regain the trust of e mbittered former loyalists and guide them through the bizarre Astral Plane known as the Internet -- where a cruel kingdom called Microsoft battles a guild of gnome-like tinkerers and their nebbishy leader, a sorcerer from faraway Finland, the one with an unpronounceable name and a magic penguin.

- Wagner James Au, Gaming blogger and Tech writer

Fiction is evolutionarily valuable because it allows low-cost experimentation compared to trying things for real.

- Dennis Dutton

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.

- The Road Ahead by Bill Gates, 1995.

There is nothing more dangerous than a resourceful idiot.

- Scott Adams, The Dilbert Principle

Passion. It lies in all of us. Sleeping...waiting...and though unwanted...unbidden...it will stir...open its jaws, and howl. It speaks to us...guides us. Passion rules us all. And we obey. What other choice do we have? Passion is the source of our finest moments. the joy of love...the clarity of hatred...and the ecstasy of grief. It hurts sometimes more than we can bear. If we could live without passion, maybe we'd know some kind of peace. But we would be hollow. Empty rooms, shuttered and dank. Without passion, we'd truly be dead.

- Buffy the Vampire Slayer, (Episode 217) "Passion" by Ty King. Character: Angelus

On all levels primary, and secondary and undergraduate - mathematics is taught as an isolated subject with few, if any, ties to the real world. To students, mathematics appears to deal almost entirely with things whlch are of no concern at all to man. ...mathematics is expected either to be immediately attractive to students on its own merits or to be accepted by students solely on the basis of the teacher's assurance that it will be helpful in later life. [And yet,] mathematlcs is the key to understanding and mastering our physical, social and biological worlds.

- Translated from an editorial written by Morris Kline for his June 11, 1992 obituary in the New York Times.

Here lies a toppled God -
His fall was not a small one.
We did but build his pedestal,
A narrow and a tall one.

- "Tleilaxu Epigram" Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert

Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic god. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times.

- Civilization and Its Discontents by Sigmund Freud, 1929.

As machines become more and more efficient and perfect, so it will become clear that imperfection is the greatness of man.

- The Necessity of Art by Ernst Fischer, 1959.

Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats.

- Howard Aiken, Early computer pioneer

To design something really well you have to get it. You have to really grok what it's all about. It takes a passionate commitment to thoroughly understand something -- chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. Most people don't take the time to do that.

Creativity is just connecting things.

When you ask a creative person how they did something, they may feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after awhile. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they've had more experiences or have thought more about their experiences than other people have.

Unfortunately, that's too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven't had very diverse experiences. They don't have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions, without a broad perspective on the problem.

The broader one's understanding of the human experience, the better designs we will have.

- Steve Jobs, as quoted in "Steve Jobs: The Next Insanely Great Thing" by Gary Wolf. First published in Wired magazine, February 1996.

The future masters of technology will have to be light-hearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb.

- Marshall McLuhan, 1969.

In this culture, I figure people have the right to name themselves; if you feel like a geek, you are one. But there are some clues : You are online a good part of the time. You feel a personal connection with technology, less its mechanics than its applications and consequences. You're a fan of The Simpsons and The Matrix. You saw The Phantom Menace opening weekend despite the hype and despite JarJar. You are obsessive about pop culture, which is what you talk about with your friends or co-workers every Monday.
You don't like being told what to do, authority being a force you see as not generally on your side. Life began for you when you got out of high school, which more likely than not, was a profoundly painful experience. You didn't go to the prom, or if you did, you certainly didn't feel comfortable there. Maybe your parents helped you get through, maybe a teacher or a soulmate.
Now, you zone out on your work. You solve problems and puzzles. You love to create things just for the kick of it. Even though you're indispensable to the company that's hired you, it's almost impossible to imagine yourself running it. You may have power of your own now - a family, money - yet you see yourself as one who never quite fits in. In many ways, geekdom is a state of mind, a sense of yourself in relation to the world that's not easily rewritten.

- Geeks: How Two Lost Boys Rode the Internet Out of Idaho by Jon Katz,

The case for digitally-driven stupidity assumes we’ll fail to integrate digital freedoms into society as well as we integrated literacy. This assumption in turn rests on three beliefs: that the recent past was a glorious and irreplaceable high-water mark of intellectual attainment; that the present is only characterized by the silly stuff and not by the noble experiments; and that this generation of young people will fail to invent cultural norms that do for the Internet’s abundance what the intellectuals of the 17th century did for print culture.

- "Does the Internet Make You Smarter?" by Clay Shirky, June 4, 2010.

Software is a great combination between artistry and engineering. When you finally get done and get to appreciate what you have done it is like a part of yourself that you've put together. I think a lot of the people here feel that way.

- Bill Gates

Technology will definitely solve all our problems, but in the process it will create brand-new ones. But that's OK because the most you can expect from life is to get to solve better and better problems.

- Scott Adams, Creator of Dilbert

The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance - the idea that anything is possible.

- Ray Bradbury

The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn't understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.

- Eric Schmidt

Our earth is round, and, among other things, that means that you and I can hold completely different points of view and both be right. The difference of our positions will show stars in your window I cannot even imagine. Your sky may burn with light, while mine, at the same moment, spreads beautiful to darkness. Still we must choose how we separately corner the circling universe of our experience. Once chosen, our cornering will determine the message of any star and darkness we encounter.

- Introduction to the "Corners on the Curving Sky" by June Jordan, 1970.

...It makes no sense to try, or even to want, to fit into a place where you don't belong. ...It's not going to happen, and if it ever did, it's not what you would want anyway. ...It's a delusion. The trick is to take something that's painful, and to make it so trivial that it's inconsequential. Just walk away and make it trivial. My advice to geeks? If you don't like it, leave, leave fast, make it trivial. Come to terms with who you are.

- Jesse Daily, in correspondence with Jon Katz Published in Geeks: How Two Lost Boys Rode the Internet Out of Idaho by Jon Katz

When, as we must often do, we fear science, we really fear ourselves. Human dignity is better served by embracing knowledge.

- John Charles Polanyi, 1986 Chemistry Nobel Laureate.

I was in my mid-teens when I discovered that I was a writer. Notice that I didn’t say 'wanted to be a writer.' 'Want' has almost nothing to do with it. It's either there or it isn't. If you happen to be one, you're stuck with it. You'll write whether you get paid for it or not. You won't be able to help yourself. When it's going, well, it's like reaching up into heaven and pulling down fire. It's better than any dope you can buy. When it's not going well, it's much like giving birth to a baby elephant.

- Belgarath the Sorcerer by David Eddings, June 1, 1996.

Learning is seeing patterns in the world around us. Teaching is creating the conditions in which students can see the known pattens of our collective understanding. Nobel prize winners see patterns where they have not been seen before

- John Charles Polanyi, 1986 Chemistry Nobel Laureate.

I put my heart and my soul into my work,
and have lost my mind in the process.

- Vincent van Gogh

It is the essence of genius to make use of the simplest ideas.

- Charles Deguy

I've developed a new philosophy - I only dread one day at a time.

- Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz.

Science is wonderful: for years uranium cost only a few dollars a ton until scientists discovered you could kill people with it.

- 20,000 quips & quotes by Evan Esar.

The Net is a unique creation of human intelligence.
... the first intelligent artificial organism.
... represents the growth of a new society within the old.
... represents a new model of governance.
... represents a threat to civil liberties.
... the greatest free marketplace of ideas that has ever existed.
The Net is in imminent danger of extinction.
The Net is immortal.

- Henry Edward Hardy, introduction to The History of the Net
Master's Thesis for the School of Communications, Grand Valley State University (September 28, 1993)

Man is manifestly not the measure of all things. This universe is shot through with mystery. The very fact of its being, and of our own, is a mystery absolute, and the only miracle worthy of the name.

- The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason by Sam Harris, 2004.

If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.

- Swann's Way by Marcel Proust, 1913.

If people never did silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done.

- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Austrian philosopher

Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence-whether much that is glorious-whether all that is profound-does not spring from disease of thought-from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect.

- "Eleanora" by Edgar Allan Poe, 1841.

There's no point being grown-up if you can't be childish sometimes.

- The Doctor Who Episode 75, "Robot" by Terrance Dicks, January 18, 1975. Character: The Doctor

Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before. He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.

- The character Bokonon, in "Cat's Cradle" by Kurt Vonnegut

...modern technology is a major evolutionary transition - as important as when the first cells came together to form multicellular organisms. It would be astonishing if that occurred without disrupting existing life.

- Gregory Stock, as quoted in "Cloning. Problem? No problem." First published in Wired, September 1997.

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.

- Kurt Vonnegut, "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater"

Introduction

Welcome to Geek Quotes, my own personal repository for interesting clips, excerpts, and quotations of geek wisdom. Feel free to chime in with your own in the comments section!