top of page
Exlpore more Computer quotes

"The word user is the word used by the computer professional when they mean idiot."

"Man is still the most extraordinary computer of all."

"Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest."

"To me, there is something superbly symbolic in the fact that an astronaut, sent up as assistant to a series of computers, found that he worked more accurately and more intelligently than they. Inside the capsule, man is still in charge."

"The trick with computers I think, is to approach old and new things with the same reverence as you would like your favourite chair and not be seduced by the constant innovation otherwise you never do anything."

"There are allowable limits for radiation going - I mean there's radiation all around us. There's radiation from your television set. There's radiation from your computer. There's radiation actually occurring in the ground."

"We have an epidemic of sexual predators following our children, whether it be on the computers, whether it be in our public parks, whether it be in the workplace, or even our schools."

"I see the player piano as the grandfather of the computer, the ancestor of the entire nightmare we live in, the birth of the binary world where there is no option other than yes or no and where there is no refuge."

"Why is it drug addicts and computer afficionados are both called users?"
Explore more quotes by Arthur C. Clarke

"This had not endeared him to exobiologists such as Dr Perera, who took exactly the opposite view. To them, the only purpose of the Universe was the production of intelligence, and they were apt to talk sneeringly about purely astronomical phenomena, 'Mere dead matter' was one of their favourite phrases."

"And yet, even while they baffled him, they aroused within his heart a feeling he had never known before. When- which was not often, but sometimes happened- they burst into tears of utter frustration or despair, their tiny disappointments seemed to him more tragic than Man's long retreat after the loss of his Galactic Empire. That was something too huge and remote for comprehension, but the weeping of a child could pierce one to the heart.Alvin had met love in Diaspar, but now he was learning something equally precious, and without which love itself could never reach its highest fulfillment but must remain forever incomplete. He was learning tenderness."

"Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying."

"There is no reason to assume that the universe has the slightest interest in intelligence-or even in life. Both may be random accidental by-products of its operations like the beautiful patterns on a butterfly's wings. The insect would fly just as well without them."

"Three million years! The infinitely crowded panorama of written history, with its empires and its kings, its triumphs and its tragedies, covered barely one thousandth of this appalling span of time."

"Even more alarming were persistent rumors that someone had smuggled an Emotion Amplifier on board 'Mentor'. The so-called joy machines were banned on all planets, except under strict medical control; but there would always be people to whom reality was not good enough, and who would want to try something better."

"Moses Kaldor had always loved mountains, they made him feel nearer to the God whose nonexistence he still sometimes resented."

"Men knew better than they realized, when they placed the abode of the gods beyond the reach of gravity."

"There's no real objection to escapism, in the right places... We all want to escape occasionally. But science fiction is often very far from escapism, in fact you might say that science fiction is escape into reality... It's a fiction which does concern itself with real issues: the origin of man; our future. In fact I can't think of any form of literature which is more concerned with real issues, reality."
bottom of page