All Quotes

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it. Alan Kay (1971) at a 1971 meeting of PARC”

“Similar remarks are attributed to Peter Drucker and Dandridge M. Cole.”

“Cf. Dennis Gabor, Inventing the Future (1963): "The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented."”

“[ Computing ] is just a fabulous place for that, because it's a place where you don't have to be a Ph.D. or anything else. It's a place where you can still be an artisan. People are willing to pay you if you're any good at all, and you have plenty of time for screwing around. Alan Kay (1972) in 1972 Rolling Stone article”

“People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware. talk at Creative Think seminar, 20 July 1982”

“A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points. Perspective is worth 80 IQ points.”

“Point of view is worth 80 IQ points”

“Talk at Creative Think seminar, 20 July 1982”

“Technology is anything that wasn't around when you were born. Hong Kong press conference in the late 1980s”

“The future is not laid out on a track. It is something that we can decide, and to the extent that we do not violate any known laws of the universe, we can probably make it work the way that we want to. 1984 in Alan Kay's paper Inventing the Future which appears in The AI Business: The Commercial Uses of Artificial Intelligence, edited by Patrick Henry Winston and Karen Prendergast. As quoted by Eugene Wallingford in a post entiteled ALAN KAY'S TALKS AT OOPSLA on November 06, 2004 9:03 PM at the website of the Computer Science section of the University of Northern Iowa.”

“Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals,”

“We are leaving out of account that most important faculty which distinguishes topics of interest from others; in fact, we are regarding the function of the mathematician as simply to determine the truth or falsity of propositions.”

“Proposed Electronic Calculator”

“Intelligent Machinery: A Report by A. M. Turing,”

“Intelligent Machinery.”

“This is only a foretaste of what is to come, and only the shadow of what is going to be. We have to have some experience with the machine before we really know its capabilities. It may take years before we settle down to the new possibilities, but I do not see why it should not enter any one of the fields normally covered by the human intellect, and eventually compete on equal terms. 'The Mechanical Brain. Answer Found to 300 Year Old Problem' The Times newspaper, 11 June 1949 page 4 column 5.”

“The sentence in bold appears on the latest British £50 bank note featuring Alan Turing which was released on 23 June 2021 on what would have been his 109th birthday.”

“Science is a differential equation . Religion is a boundary condition . Epigram to Robin Gandy (1954); reprinted in Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: the Enigma (Vintage edition 1992), p. 513.”

“The Exclusion Principle is laid down purely for the benefit of the electrons themselves, who might be corrupted (and become dragons or demons) if allowed to associate too freely. Epigram to Robin Gandy (1954).”

“Intelligent Machinery, A Heretical Theory”

“He is going to pay his debt to society ,”

“Nous nous trompons toujours deux fois sur ceux que nous aimons: d'abord à leur avantage, puis à leur désavantage. We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love”

“A novel is never anything but a philosophy put into images. And in a good novel, the whole of the philosophy has passed into the images. But if once the philosophy overflows the characters and action, and therefore looks like a label stuck on the work, the plot loses its authenticity and the novel its life. Nevertheless, a work that is to last cannot dispense with profound ideas. And this secret fusion between experiences and ideas, between life and reflection on the meaning of life, is what makes the great novelist. Review of Nausea by Jean”

“It is the failing of a certain literature to believe that life is tragic because it is wretched. Life can be magnificent and overwhelming”

“Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children. And if you don't help us, who else in the world can help us do this? Said at the Dominican Monastery of Latour”

“We have exiled beauty ; the Greeks took up arms for her. "Helen's Exile"”

“We turn our backs on nature ; we are ashamed of beauty. Our wretched tragedies have a smell of the office clinging to them, and the blood that trickles from them is the color of printer's ink. "Helen's Exile"”

“Man cannot do without beauty, and this is what our era pretends to want to disregard. It steels itself to attain the absolute and authority; it wants to transfigure the world before having exhausted it, to set it to rights before having understood it. Whatever it may say, our era is deserting this world. "Helen's Exile"”

“Toute idée fausse finit dans le sang, mais il s'agit toujours du sang des autres. C'est ce qui explique que certains de nos philosophes se sentent à l'aise pour dire n'importe quoi. Mistaken ideas always end in bloodshed, but in every case it is someone else's blood. That is why some of our thinkers feel free to say just about anything. Actuelles I, 1950”

“One does not decide the truth of a thought according to whether it is right”