Hackers Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Hackers. Here they are! All 100 of them:

Never underestimate the determination of a kid who is time-rich and cash-poor.
Cory Doctorow (Little Brother (Little Brother, #1))
Hide yourself in God, so when a man wants to find you he will have to go there first.
Shannon L. Alder
I have a hacker, a half-dead dog, and a child. It’s hardly an arsenal.
Victoria Schwab (Vicious (Villains, #1))
There are few sources of energy so powerful as a procrastinating college student.
Paul Graham (Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age)
No one messes around with a nerd’s computer and escapes unscathed.
E.A. Bucchianeri (Brushstrokes of a Gadfly (Gadfly Saga, #1))
Idiots emit bogons, causing machinery to malfunction in their presence. System administrators absorb bogons, letting machinery work again.
Charles Stross (The Atrocity Archives (Laundry Files, #1))
Hackers are nerdy, pasty, tubby, little geeks with triple thick glasses and this is probably a demented otaku with smelly feet. So catching him will be a breeze!
Keiko Nobumoto (Cowboy Bebop Film Manga, Volume 1)
You lose yourself, Erica, because with the right person, who you become together is something so much greater, more than you could even realize right now.
Meredith Wild (Hardwired (Hacker, #1))
I'm a hacker!" Cadel protested. "I don't poison people! I don't blow them up!
Catherine Jinks (Evil Genius (Genius, #1))
But Asha Grant isn't a hacker wizard like her cousin. She's not a kung fu expert.She's not particularly brilliant at anything. She's a ***ing pharmacy intern,chum.Just a regular person like you.An ordinary person caught up in a really **** situation.So I think,out of every person in these files, that makes her the bravest.
Amie Kaufman (Obsidio (The Illuminae Files, #3))
Look at you, hacker: a pathetic creature of meat and bone, panting and sweating as you run through my corridors. How can you challenge a perfect, immortal machine?
Ken Levine
You were right. I'm going to make you want things you never knew you wanted.
Meredith Wild (Hardwired (Hacker, #1))
I went to prison for my hacking. Now people hire me to do the same things I went to prison for, but in a legal and beneficial way.
Kevin D. Mitnick (Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker)
Did you love well what you very soon left? Come home and take me in your arms and take away this stomach ache, headache, heartache.
Marilyn Hacker
Most hackers are young because young people tend to be adaptable. As long as you remain adaptable, you can always be a good hacker.
Emmanuel Goldstein (Dear Hacker: Letters to the Editor of 2600)
It is not the monsters we should be afraid of; it is the people that don't recognize the same monsters inside of themself.
Shannon L. Alder
I admire these phone hackers. I think they have a lot of patience. I can't even be bothered to check my OWN voicemails.
Andrew Lawrence
progress comes not only in great leaps but also from hundreds of small steps.
Walter Isaacson (The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution)
The recipe for great work is: very exacting taste, plus the ability to gratify it.
Paul Graham (Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age)
A new idea comes suddenly and in a rather intuitive way,” Einstein once said, “but intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience.
Walter Isaacson (The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution)
Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.
Paul Graham (Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age)
The main reason nerds are unpopular is that they have other things to think about.
Paul Graham (Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age)
I've got six months to sort out the hackers, get the Japanese knotweed under control and find an acceptable form of narcissus.
Jasper Fforde (Lost in a Good Book (Thursday Next, #2))
Every time some [developer] says, ‘Nobody will go to the trouble of doing that,’ there’s some kid in Finland who will go to the trouble.
Kevin D. Mitnick (The Art of Intrusion: The Real Stories Behind the Exploits of Hackers, Intruders and Deceivers)
You happened to me. You were as deep down as I’ve ever been. You were inside me like my pulse.
Marilyn Hacker
I appreciate the offer. I really do. But you can't put a price on independence, Blake.
Meredith Wild (Hardpressed (Hacker, #2))
He shook his head and raked his hands through his hair. "I'm sorry, Erica, but I'm going to fix this. I promise." I nodded, trusting he would. Said by Blake to Erica
Meredith Wild (Hardwired (Hacker, #1))
I’m a fucking killing machine, and you’re a sweet little hacker who likes to flirt with danger. Baby, I am danger.
Rebecca Zanetti (Total Surrender (Sin Brothers, #4))
Innovation requires having at least three things: a great idea, the engineering talent to execute it, and the business savvy (plus deal-making moxie) to turn it into a successful product.
Walter Isaacson (The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution)
Genius has less to do with the size of your mind than how open it is.
Shane Snow (Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success)
Sweetheart, it isn’t lust; it’s all the rest of what I want with you that scares me shitless.
Marilyn Hacker
No engineer would have dreamed of such an inelegant solution, which goes to illustrate the opportunistic nature of evolution. (As Francis Crick once said, ‘God is a hacker, not an engineer.’)
V.S. Ramachandran (The Tell: Tale Brain-Unlocking the Mystry of Human Nature)
i'm alternatingly brilliant and witless-and sleepless: bed is just a swamp to roll in.
Marilyn Hacker (Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons)
The Yankees' Facebook page was hacked. The hacker was immediately purchased and signed to a 5 year contract with the Yankees.
Stephen Colbert
To guys like Mark, time was another weapon of the establishment, like alphabetical order. The great engineers, hackers - they didn't function under the same time constraints as everyone else.
Ben Mezrich (The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, a Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal)
Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.
Walter Isaacson (The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution)
JOHN: you hacked my dad's wallet??
Andrew Hussie (Homestuck)
It's important for nerds to realize, too, that school is not life. School is a strange, artificial thing, half sterile and half feral. It's all-encompassing, like life, but it isn't the real thing. It's only temporary, and if you look, you can see beyond it even while you're still in it.
Paul Graham (Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age)
Let's start with a test: Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers? If the answer is no, you might want to stop and think about that. If everything you believe is something you're supposed to believe, could that possibly be a coincidence? Odds are it isn't. Odds are you just think whatever you're told.
Paul Graham (Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age)
You read everything—that’s part of the job,” he said. “You accumulate all this trivia, and you hope that someday maybe a millionth of it will be useful.
Walter Isaacson (The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution)
Baby, this is who I am. I'm hardwired this way. And if I'm trying to take control over the situation, please understand that I have very solid reasoning for it.
Meredith Wild (Hardwired (Hacker, #1))
if you can imagine someone surpassing you, you should do it yourself.
Paul Graham (Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age)
Tsukiko Saionji: He doesn't look like a weed whacker. Aoi "Flippy" Kyogoku: But I'm a computer hacker, and a safe cracker, and a butt smacker...and I've got just the right equipment to trim your hedge.
Yuu Watase
I can't live without this Erica. Without you.
Meredith Wild (Hardpressed (Hacker, #2))
Innovation requires articulation.
Walter Isaacson (The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution)
But the main lesson to draw from the birth of computers is that innovation is usually a group effort, involving collaboration between visionaries and engineers, and that creativity comes from drawing on many sources. Only in storybooks do inventions come like a thunderbolt, or a lightbulb popping out of the head of a lone individual in a basement or garret or garage.
Walter Isaacson (The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution)
Who gets to choose what battle takes her down?
Marilyn Hacker
There are lines of yours I know by heart. There are scents of yours soaked in my skin.
Marilyn Hacker
I love you, and I'm going to do whatever I need to do to protect you. Do you understand?
Meredith Wild (Hardwired (Hacker, #1))
It would all be done with keys on alphanumeric keyboards that stood for weightless, invisible chains of electronic presence or absence. If patterns of ones and zeroes were "like" patterns of human lives and deaths, if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long strings of ones and zeroes, then what kind of creature could be represented by a long string of lives and deaths? It would have to be up one level, at least -- an angel, a minor god, something in a UFO. It would take eight human lives and deaths just to form one character in this being's name -- its complete dossier might take up a considerable piece of history of the world. We are digits in God's computer, she not so much thought as hummed to herself to sort of a standard gospel tune, And the only thing we're good for, to be dead or to be living, is the only thing He sees. What we cry, what we contend for, in our world of toil and blood, it all lies beneath the notice of the hacker we call God.
Thomas Pynchon (Vineland)
I’m not on my way anywhere, Harry sometimes tells inquirers. How to explain, in a culture frantic for resolution, that sometimes the shit stays messy? I do not want the female gender that has been assigned to me at birth. Neither do I want the male gender that transsexual medicine can furnish and that the state will award me if I behave in the right way. I don’t want any of it. How to explain that for some, or for some at some times, this irresolution is OK—desirable, even (e.g., “gender hackers”)—whereas for others, or for others at some times, it stays a source of conflict or grief?
Maggie Nelson (The Argonauts)
What hackers do is figure out technology and experiment with it in ways many people never imagined. They also have a strong desire to share this information with others and to explain it to people whose only qualification may be the desire to learn.
Emmanuel Goldstein (Dear Hacker: Letters to the Editor of 2600)
But have you ever felt that something was so good it couldn’t possibly last?
Kevin D. Mitnick (Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker)
If you can keep hope and worry balanced, they will drive a project forward the same way your two legs drive a bicycle forward.
Paul Graham (Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age)
Then don't give up on us. Love me, damn it. Please baby. Let me love you.
Meredith Wild (Hardpressed (Hacker, #2))
Jesus, Erica, I'd walk through fire to make sure you were safe.
Meredith Wild (Hardwired (Hacker, #1))
Mine. You're mine. Just like this. Your body, your heart. Every part of you.
Meredith Wild (Hardpressed (Hacker, #2))
Out in the field, any connection with home just makes you weaker. It reminds you that you were once civilized, soft; and that can get you killed faster than a bullet through the head.
Henry Mosquera (Sleeper's Run)
If you want to make money at some point, remember this, because this is one of the reasons startups win. Big companies want to decrease the standard deviation of design outcomes because they want to avoid disasters. But when you damp oscillations, you lose the high points as well as the low. This is not a problem for big companies, because they don't win by making great products. Big companies win by sucking less than other big companies.
Paul Graham (Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age)
I found myself falling in love with him all over again. I fell in love with the broken parts and the parts that had healed and changed for the better.
Meredith Wild (Hard Love (Hacker, #5))
Knowing that great conceptions are worth little without precision execution
Walter Isaacson (The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution)
A physicist is one who’s concerned with the truth,” he later said. “An engineer is one who’s concerned with getting the job done.
Walter Isaacson (The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution)
If Apple were to grow the iPod into a cell phone with a web browser, Microsoft would be in big trouble.
Paul Graham (Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age)
Now he was about to launch the Macintosh, a machine that violated many of the principles of the hacker’s code: It was overpriced; it would have no slots, which meant that hobbyists could not plug in their own expansion cards or jack into the motherboard to add their own new functions; and it took special tools just to open the plastic case. It was a closed and controlled system, like something designed by Big Brother rather than by a hacker.
Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs)
In business, there is nothing more valuable than a technical advantage your competitors don’t understand. In business, as in war, surprise is worth as much as force.
Paul Graham (Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age)
authority should be questioned, hierarchies should be circumvented, nonconformity should be admired, and creativity should be nurtured.
Walter Isaacson (The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution)
Love. It bloomed in small moments like this, making all the good times that much better, all the tough times worth working through.
Meredith Wild (Hardline (Hacker #3))
People with the halo effect seem to know exactly what they’re doing and, moreover, make you want to admire them for it.
Walter Isaacson (The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution)
Narcissistic Supply You get discarded as supply for one of two reason: They find you too outspoken about their abuse. They prefer someone that will keep stroking their ego and remain their silent doormat. Or, they found new narcissistic supply. Either way, you can count on the fact that they planned your devaluation phase and smear campaign in advance, so they could get one more ego stroke with your reaction. Narcissists are angry, spiteful takers that don't have empathy, remorse or conscience. They are incapable of unconditional love. Love to them is giving only when it serves them. They gaslight their victims by minimizing the trauma they have caused by blaming others or stating you are too sensitive. They never feel responsible or will admit to what they did to you. They have disordered thinking that is concerned with their needs and ego. It is not uncommon for them to hack their targets, in order to gain information about them. They enjoy mind games and control. This is their dopamine high. The sooner you distance yourself the healthier you will become. Narcissism can't be cured or prayed away. It is a mental disorder that turns the victims of its abuse into mental patients because it causes so much psychological manipulation.
Shannon L. Alder
Paying attention is more important to reliability than moving slowly. Because he pays close attention, a Navy pilot can land a 40,000 lb. aircraft at 140 miles per hour on a pitching carrier deck, at night, more safely than the average teenager can cut a bagel.
Paul Graham (Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age)
It means that every waking breath you take, every step you take, you don't just take to move your own life forward, but ours. You take it knowing I'm right there with you, irrevocably tied to every decision you make.
Meredith Wild (Hardline (Hacker #3))
From Orient Point The art of living isn't hard to muster: Enjoy the hour, not what it might portend. When someone makes you promises, don't trust her unless they're in the here and now, and just her willing largesse free-handed to a friend. The art of living isn't hard to muster: groom the old dog, her coat gets back its luster; take brisk walks so you're hungry at the end. When someone makes you promises, don't trust her to know she can afford what they will cost her to keep until they're kept. Till then, pretend the art of living isn't hard to muster. Cooking, eating and drinking are a cluster of pleasures. Next time, don't go round the bend when someone makes you promises. Don't trust her past where you'd trust yourself, and don't adjust her words to mean more to you than she'd intend. The art of living isn't hard to muster. You never had her, so you haven't lost her like spare house keys. Whatever she opens, when someone makes you promises, don't. Trust your art; go on living: that's not hard to muster.
Marilyn Hacker
And I’m going to make you fall in love with me all over again. Every morning and every night. In every city and at the edge of every ocean. I’ll remind you why you’re mine and why I’ve always been yours.
Meredith Wild (Hard Love (Hacker, #5))
The maximum sentence was twenty years for each free phone call. Twenty years for each call! I was facing a worst-case scenario of 460 years.
Kevin D. Mitnick (Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker)
We worried for decades about WMDs – Weapons of Mass Destruction. Now it is time to worry about a new kind of WMDs – Weapons of Mass Disruption.
John Mariotti
There was a key lesson for innovation: Understand which industries are symbiotic so that you can capitalize on how they will spur each other on.
Walter Isaacson (The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution)
Another key to fielding a great team is pairing visionaries, who can generate ideas, with operating managers, who can execute them. Visions without execution are hallucinations.31
Walter Isaacson (The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution)
Attribution is an enduring problem when it comes to forensic investigations. Computer attacks can be launched from anywhere in the world and routed through multiple hijacked machines or proxy servers to hide evidence of their source. Unless a hacker is sloppy about hiding his tracks, it's often not possible to unmask the perpetrator through digital evidence alone.
Kim Zetter
Trans” may work well enough as shorthand, but the quickly developing mainstream narrative it evokes (“born in the wrong body,” necessitating an orthopedic pilgrimage between two fixed destinations) is useless for some—but partially, or even profoundly, useful for others? That for some, “transitioning” may mean leaving one gender entirely behind, while for others—like Harry, who is happy to identify as a butch on T—it doesn’t? I’m not on my way anywhere, Harry sometimes tells inquirers. How to explain, in a culture frantic for resolution, that sometimes the shit stays messy? I do not want the female gender that has been assigned to me at birth. Neither do I want the male gender that transsexual medicine can furnish and that the state will award me if I behave in the right way. I don’t want any of it. How to explain that for some, or for some at some times, this irresolution is OK—desirable, even (e.g., “gender hackers”)—whereas for others, or for others at some times, it stays a source of conflict or grief? How does one get across the fact that the best way to find out how people feel about their gender or their sexuality—or anything else, really—is to listen to what they tell you, and to try to treat them accordingly, without shellacking over their version of reality with yours?
Maggie Nelson (The Argonauts)
People who do good work often think that whatever they’re working on is no good. Others see what they’ve done and think it’s wonderful, but the creator sees nothing but flaws. This pattern is no coincidence: worry made the work good.
Paul Graham (Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age)
The last thing I want to do is find my way back to myself when I've already found the best part of myself in her.
Meredith Wild (Hard Love (Hacker, #5))
The tale of their teamwork is important because we don’t often focus on how central that skill is to innovation.
Walter Isaacson (The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution)
Insert quarter, avoid Klingons.
Walter Isaacson (The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution)
The same recipe that makes individuals rich makes countries powerful. Let the nerds keep their lunch money, and you rule the world.
Paul Graham (Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age)
You’re allowed to want different things in bed than you do in your normal everyday life.
Meredith Wild (Hardwired (Hacker, #1))
Ours was a hard love. We'd fallen hard into it, and we'd fought hard to keep it. Our kind of love didn't ask nicely. It took. It ravaged. It consumed the heart whole and asked questions later. The rewards were soul-deep and all-consuming, sweeping through like a wildfire.
Meredith Wild (Hard Love (Hacker, #5))
Likewise, in any social hierarchy, people unsure of their own position will try to emphasize it by maltreating those they think rank below. I’ve read that this is why poor whites in the United States are the group most hostile to blacks.
Paul Graham (Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age)
A startup is like a mosquito. A bear can absorb a hit and a crab is armored against one, but a mosquito is designed for one thing : to score. No energy is wasted on defense. The defense of mosquitos, as a species, is that there are a lot of them, but this is little consolation to the individual mosquito.
Paul Graham (Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age)
I think all artists struggle to represent the geometry of life in their own way, just like writers deal with archetypes. There are only so many stories that you can tell, but an infinite number of storytellers.
Henry Mosquera (Sleeper's Run)
innovation resides where art and science connect is not new. Leonardo da Vinci was the exemplar of the creativity that flourishes when the humanities and sciences interact. When Einstein was stymied while working out General Relativity, he would pull out his violin and play Mozart until he could reconnect to what he called the harmony of the spheres.
Walter Isaacson (The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution)
The Plot Against The Giant First Girl When this yokel comes maundering, Whetting his hacker, I shall run before him, Diffusing the civilest odors Out of geraniums and unsmelled flowers. It will check him. Second Girl I shall run before him, Arching cloths besprinkled with colors As small as fish-eggs. The threads Will abash him. Third Girl Oh, la...le pauvre! I shall run before him, With a curious puffing. He will bend his ear then. I shall whisper Heavenly labials in a world of gutturals. It will undo him.
Wallace Stevens (Harmonium)
Unix is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic: a living body of narrative that many people know by heart, and tell over and over again—making their own personal embellishments whenever it strikes their fancy. The bad embellishments are shouted down, the good ones picked up by others, polished, improved, and, over time, incorporated into the story. […] Thus Unix has slowly accreted around a simple kernel and acquired a kind of complexity and asymmetry about it that is organic, like the roots of a tree, or the branchings of a coronary artery. Understanding it is more like anatomy than physics.
Neal Stephenson
This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore... and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals. Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for.
The Mentor
Nearly a Valediction" You happened to me. I was happened to like an abandoned building by a bull- dozer, like the van that missed my skull happened a two-inch gash across my chin. You were as deep down as I’ve ever been. You were inside me like my pulse. A new- born flailing toward maternal heartbeat through the shock of cold and glare: when you were gone, swaddled in strange air I was that alone again, inventing life left after you. I don’t want to remember you as that four o’clock in the morning eight months long after you happened to me like a wrong number at midnight that blew up the phone bill to an astronomical unknown quantity in a foreign currency. The U.S. dollar dived since you happened to me. You’ve grown into your skin since then; you’ve grown into the space you measure with someone you can love back without a caveat. While I love somebody I learn to live with through the downpulled winter days’ routine wakings and sleepings, half-and-half caffeine- assisted mornings, laundry, stock-pots, dust- balls in the hallway, lists instead of longing, trust that what comes next comes after what came first. She’ll never be a story I make up. You were the one I didn’t know where to stop. If I had blamed you, now I could forgive you, but what made my cold hand, back in prox- imity to your hair, your mouth, your mind, want where it no way ought to be, defined by where it was, and was and was until the whole globed swelling liquefied and spilled through one cheek’s nap, a syllable, a tear, was never blame, whatever I wished it were. You were the weather in my neighborhood. You were the epic in the episode. You were the year poised on the equinox.
Marilyn Hacker (Winter Numbers: Poems)
Don't tell me about the Press. I know *exactly* who reads the papers. The Daily Mirror is read by the people who think they run the country. The Guardian is read by people who think they *ought* to run the country. The Times is read by the people who actually *do* run the country. The Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country. The Financial Times is read by people who *own* the country. The Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by *another* country. The Daily Telegraph is read by the people who think it is.' "Prime Minister, what about the people who read The Sun?" "Sun readers don't care *who* runs the country - as long as she's got big tits.
Antony Jay (Yes Prime Minister: The Diaries of the Right Hon. James Hacker)
Dear 2600: I think my girlfriend has been cheating on me and I wanted to know if I could get her password to Hotmail and AOL. I am so desperate to find out. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks. And this is yet another popular category of letter we get. You say any help would be appreciated? Let’s find out if thats true. Do you think someone who is cheating on you might also be capable of having a mailbox you don’t know about? Do you think that even if you could get into the mailbox she uses that she would be discussing her deception there, especially if we live in a world where Hotmail and AOL passwords are so easily obtained? Finally, would you feel better if you invaded her privacy and found out that she was being totally honest with you? Whatever problems are going on in this relationship are not going to be solved with subterfuge. If you can’t communicate openly, there’s not much there to salvage.
Emmanuel Goldstein (Dear Hacker: Letters to the Editor of 2600)
The president, the secretary of state, the businessman, the preacher, the vendor, the spies, the clients and managers—all walking around Wall Street like chickens with their heads cut off—rushing to escape bankruptcy—plotting to melt down the Statue of Liberty—to press more copper pennies—to breed more headless chickens—to put more feathers in their caps—medals, diplomas, stock certificates, honorary doctorates—eggs and eggs of headless chickens—multitaskers—system hackers—who never know where they’re heading--northward, backward, eastward, forward, and never homeward—(where is home)—home is in the head—(but the head is cut off)—and the nest is full of banking forms and Easter eggs with coins inside. Beheaded chickens, how do you breed chickens with their heads cut off? By teaching them how to bankrupt creativity.
Giannina Braschi
The difference between design and research seems to be a question of new versus good. Design doesn't have to be new, but it has to be good. Research doesn't have to be good, but it has to be new. I think these two paths converge at the top: the best design surpasses its predecessors by using new ideas, and the best research solves problems that are not only new, but worth solving. So ultimately design and research are aiming for the same destination, just approaching it from different directions.
Paul Graham (Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age)
The next phase of the Digital Revolution will bring even more new methods of marrying technology with the creative industries, such as media, fashion, music, entertainment, education, literature, and the arts. Much of the first round of innovation involved pouring old wine—books, newspapers, opinion pieces, journals, songs, television shows, movies—into new digital bottles. But new platforms, services, and social networks are increasingly enabling fresh opportunities for individual imagination and collaborative creativity. Role-playing games and interactive plays are merging with collaborative forms of storytelling and augmented realities. This interplay between technology and the arts will eventually result in completely new forms of expression and formats of media. This innovation will come from people who are able to link beauty to engineering, humanity to technology, and poetry to processors. In other words, it will come from the spiritual heirs of Ada Lovelace, creators who can flourish where the arts intersect with the sciences and who have a rebellious sense of wonder that opens them to the beauty of both.
Walter Isaacson (The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution)
Most of the successful innovators and entrepreneurs in this book had one thing in common: they were product people. They cared about, and deeply understood, the engineering and design. They were not primarily marketers or salesmen or financial types; when such folks took over companies, it was often to the detriment of sustained innovation. “When the sales guys run the company, the product guys don’t matter so much, and a lot of them just turn off,” Jobs said. Larry Page felt the same: “The best leaders are those with the deepest understanding of the engineering and product design.”34 Another lesson of the digital age is as old as Aristotle: “Man is a social animal.” What else could explain CB and ham radios or their successors, such as WhatsApp and Twitter? Almost every digital tool, whether designed for it or not, was commandeered by humans for a social purpose: to create communities, facilitate communication, collaborate on projects, and enable social networking. Even the personal computer, which was originally embraced as a tool for individual creativity, inevitably led to the rise of modems, online services, and eventually Facebook, Flickr, and Foursquare. Machines, by contrast, are not social animals. They don’t join Facebook of their own volition nor seek companionship for its own sake. When Alan Turing asserted that machines would someday behave like humans, his critics countered that they would never be able to show affection or crave intimacy. To indulge Turing, perhaps we could program a machine to feign affection and pretend to seek intimacy, just as humans sometimes do. But Turing, more than almost anyone, would probably know the difference. According to the second part of Aristotle’s quote, the nonsocial nature of computers suggests that they are “either a beast or a god.” Actually, they are neither. Despite all of the proclamations of artificial intelligence engineers and Internet sociologists, digital tools have no personalities, intentions, or desires. They are what we make of them.
Walter Isaacson (The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution)