“Systems are organic, living creations: if people stop working on them and improving them, they die.”
― quote from Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
“She noted the lack of female hardware hackers, and was enraged at the male hacker obsession with technological play and power.”
― quote from Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
“to absorb, explore, and expand the intricacies of those bewitching systems;”
― quote from Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
“the Hacker Ethic, which instructs you to keep working until your hack tops previous efforts.”
― quote from Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
“To hackers, a program was an organic entity that had a life independent from that of its author.”
― quote from Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
“Because to hackers, passwords were even more odious than locked doors.”
― quote from Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
“It’s your life story if you’re a mathematician: every time you discover something neat, you discover that Gauss or Newton knew it in his crib.”
― quote from Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
“Hackers can do almost anything and be a hacker. You can be a hacker carpenter. It’s not necessarily high tech. I think it has to do with craftsmanship and caring about what you’re doing.”
― quote from Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
“in keeping with the Hacker Ethic, no artificial boundaries were maintained.”
― quote from Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
“central tenets of the Hacker Ethic: the free flow of information, particularly information that helped fellow hackers understand, explore, and build systems.”
― quote from Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
“There are fun programs with jokes in them, there are exciting programs which do The Right Thing, and there are sad programs which make valiant tries but don’t quite fly.”
― quote from Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
“Every problem has a better solution when you start thinking about it differently than the normal way.”
― quote from Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
“Gosper had disdained NASA’s human-wave approach toward things. He had been adamant in defending the AI lab’s more individualistic form of hacker elegance in programming, and in computing style in general. But now he saw how the real world, when it got its mind made up, could have an astounding effect. NASA had not applied the Hacker Ethic, yet it had done something the lab, for all its pioneering, never could have done. Gosper realized that the ninth-floor hackers were in some sense deluding themselves, working on machines of relatively little power compared to the computers of the future — yet still trying to do it all, change the world right there in the lab. And”
― quote from Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
“It would be like trying to make love to your wife, knowing she was simultaneously making love to six other people!”
― quote from Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
“But mostly people hacked Tools to Make Tools. Or games. And they would come into computer stores to show off their hacks.”
― quote from Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
“There is nothing more frustrating to a hacker than to see an extension to a system and not be able to keep hands-on.”
― quote from Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
“There’s nothing illegal about a Defense Department funding research. It’s certainly better than a Commerce Department or Education Department funding research . . . because that would lead to thought control. I would much rather have the military in charge of that . . . the military people make no bones about what they want, so we’re not under any subtle pressures. It’s clear what’s going on. The case of ARPA was unique, because they felt that what this country needed was people good in defense technology. In case we ever needed it, we’d have it.”
― quote from Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
“— the new Atari firm was just beginning to put together a home setup to play that game, in which two people control “paddles” of light”
― quote from Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
“At one point a research firm was called in to do a study of the excessive, inescapable noise, and they concluded that the hum of the air conditioner was so bothersome because there weren’t enough competing noises — so they fixed the machines to make them give off a loud, continual hiss. In Greenblatt’s words, this change “was not a win,” and the constant hiss made the long hours on the ninth floor rather nerve-racking for some. Add”
― quote from Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
“From their point of view, it seemed to indicate another hacker sin — inefficiency.”
― quote from Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
“Women, even today, are considered grossly unpredictable,” one PDP-6 hacker noted, almost two decades later. “How can a hacker tolerate such an imperfect being?”
― quote from Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
“and a tendency to take offense at an inefficient, suboptimal way of doing things.”
― quote from Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
“but by and large ITS proved that the best security was no security at all.”
― quote from Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
“In their view, hacking would be better served by using the best system possible.”
― quote from Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
“Years of working in the free-flow world of electronics had infused Marsh with the Hacker Ethic, and he saw school as an inefficient, repressive system. Even when he worked at a radical school with an open classroom, he thought it was a sham, still a jail.”
― quote from Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
“A computer gives the average person, a high school freshman, the power to do things in a week that all the mathematicians who ever lived until thirty years ago couldn’t do.”
― quote from Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
“Ava’s Mum: – We are not like them, Ava. […] We have to be ready to fight, and when the enemy gets you, one day, you show them what I taught you. When they lock you in the darkness, become an arsonist. When they put you under house arrest, or defile your name in public, or make you live beneath the rules that will suffocate you, become an arsonist. When they put a pistol in your hand and make you shoot your best friend, and when they throw you in a death camp, when you see everyone around you get sick from the poison they’re feeding them, light a fire that will destroy them. A fire they won’t forget the next time they try to do it to someone else.”
― Stephanie Oakes, quote from The Arsonist
“Just because you’re, like, super powerful doesn’t mean people shouldn’t defend you.” But he was looking at her like she was a cute harmless little bunny that was obviously on drugs. She sighed. “You’re still not fearing my mighty wrath.” “I’m trying.” “One day I will unleash it and you will flee in terror. Why are you laughing? It’s only the truth. A sphinx in full-on berserker-mode can wreak major destruction and instill fear into the hearts of all who… stop laughing!”
― Suzanne Wright, quote from Blaze
“We have simply not come to grips with the fact that it isn’t hard to live the Christian life. It’s impossible! Only Christ can live it. And that’s why our only hope is to learn that Jesus Christ did not come just to get men out of hell and into heaven; He came to get Himself out of heaven and into men!”
― Bob George, quote from Classic Christianity: Life's Too Short to Miss the Real Thing
“Something I learned from the Serbian tribes. Churches are built where saints were martyred. A bridge requires a child in its foundations if it is to hold. All great works must begin with a sacrifice.”
― Grady Hendrix, quote from Horrorstör
“She cringed when she saw she needed a bikini wax - and cringed that she even got them in the first place. It wasn't the pain. It was the whole idea she was raising her daughter in a world where pubic hair was a problem.”
― Chris Bohjalian, quote from The Guest Room
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Blood Will TellBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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