“Mathematical reasoning may be regarded.”

We are not interested in the fact that the brain has the consistency of cold porridge.

These disturbing phenomena [Extra Sensory Perception] seem to deny all our scientific ideas. How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming.

One day ladies will take their computers for walks in the park and tell each other, “My little computer said such a funny thing this morning”.

Machines take me by surprise with great frequency.

A very large part of space-time must be investigated, if reliable results are to be obtained.

We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.

A man provided with paper, pencil, and rubber, and subject to strict discipline, is in effect a universal machine.

The original question, ‘Can machines think?’ I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion.

No, I’m not interested in developing a powerful brain.

We may hope that machines will eventually compete with men in all purely intellectual fields.

Codes are a puzzle. A game, just like any other game.

No, I’m not interested in developing a powerful brain. All I’m after is just a mediocre brain, something like the President of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company.

Programming is a skill best acquired by practice and example rather than from books.

Unless in communicating with it one says exactly what one means, trouble is bound to result.

Mathematical reasoning may be regarded rather schematically as the exercise of a combination of two facilities, which we may call intuition and ingenuity.

If a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent.

Understand well as I may, my comprehension can only be an infinitesimal fraction of all I want to understand.

The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.

One essential object is to choose that arrangement which shall tend to reduce to a minimum the time necessary for completing the calculation.

Mathematical science shows what is. It is the language of unseen relations between things. But to use and apply that language, we must be able fully to appreciate, to feel, to seize the unseen, the unconscious.

The grand thing is to be able to reason backwards.

I’m sorry to say that the subject I most disliked was mathematics. I have thought about it. I think the reason was that mathematics leaves no room for argument. If you made a mistake, that was all there was to it.

As a poet and as a mathematician, he would reason well; as a mere mathematician, he could not have reasoned at all.

The important thing to remember about mathematics is not to be frightened.