We must include in any language with which we hope to describe complex — Grace Hopper

"[The Computer] was the first machine man built that assisted the power of his brain instead of the strength of his arm."

"I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. ... they carefully told me, computers could only do arithmetic; they could not do programs."

"But Grace, then anyone will be able to write programs!"

"Admiral Hopper, ... is the first woman to receive Americas highest technology award as an individual. The award recognizes her as a computer pioneer, who spent a half century helping keep America on the leading edge of high technology."

"Were flooding people with information. We need to feed it through a processor. A human must turn information into intelligence or knowledge. Weve tended to forget that no computer will ever ask a new question."

"You manage things, you lead people. We went overboard on management and forgot about leadership. It might help if we ran the MBAs out of Washington."

"As long as you keep getting born, it’s okay to die sometimes."

"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that theres free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."

"History is a strange experience. The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles. When you go to Mexico City through space, you find it a sort of cross between modern Madrid and modern Chicago, with additions of its own; but if you go to Mexico City through history, back only 500 years, you will find it as distant as though it were on another planet: inhabited by cultivated barbarians, sensitive and cruel, highly organized and still in the Copper Age, a collection of startling, of unbelievable contrasts."

"As soon as a thought or word becomes a tool, one can dispense with actually ‘thinking’ it, that is, with going through the logical acts involved in verbal formulation of it. As has been pointed out, often and correctly, the advantage of mathematics—the model of all neo-positivistic thinking—lies in just this ‘intellectual economy.’ Complicated logical operations are carried out without actual performance of the intellectual acts upon which the mathematical and logical symbols are based. … Reason … becomes a fetish, a magic entity that is accepted rather than intellectually experienced."

"Our feminist culture at the present moment is completely dependent on capitalism. My grandmother was still scrubbing clothes on the back porch on a washboard!"

"A word of the faith that never balks, Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely. It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all, That mystic baffling wonder alone completes all. (23)"