The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to the idealised past.
—ROBERTSON DAVIES
I have seen the future and it doesn’t work.
—ROBERT FULFORD
The future is here. It’s just not widely distributed yet.
—WILLIAM GIBSON
I look forward to the invention of faster-than-light travel. What I’m not looking forward to is the long wait in the dark once I arrive at my destination.
—MARC BELAND
We look at the present through the rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.
—MARSHALL MCLUHAN
If humanity profits from its mistakes, we have a glorious future coming up.
—LAURENCE J. PETER
A man’s understanding of technology never embraces the field of washing machines.
—PENNEY KOME
Even when you take a holiday from technology, technology doesn’t take a break from you.
—DOUGLAS COUPLAND
A lot of what appears to be progress is just so much technological rococo.
—BILL GRAY
With all the technology in the 21st century why have they not invented the self-cleaning toilet bowl!
—DAWN MONROE
As a rule, software systems do not work well until they have been used, and have failed repeatedly, in real applications.
—DAVID PARNAS
Beware of any computer installation that has heel indentations all up and down the front of it.
—EDWARD PHILLIPS
No one needs a word processor if he has an efficient secretary.
—ROBERTSON DAVIES
Computers can solve all kinds of problems except the unemployment they create.
—LAURENCE J. PETER
The problem with juggling is that the balls go where you throw them. Just as the problem with programming is that the computer does exactly what you tell it.
—RON GRAHAM
Computing power increases as the square of the cost. If you want to do it twice as cheaply, you have to do it four times as fast.
—HERB GROSCH
There’s one thing computing teaches you, and that’s that there’s no point to remembering everything.
—DOUGLAS COUPLAND
A hacker does for love what others would not do for money.
—LAURA CREIGHTON
Computers may replace men but they will never replace women.
—LOUIS DUDEK
The ‘Net’ is a waste of time, and that’s exactly what’s right about it.
—WILLIAM GIBSON
In cyberspace…there are no shadows.
—WILLIAM GIBSON
The Net interprets censorship as damage… and routes around it.
—JOHN GILMORE
The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.
—MARSHALL MCLUHAN
I wish the chat world’s “ignore” button was available in the real world.
—FLOYD MAXWELL
With Google I’m starting to burn out on knowing the answer to everything. People in the year 2020 are going to be nostalgic for the sensation of feeling clueless.
—DOUGLAS COUPLAND
It is a principal aspect of the electric age that it establishes a global network that has much of the character of our central nervous system.
—MARSHALL MCLUHAN
Once you accept that the world is a giant computer run by white mice, all other movies fade into insignificance.
—MUTSUMI TAKAHASHI