Alan Turing

"The use of the word 'machine' in this connection is perhaps misleading."

"I do not believe that there is any disembodied action of mind and body relationship."

"Digital computers will be the white elephant of the electronics industry."

"The fact that we cannot perceive something does not mean that it is not there."

"I do think mathematical analysis is possible and permissible in this field."

"It would be disingenuous of me to deny that computing machinery has played an important part in the direction my life has taken."

"There would be something rather exciting about discovering the principles by which machines think."

"I want to avoid both the excessive spiritualism of the 'pure mathematician' and the excessive materialism of the 'practical man'."

"It will be practically impossible to discriminate between the machine and the human being."

"I consider the question 'Can machines think?' to be too meaningless to deserve discussion."

"Computing machines, like people, can be made intelligent."

"The form of my protest will be to send my resignation."

"We cannot very well require that a machine shall do what we cannot describe its doing."

"I have something I want to say. I have always hated machinery."

"Playing chess is the most obvious activity of thought we can imagine."

"We may say most aptly that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves."

"It is not difficult to design with the modern computers the circuit which will make the whole machine oscillate."

"Machines can follow rules, but they cannot have real understanding without consciousness."

"The problem of producing a thinking machine is at the outset a problem of programming."

"All the evidence we have suggests that it is the outermost brain, the brain that deals with the world, that is the newest."

"Something new that has departed from tradition is worth doing only if it is done very well."

"To understand programs you must understand the machines."

"I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted."

"The Analytical Engine might act upon other things besides number if objects could be found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed through the abstract operations of the engine."

"The idea of an intelligent machine would not come as such a shock if people were less inflexible in their ideas of what thinking is."

"We do not need to programme a machine to learn simple facts of the world."

"But at what point does the resemblance between the output of the machine and that of the brain end?"

"The view that machines cannot think is quite popular among philosophers."

"Each time one masters a difficulty one feels much stronger."

"We are not trying to produce a programme to simulate the adult mind, but rather to produce one which simulates the child's."