John von Neumann

"If you wish to foresee the future of mathematics our answer is brief and definitive - it is excellent."

"The sciences do not try to enclose nature in a straitjacket, but rather to devise concepts and discern patterns of relationships such that the experimental scientists can enlarge, modify, or change them as he wishes."

"In mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them."

"One expects a mathematician to know mathematics, but I am always surprised and delighted when I meet one who knows something else as well."

"The task of the mathematician is to organize and arm experience with concepts and notions so that the next generation is better equipped for an attack on the problems that the future will present."

"I think it is very important to have rules of thumb which are useful in a very great variety of circumstances and to know quite generally how they work and when to use them."

"Nature isn't classical, dammit, and if you want to make a simulation of nature, you'd better make it quantum mechanical."

"The problem of viruses is that they represent intermediate steps between non-life and life."

"As we know, there are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns - the ones we don't know we don't know."

"If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is."

"In their erratic path across the heavens, planets sometimes seem to slow down, stop, and then move backwards. This retrograde motion was one of the great puzzles of astronomy until Copernicus explained it."

"The continued rapid development of computing machinery will make it possible, in a not too distant future, to construct automata of ever-increasing logical depth and ever-increasing number of logical elements."

"There is a possibility that the machine could be made so intelligent that it would be able to correct its own errors."

"Computers are like air conditioners - they both stop working when you open Windows."

"The most important contribution of the human mind is probably the discovery of mathematics."

"The primary aim of studying mathematics is to improve your thinking."

"If you say why not construct a very powerful computing machine that, by all the logical processes of arithmetic and reasoning, arrives at its own conclusions, you've arrived at the concept of a computer."

"The problem with self-driving cars is that they are always doing what you tell them to do, when they should occasionally do the right thing."

"With computers we will always be able to find people who, from basic principles alone, can compute and find out things that would otherwise only be found by experimentation or actual observation."

"The world as we know it is coming to an end. The only question is whether we can build a better one before it does."

"The real problem is that programmers have spent far too much time worrying about efficiency and not enough time worrying about correctness."

"You don't have to be a genius to write a simple program. You need to be a computer engineer to write a complex one that still works."

"The brain may be viewed as a computing machine operating on a simple binary basis."

"The speed of evolution of mankind cannot indefinitely keep pace with the speed of evolution of computers."

"Ideas are in the air, and ideas are the currency of civilization."

"It is just as foolish to complain that people are selfish and tyrannical as it is to complain that the temperature is high or low. It is just as foolish to complain about them as to complain that it is raining."

"The sciences are not endeavouring to explain nature: that is much too ambitious. If science sometimes pretends to do that, it should be stopped: it is rebuffed immediately."

"All sciences are now under the obligation to put up, or shut up."

"A doctor who doesn't know statistics is a doctor who doesn't know medicine."

"The most important new principles are the last to be discovered; the latest principles are the most important."