You don't have to be responsible for the world that you're in.

You insist that there is something a machine cannot do. If you tell me precisely what it is a machine cannot do, then I can always make a machine which will do just that.

The total subject of mathematics is clearly too broad for any of us. I do not think that any mathematician since Gauss has covered it uniformly and fully; even Hilbert did not and all of us are of considerably lesser width quite apart from the question of depth than Hilbert.

All stable processes we shall predict. All unstable processes we shall control.

There is no point in being precise if you do not even know what you are talking about.

It is exceptional that one should be able to acquire the understanding of a process without having previously acquired a deep familiarity with running it, with using it, before one has assimilated it in an instinctive and empirical way... Thus any discussion of the nature of intellectual effort in any field is difficult, unless it presupposes an easy, routine familiarity with that field. In mathematics this limitation becomes very severe.

I am thinking about something much more important than bombs. I am thinking about computers.

Computers are like humans - they do everything except think.

Problems are often stated in vague terms... because it is quite uncertain what the problems really are.

Science, as well as technology, will in the near and in the farther future increasingly turn from problems of intensity, substance, and energy, to problems of structure, organization, information, and control.

Technological possibilities are irresistible to man. If man can go to the moon, he will. If he can control the climate, he will.

You wake me up early in the morning to tell me I am right? Please wait until I am wrong.

I am a little troubled about the tea service in the electronic computer building. Apparently the members of your staff consume several times as much supplies as the same number of people do in Fuld Hall and they have been especially unfair in the matter of sugar.... I should like to raise the question whether it would not be better for the computer people to come up to Fuld Hall at the end of the day at 5 o'clock and have their tea here under proper supervision.

Any one who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin. For, as has been pointed out several times, there is no such thing as a random numberЂ' there are only methods to produce random numbers, and a strict arithmetic procedure of course is not such a method.

Kurt Godel's achievement in modern logic is singular and monumental - indeed it is more than a monument, it is a landmark which will remain visible far in space and time. ... The subject of logic has certainly completely changed its nature and possibilities with Godel's achievement.

With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.

Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin.

It is just as foolish to complain that people are selfish and treacherous as it is to complain that the magnetic field does not increase unless the electric field has a curl. Both are laws of nature.