Grace Hopper

"Humans are allergic to change. They love to say, "We've always done it this way." I try to fight that. That's why I have a clock on my wall that runs counter-clockwise."

"At the end of about a week, I called back and said, "I need something to compare this to. Could I please have a microsecond?"

"We're flooding people with information. We need to feed it through a processor. A human must turn information into intelligence or knowledge. We've tended to forget that no computer will ever ask a ne…"

"Life was simple before World War II. After that, we had systems."

"At present, we're putting on paper a lot of stuff that never needed to be on paper. We do need to keep the records. But there isn't any reason for printing them. The next generation growing up with th…"

"I've always been more interested in the future than in the past."

"There's something you learn in your first boot-camp, or training camp: If they put you down somewhere with nothing to do, go to sleep — you don't know when you'll get any more."

"I handed my passport to the immigration officer, and he looked at it and looked at me and said, "What are you?"