In His Own Words
Selected quotations from Alan Turing
"We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done."
— Alan Turing
"Sometimes it is the people no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine."
— Alan Turing
"A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human."
— Alan Turing
"Those who can imagine anything, can create the impossible."
— Alan Turing
"Machines take me by surprise with great frequency."
— Alan Turing
"Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition."
— Alan Turing
"The original question, 'Can machines think?' I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion."
— Alan Turing
"I believe that at the end of the century... one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted."
— Alan Turing
"Mathematical reasoning may be regarded rather schematically as the exercise of a combination of two facilities, which we may call intuition and ingenuity."
— Alan Turing
"If a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent."
— Alan Turing
"No, I'm not interested in developing a powerful brain. All I'm after is just a mediocre brain, something like the President of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company."
— Alan Turing
"Programming is a skill best acquired by practice and example rather than from books."
— Alan Turing
"I'm afraid that the following syllogism may be used by some in the future: Turing believes machines think. Turing lies with men. Therefore machines do not think."
— Alan Turing
"In attempting to construct such machines we should not be irreverently usurping His power of creating souls, any more than we are in the procreation of children."
— Alan Turing
"A very large part of space-time must be investigated, if reliable results are to be obtained."
— Alan Turing
What Others Said
"Turing's 1936 paper... is the founding document of the computer age."
— Martin Davis, mathematician
"He founded the discipline of computer science. He conceived the idea of the universal computing machine. He invented the imitation game. He broke the Enigma code. And then we killed him."
— Attributed
"I got to sit in the room with a bunch of engineers and watch them cry because... it worked."
— Joseph Gordon-Levitt, on visiting Bletchley Park
"Alan Turing was a quite brilliant mathematician... and a national hero. He was also gay. His 'reward' for everything he gave to this country was a criminal prosecution, forced chemical castration and exile... We're sorry. You deserved so much better."
— Gordon Brown, Prime Minister, formal apology (2009)