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David Silver was getting a lot of criticism. The criticism came from nemeses of the Hacker Ethic: the Al theorists and grad students on the eighth floor. These were people who did not necessarily see the process of computing as a joyful end in itself: they were more concerned with getting degrees, winning professional recognition, and the, ahem, advancement of computer science. They considered hackerism unscientific.

— Hackers by Steven Levy (Page 106)

Besides being a technical genius, Nelson would attack problems with bird-dog perseverance. "He approached problems by taking action," Donald Eastlake, a hacker in Nelson's class, later recalled. "He was very persistent. If you try a few times and give up, you'll never get there. But if you keep at it... There's a lot of problems in the world which can really be solved by applying two or three times the persistence that other people will."

— Hackers by Steven Levy (Page 86)

Some of the planners envisioned a day when artificially intelligent computers would relieve man's mental burdens, much as indus-trial machinery had already partially lifted his physical yoke.

— Hackers by Steven Levy (Page 57)

Television purports to challenge political language by conveying images, but the succession from one frame to another can hinder a sense of resolution. Everything happens fast, but nothing actually happens. Each story on televised news is “breaking” until it is displaced by the next one. So we are hit by wave upon wave but never see the ocean.

— On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder

What really drove the hackers crazy was the attitude of the IBM priests and sub-priests, who seemed to think that IBM had the only "real" computers, and the rest were all trash. You couldn't talk to those people they were beyond convincing. They were batch-processed people, and it showed not only in their prefer-ence of machines, but in their ideas about the way a computation center, and a world, should be run. Those people could never understand the obvious superiority of a decentralized system, with no one giving orders a system where people could follow their interests, and if along the way they discovered a flaw in the system, they could embark on ambitious surgery. No need to get a requisition form. Just a need to get something done.

— Hackers by Steven Levy (Page 30)

Peter Samson and his friends had grown up with a specific relationship to the world, wherein things had meaning only if you found out how they worked. And how would you go about that if not by getting your hands on them?

— Hackers by Steven Levy (1%)

Is this what science is? Putting your blood and sweat into something that might be nothing? Well, I fucking hate it.

— Those Beyond the Wall by Micaiah Johnson (The Space Between Worlds, #2)