Best Hackers Quotes & Sayings

Service disruptions have to be avoided or at least resolved as quickly as possible. When the Internet goes down, consumers don't notice the difference between a technical malfunction, an act of sabotage by hackers or a military attack. — Thomas De Maiziere

Livingston: Some aspects of business turned out to be less of a mystery than you had thought. What did you find you were better at than you thought? Graham: I found I could actually sell moderately well. I could convince people of stuff. I learned a trick for doing this: to tell the truth. A lot of people think that the way to convince people of things is to be eloquent - to have some bag of tricks for sliding conclusions into their brains. But there's also a sort of hack that you can use if you are not a very good salesman, which is simply tell people the truth. Our strategy for selling our software to people was: make the best software and then tell them, truthfully, "this is the best software." And they could tell we were telling the truth. Another advantage of telling the truth is that you don't have to remember what you've said. You don't have to keep any state in your head. It's a purely functional business strategy. (Hackers will get what I mean.) — Jessica Livingston

Should we fear hackers? Intention is at the heart of this discussion. — Kevin Mitnick

The intent of the individuals who created the DDoS attacks has nothing to do with hacking, and they are vandals, not hackers. — Kevin Mitnick

In the hacking world, security is more of a response than a proactive measure. They wait for hackers to attack and then they patch, based on the attacks. — Michael Demon Calce

If hackers, if anyone committing a criminal act, wants to reduce their risk, they obviously don't involve anybody else. The greater the circle of people that know what you're doing, the higher the risk. — Kevin Mitnick

New security loopholes are constantly popping up because of wireless networking. The cat-and-mouse game between hackers and system administrators is still in full swing. — Kevin Mitnick

Dear 2600: ... So, in the interest of information gathering and because I am a subscriber, are you going to be checking me out?
This would be unnecessary since we checked you out before you subscribed. That's why we made sure you heard about us and followed the plan by subscribing. Writing this letter, however, was not part of the plan and we will be taking corrective action. — Emmanuel Goldstein

I think the thing that our government lacks - just about more than anything else - is technological competence. We have some of the greatest white-hat hackers in the world here in the U.S., but the government seems to be technologically illiterate. — John McAfee

"Story-tellers" should listen seriously to design and architecture without getting all literary and imperial about that. Hackers are arrogant geek romantics. They lack the attentive spirit of inquiry. — Bruce Sterling

In the aftermath of the oh-so-predictable crash, the Bitcoin fanatics have begun marshaling out excuse after excuse for why this non-investment investment lost so much of its value so fast. One was that hackers attacked some of the exchanges for Bitcoins and crippled it. Really? A hacker can wreck an entire market? — Kurt Eichenwald

It is not just software glitches and corrupted memory cards that should be on the minds of election officials. Hackers pose another very real problem whereby an election could be tilted towards a favored candidate. — Bob Barr

Let's just hope that all the world is run by Bill Gates before the Perl hackers can destroy it. — Erik Naggum

Lisp was far more powerful and flexible than any other language of its day; in fact, it is still a better design than most languages of today, twenty-five years later. Lisp freed ITS's hackers to think in unusual and creative ways. It was a major factor in their successes, and remains one of hackerdom's favorite languages. — Eric S. Raymond

So it's not an architectural masterpiece. When Da5id and Hiro and the other hackers wrote The Black Sun, they didn't have enough money to hire architects or designers, so they just went in for simple geometric shapes. The avatars milling around the entrance don't seem to care. — Neal Stephenson

There are proxies, proxy servers on the internet, and this is very typical for hackers to use. They create what are called proxy chains where they gain access to a number of different systems around the world, sometimes by hacking these, and they use them as sort of relay boxes. — Edward Snowden

We want Facebook to be one of the best places people can go to learn how to build stuff. If you want to build a company, nothing better than jumping in and trying to build one. But Facebook is also great for entrepreneurs/hackers. If people want to come for a few years and move on and build something great, that's something we're proud of. — Mark Zuckerberg

Hackers often describe what they do as playfully creative problem solving. — Heather Brooke

I am well aware of the facts presented by numerous security experts on the many ways in which the United States' digital networks have come under siege by cybercriminals and under daily assault by hackers in league with various foreign governments. — Rebecca MacKinnon

I'm a hacker, but I'm the good kind of hackers. And I've never been a criminal. — Mikko Hypponen

Are hackers a threat? The degree of threat presented by any conduct, whether legal or illegal, depends on the actions and intent of the individual and the harm they cause. — Kevin Mitnick

There was one new metallic monstrosity stacked in one corner that she hadn't seen the last time she was a visitor to his strange chamber, it appeared to be a mass of hard drives all fused together, but they looked too sophisticated to be merely hard drives.
"What on earth is that?"
"That's my Kung Fu," he said proudly, patting the top of the futuristic-looking stack.
"Is that what you wanted to show me?"
"No, but it's impressive, isn't it?"
"If you say so."
Steves sighed and shook his head, so few people could appreciate the intellectual complexity of an almost untraceable hacking device. — E.A. Bucchianeri

There are few sources of energy so powerful as a procrastinating college student. — Paul Graham

Hackers are nerdy, pasty, tubby, little geeks with triple thick glasses and this is probably a demented otaku with smelly feet. So catching him will be a breeze! — Keiko Nobumoto

I admire these phone hackers. I think they have a lot of patience. I can't even be bothered to check my OWN voicemails. — Andrew Lawrence

I am not a wishing well with legs.
(Paraphrasing Babylon 5's Londo Mollari, repeately, when asked to perform hacking functions for strangers.) — Adrian Lamo

As the world becomes more digitalized, there are more entry points for hackers. — Michael Demon Calce

It might seem that security should gradually improve over time as security problems are discovered and corrected, but unfortunately this does not seem to be the case. System software is growing ever more complicated, hackers are becoming better and better organized, and computers are connecting more and more intimately on the Internet. Security is an ongoing battle that can never really be won. — Evi Nemeth

Berkeley hackers liked to see themselves as rebels against soulless corporate empires. — Eric S. Raymond

Most hackers graduate from Unix and Linux platforms. They know them intimately. They don't try to exploit them — Dean Stockwell

Growth hackers resist this temptation (or, more appropriate, this delusion). They opt, deliberately, to attract only the early adopters who make or break new tech services and seek to do it as cheaply as possible. In fact, part of the reason the scrappy start-ups, services, and apps in this book might not always be well-known or topics of daily conversation is because their founders have focused their energies on product development with an eye toward growth - they're now millions of members strong without any superfluous "buzz." They got to mass market by ignoring the urge to appeal to the mass market, at least to start with. — Ryan Holiday

When you choose a language, youre also choosing a community. The programmers youll be able to hire to work on a Java project wont be as smart as the ones you could get to work on a project written in Python. And the quality of your hackers probably matters more than the language you choose. Though, frankly, the fact that good hackers prefer Python to Java should tell you something about the relative merits of those languages. — Philip Greenspun

The president, the secretary of state, the businessman, the preacher, the vendor, the spies, the clients and managers - all walking around Wall Street like chickens with their heads cut off - rushing to escape bankruptcy - plotting to melt down the Statue of Liberty - to press more copper pennies - to breed more headless chickens - to put more feathers in their caps - medals, diplomas, stock certificates, honorary doctorates - eggs and eggs of headless chickens - multitaskers - system hackers - who never know where they're heading
northward, backward, eastward, forward, and never homeward - (where is home) - home is in the head - (but the head is cut off) - and the nest is full of banking forms and Easter eggs with coins inside. Beheaded chickens, how do you breed chickens with their heads cut off? By teaching them how to bankrupt creativity. — Giannina Braschi

I'm not on my way anywhere, Harry sometimes tells inquirers. How to explain, in a culture frantic for resolution, that sometimes the shit stays messy? I do not want the female gender that has been assigned to me at birth. Neither do I want the male gender that transsexual medicine can furnish and that the state will award me if I behave in the right way. I don't want any of it. How to explain that for some, or for some at some times, this irresolution is OK - desirable, even (e.g., "gender hackers") - whereas for others, or for others at some times, it stays a source of conflict or grief? — Maggie Nelson