Bletchley Quotes & Sayings

Somehow, architecture alters the way we think about the world and the way we behave. Any serious architecture, as a litmus test, has to be that. — Thom Mayne

Your thinking has the potentiality to make you a kid or a king, in it lies your enthronement or dethronement. — Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

It's all fine to say, "Time will heal everything, this too shall pass away. People will forget" - and things like that when you are not involved, but when you are there is no passage of time, people do not forget and you are in the middle of something that does not change. — John Steinbeck

No wonder that Churchill described this effort [the British codebreakers working at Bletchley Park] as "Britian"s secret weapon," a weapon far more effective than the buzz bombs and the rockets that Werner von Braun designed for a German victory, a weapon absolutely decisive, in the judgement of many, in winning the war for the Allies. — Peter Hilton

Who should we trust to say what teaching is, and how does this play out in schools? How can we even begin to transform education policy or practice unless we all understand what teaching really means? — Vanessa Rodriguez

A lot of the credit, too, should go to Turing, for developing the concept of a universal computer and then being part of a hands-on team at Bletchley Park. How you rank the historic contributions of the others depends partly on the criteria you value. If you are enticed by the romance of lone inventors and care less about who most influenced the progress of the field, you might put Atanasoff and Zuse high. But the main lesson to draw from the birth of computers is that innovation is usually a group effort, involving collaboration between visionaries and engineers, and that creativity comes from drawing on many sources. — Walter Isaacson

A city of Dreadful Nights:
The world rolls round forever like a mill, it grinds out life and death and good and ill. It has no purpose, heart, nor mind, nor will. — James Thompson

Rain is Nature's way of telling us to go slowly because the roads will soon be wet. — Hermester Barrington

Turing needed more staff, but his requests had been blocked by Commander Edward Travis, who had taken over as Director of Bletchley, and who felt that he could not justify recruiting more people. On October 21, 1941, the cryptanalysts took the insubordinate step of ignoring Travis and writing directly to Churchill. — Simon Singh

Twice a year, I take myself off to a self-imposed 'writer's retreat', staying at a small inn or on a friend's farm, where I am all alone and do nothing other than write. — Jane Green

You will see that the things you desire most are the very things that bring you the greatest sorrow. — Christopher Pike

Few would venture to deny the advantages of temperance in increasing the efficiency of a nation at war. — William Lyon Mackenzie King

We should expect nothing less from the language that was originally given by God, to His human family. Hebrew was the method that God chose for mankind to speak to Him, and Him to them. Adam spoke Hebrew - and your Bible confirms this. Everyone who got off the ark spoke one language - Hebrew.
Even Abraham spoke Hebrew. Where did Abraham learn to speak Hebrew? Abraham was descended from Noah's son, Shem. (Ge 11:10-26) Shem's household was not affected by the later confusion of languages, at Babel. (Ge 11:5-9) To the contrary, Shem was blessed while the rest of Babel was cursed. (Ge 9:26) That is how Abraham retained Hebrew, despite residing in Babylon.
So, Shem's language can be traced back to Adam. (Ge 11:1) And, Shem (Noah's son) was still alive when Jacob and Esau was 30 years of age. Obviously, Hebrew (the original language) was clearly spoken by Jacob's sons. (Ge 14:13) — Michael Ben Zehabe

New ideas are sometimes found in the most granular details of a problem where few others bother to look. — Nate Silver

Blain nodded and walked away. — Angela McPherson

During World War II, the British spy agency MI8 secretly recruited a crew of teenage wireless operators (prohibited from discussing their activities even with their families) to intercept coded messages from the Nazis. By forwarding these transmissions to the crack team of code breakers at Bletchley Park led by the computer pioneer Alan Turing, these young hams enabled the Allies to accurately predict the movements of the German and Italian forces. Asperger's prediction that the little professors in his clinic could one day aid in the war effort had been prescient, but it was the Allies who reaped the benefits. — Steve Silberman

Enoch ... why are you here?
Why has my spirit been incarnated into a physical bodi in this world generally? Or specifically, why am I here in a Swedish forest, standing on the wreck of a mysterious German rocket plane while a homosexual German sobs over the cremated remains of his Italian lover? — Neal Stephenson