Hacker Quotes & Sayings

The Plot Against The Giant

First Girl
When this yokel comes maundering,
Whetting his hacker,
I shall run before him,
Diffusing the civilest odors
Out of geraniums and unsmelled flowers.
It will check him.

Second Girl
I shall run before him,
Arching cloths besprinkled with colors
As small as fish-eggs.
The threads
Will abash him.

Third Girl
Oh, la...le pauvre!
I shall run before him,
With a curious puffing.
He will bend his ear then.
I shall whisper
Heavenly labials in a world of gutturals.
It will undo him. — Wallace Stevens

I lived in the studio apartment that I bought for four years before I bought it in 1989, so I was already in it. I began living there in 1985, so I've had the same address and phone number since then. — Marilyn Hacker

I worked at all kinds of jobs, mostly commercial editing. — Marilyn Hacker

The explosion of companies deploying wireless networks insecurely is creating vulnerabilities, as they think it's limited to the office - then they have Johnny Hacker in the parking lot with an 802.11 antenna using the network to send threatening emails to the president! — Kevin Mitnick

While the Texas prison officials remained in the dark about what was going on, they were fortunate that William and Danny had benign motives. Imagine what havoc the two might have caused; it would have been child's play for these guys to develop a scheme for obtaining money or property from unsuspecting victims. The Internet had become their university and playground. Learning how to run scams against individuals or break in to corporate sites would have been a cinch; teenagers and preteens learn these methods every day from the hacker sites and elsewhere on the Web. And as prisoners, Danny and William had all the time in the world.

Maybe there's a lesson here: Two convicted murderers, but that didn't mean they were scum, rotten to the core. They were cheaters who hacked their way onto the Internet illegally, but that didn't mean they were willing to victimize innocent people or naively insecure companies. — Kevin D. Mitnick

To be a hacker - when I use the term - is somebody who is creative and does wonderful things. — Tim Berners-Lee

I've got to be careful what I say but Glenn Mulcaire was a blagger and a phone hacker. — Thomas Watson Jr.

If one day I should hear the hacker's slow, booted step on the stair, perhaps I'll suggest a cup of tea and try to get the story of his life. — Alix Kates Shulman

Mrs Hacker was the only woman present. They'd made her a sort of honorary man for the evening. — Jonathan Lynn

I love being a businessman much more than being a hacker. — Kim Dotcom

Software Engineering might be science; but that's not what I do. I'm a hacker, not an engineer. — Jamie Zawinski

I'm proud of it. Apart from marking the first occasion when I used my talent on behalf of other people without being asked and without caring whether I was rewarded
which was a major breakthrough in itself
the job was a pure masterpiece. Working on it, I realized in my guts how an artist or an author can get high on the creative act. The poker who wrote Precipice's original tapeworm was pretty good, but you could theoretically have killed it without shutting down the net
that is, at the cost of losing thirty or forty billion bits of data. Which I gather they were just about prepared to do when I showed up. But mine ... Ho, no! That, I cross my heart, cannot be killed without DISMANTLING the net. — John Brunner

Most hackers are young because young people tend to be adaptable. As long as you remain adaptable, you can always be a good hacker. — Emmanuel Goldstein

Everything about Mark Zuckerberg is pure hacker. Hackers don't take realities of the world for granted; they seek to break and rebuild what they don't like. They seek to outsmart the world. — Sarah Lacy

Fredkin believes that the universe is very literally a computer and that it is being used by someone, or something, to solve a problem. It sounds like a good-news/bad-news joke: the good news is that our lives have purpose; the bad news is that their purpose is to help some remote hacker estimate pi to nine jillion decimal places. — Ray Kurzweil

I don't condone anyone causing damage in my name, or doing anything malicious in support of my plight. There are more productive ways to help me. As a hacker myself, I never intentionally damaged anything. — Kevin Mitnick

When a hacker gains access to any corporate data, the value of that data depends on which server, or sometimes a single person's computer, that the hacker gains access to. — John McAfee

I'm not an economist; I'm a hacker who has spent his career exploring and repairing large networks. — Dan Kaminsky

Women love a sick child or a healthy animal; A man who is both itches them like an incubus. — Marilyn Hacker

Be very careful. We suggest getting a book on HTML to avoid becoming a real legend in the hacker world. Putting up a web page before you know how to put up a web page is generally a very bad idea. The .gov sites are an exception. — Emmanuel Goldstein

I think there is something about coming to a city to work that puts you in touch with it in a different way. — Marilyn Hacker

The motivation hacker learns to steer his life towards higher Value and to have fun demolishing boring necessities in his way. Impulsiveness — Nick Winter

I wasn't a hacker for the money, and it wasn't to cause damage. — Kevin Mitnick

News and images move so easily across borders that attitudes and aspirations are no longer especially national. Cyber-weapons, no longer the exclusive province of national governments, can originate in a hacker's garage. — Robert Reich

Hacks and attacks happen. Safety Netiquette helps. Periodic account reconciliation is required. Check. — David Chiles

I'm addicted to email, but other than that, there are practical things - being able to buy a book on the internet that you can't find in your local bookshop. This could be a lifeline if you live further from the sources. — Marilyn Hacker

I have experienced healing through other writers' poetry, but there's no way I can sit down to write in the hope a poem will have healing potential. If I do, I'll write a bad poem. — Marilyn Hacker

The pleasure that I take in writing gets me interested in writing a poem. It's not a statement about what I think anybody else should be doing. For me, it's an interesting tension between interior and exterior. — Marilyn Hacker

Somebody could send you an office document or a PDF file, and as soon as you open it, it's a booby trap and the hacker has complete control of your computer. Another major problem is password management. People use the same password on multiple sites, so when the hacker compromises one site, they have your password for everywhere else. — Kevin Mitnick

Well, land sakes!" Hiro says. "Lookee here!" He whips his blade sideways, cutting off both of the businessman's forearms, causing the sword to clatter onto the floor.
"Better fire up the ol' barbeque, Jemima!" Hiro continues, whipping the sword around sideways, cutting the businessman's body in half just above the navel. Then he leans down so he's looking right into the businessman's face. "Didn't anyone tell you," he says, losing the dialect, "that I was a hacker?"
Then he hacks the guy's head off. — Neal Stephenson

There is something very satisfactory about being in the middle of something. — Marilyn Hacker

You happened to me. You were as deep down as I've ever been. You were inside me like my pulse. — Marilyn Hacker

The hacker community may be small, but it possesses the skills that are driving the global economies of the future. — Heather Brooke

I'm getting a daily email from Microsoft which I have been ignoring that states a hacker is trying to access my account. As far as the Microsoft account goes, the hacker can have it ... along with all of the nasty Windows 10 upgrade problems! — Steven Magee

I characterize myself as a retired hacker. I'm applying what I know to improve security at companies. — Kevin Mitnick

the Hacker Ethic, which instructs you to keep working until your hack tops previous efforts. — Steven Levy

Attribution is an enduring problem when it comes to forensic investigations. Computer attacks can be launched from anywhere in the world and routed through multiple hijacked machines or proxy servers to hide evidence of their source. Unless a hacker is sloppy about hiding his tracks, it's often not possible to unmask the perpetrator through digital evidence alone. — Kim Zetter

Translation is an interestingly different way to be involved both with poetry and with the language that I've found myself living in much of the time. I think the two feed each other. — Marilyn Hacker

When you translate poetry in particular, you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence. — Marilyn Hacker

Poetry seems to have been eliminated as a literary genre, and installed instead, as a kind of spiritual aerobic exercise - nobody need read it, but anybody can do it. — Marilyn Hacker

Da5id Meier, supreme hacker overlord, founding father of the Metaverse protocol, creator and proprietor of the world-famous Black Sun, has just suffered a system crash. He's been thrown out of his own bar by his own daemons. — Neal Stephenson

The beginnings of the hacker culture as we know it today can be conveniently dated to 1961, the year MIT acquired the first PDP-1. — Eric S. Raymond

When you zap things with light to build quantum computers, you're hacking existing systems. You're hijacking the computation that's already happening in the universe, just like a hacker takes over someone else's computer. — Seth Lloyd

It's true, I had hacked into a lot of companies, and took copies of the source code to analyze it for security bugs. If I could locate security bugs, I could become better at hacking into their systems. It was all towards becoming a better hacker. — Kevin Mitnick

I started to send my work to journals when I was 26, which was just a question of when I got the courage up. They were mostly journals I had been reading for the previous six or seven years. — Marilyn Hacker

A growth hacker doesn't see marketing as something one does but rather as something one builds into the product itself. — Ryan Holiday

I hate to say it, and Apple never likes it, but I love anything that's hacker oriented. I don't like passing it onto others, or getting things for free. I don't like stealing music one bit, at all ... — Steve Wozniak

I went from being a kid who loved to perform magic tricks to becoming the world's most notorious hacker, feared by corporations and the government. — Kevin Mitnick

For this to work, we need to find a computer system to break into." I looked up at Jack. "I don't suppose either one of you have previously undisclosed hacker abilities?"
Jack shook his head. "Not one of my many talents, sadly. But if you have a cherry stem I can show you a really cool one."
"I'm not great," Lend said. "You need Arianna."
"I think you're right. Jack, can you take Lend back and bring Arianna here?"
"But - " Lend started.
"No, there's not anything you can do here. Go back home and figure out what, exactly, your mom and the others want me to do. If I'm going to make a decision about them, I need all the information I can get. Also please put some clothes on because sleeping, nude Lend is a huge distraction I can't deal with right now."
He laughed. — Kiersten White

For those of you unfamiliar with the term "growth hacking," growth hacking focuses exclusively on strategies and tactics (typically in digital marketing) that help grow a business or product. The concept was first coined by Sean Ellis of Dropbox fame back in 2010 in a blog post. It has since changed the face of startup marketing, with Techcrunch guest writer Aaron Ginn explaining that a growth hacker has a "mindset of data, creativity, and curiosity. — Monica Leonelle

Inside every alienated hacker who thinks he stands for the "good things that ultimately don't matter to most businesses" there is a tycoon struggling to get out. — Michael Lewis

Why should I apologize for being a HACKER? Has anyone ever apologized for turning me into one? — Harsh Mohan

The movie marketing paradigm says throw an expensive premiere and hope that translates into ticket sales come opening weekend. A growth hacker says, "Hey, it's the twenty-first century, and we can be a lot more technical about how we acquire and capture new customers." The start-up world is full of companies taking clever hacks to drive their first set of customers into their sales funnel. The necessity of that jolt - needing to get it any way they can - has made start-ups very creative. — Ryan Holiday

I've been an inveterate reader of literary magazines since I was a teenager. There are always discoveries. You're sitting in your easy chair, reading; you realize you've read a story or a group of poems four times, and you know, Yes, I want to go farther with this writer. — Marilyn Hacker

Being able to break security doesn't make you a hacker anymore than being able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer. — Eric S. Raymond

Scaremongering is an age-old political ritual. There are public officials who have benefited by playing up the 'hacker threat' so that they can win approval by cracking down on it. — Charles Platt

If you give a hacker a new toy, the first thing he'll do is take it apart to figure out how it works. — Jamie Zawinski

Did you love well what very soon you left? Come home and take me in your arms and take away this stomach ache, headache, heartache. Never so full, I never was bereft so utterly. The winter evenings drift dark to the window. Not one work will make you, where you are, turn in your day, or wake from your night toward me. The only gift I got to keep or give is what I've cried, floodgates let down to mourning for the dead chances, for the end of being young, for everyone I loved who really died. I drank our one year out in brine instead of honey from the seasons of your tongue. — Marilyn Hacker

Look at you, hacker: a pathetic creature of meat and bone, panting and sweating as you run through my corridors. How can you challenge a perfect, immortal machine? — Ken Levine

Hacker with Bullhorn: "Save your money! Accept one of our free tanks! It is invulnerable, and can drive across rocks and swamps at ninety miles an hour while getting a hundred miles to the gallon!"
Prospective Station Wagon Buyer: "I know what you say is true ... but ... er ... I don't know how to maintain a tank!"
Bullhorn: "You don't know how to maintain a station wagon either!"
Buyer: "But this dealership has mechanics on staff. If something goes wrong with my station wagon, I can take a day off work, bring it here, and pay them to work on it while I sit in the waiting room for hours, listening to elevator music."
Bullhorn: "But if you accept one of our free tanks, we will send volunteers to your house to fix it for free while you sleep!"
Buyer: "Stay away from my house, you freak! — Neal Stephenson

Clearly, once the student is no longer a student the possibilities of relationship are enlarged. — Marilyn Hacker

I'm alternatingly brilliant and witless-and sleepless: bed is just a swamp to roll in. — Marilyn Hacker

My mother was told she couldn't go to medical school because she was a woman and a Jew. So she became a teacher in the New York City public school system. — Marilyn Hacker

I don't know whether a poem has be there to help to develop something. I think it's there for itself, for what the reader finds in it. — Marilyn Hacker

With, or despite our scars, we stay alive. — Marilyn Hacker

F_k being a script kiddie if you can avoid it - be a hacker. — Kevin D. Mitnick

I am by now completely convinced that my downfall in life is going to be my inability to achieve computer nirvana like a true hacker or hackette. I think this lacking is the most unmodern facet of my personality - the career equivalent of having six fingers, or a vestigial tail. — Douglas Coupland

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

The guardians of your company's cyber security should be encouraged to network within the industry to swap information on the latest hacker tricks and most effective defenses. — Nina Easton

Of the individual poems, some are more lyric and some are more descriptive or narrative. Each poem is fixed in a moment. All those moments written or read together take on the movement and architecture of a narrative. — Marilyn Hacker

I'm a fucking killing machine, and you're a sweet little hacker who likes to flirt with danger. Baby, I am danger. — Rebecca Zanetti

I'm a bit of a hacker fanatic and know a fair bit about that industry and cyber crime and cyber warfare. — Seth Gordon

She builds people up because she knows what it is like to be torn down. — Shannon L. Alder

The key to social engineering is influencing a person to do something that allows the hacker to gain access to information or your network. — Kevin Mitnick

I know he's an assassin and I'm just his bizarre hacker partner in crime, but he is . . . different. More than a friend. In fact, if we weren't in the situation we were in, I'd call him my best friend. No one else ever takes care to make sure that I'm comfortable like he does. It's small things that tell me he's thinking of me and my quirks even when I'm not in my own head. No one, not even my brother Daniel, is so attuned to my needs. — Jessica Clare

JOHN: you hacked my dad's wallet?? — Andrew Hussie

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

Even people who feel perfectly comfortable investing in the stock market and owning their own homes often have qualms about individual medical accounts or Social Security private accounts. — Jacob Hacker

Took to typing as quickly and loudly as possible and yelling, "I'm in!" when accessing basic programs. Made me feel like a hacker. — Jeremy Robert Johnson

The hacker mindset doesn't actually see what happens on the other side, to the victim. — Kevin Mitnick

Everybody knows if it's on the Internet, some brilliant hacker can get at it. — Lesley Stahl

A hacker to me is someone creative who does wonderful things. — Tim Berners-Lee

The garage is the space for the hacker, the tinkerer, the maker. The garage is not defined by a single field or industry; instead, it is defined by the eclectic interests of its inhabitants. It is a space where intellectual networks converge. — Steven Johnson

If you are a good hacker everybody knows you, But if you are a great hacker nobody knows you. — Rishabh Surya

Wicked Tribe, Rooling Tribe! is the mejor hacker tribe. Too small, too fast, too scientific! — Tad Williams

He knows that I have a photographic memory ... and that I'm a hacker. — Stieg Larsson

The Yankees' Facebook page was hacked. The hacker was immediately purchased and signed to a 5 year contract with the Yankees. — Stephen Colbert

Perhaps first and foremost is the challenge of taking what I find as a reader and making it into a poem that, primarily, has to be a plausible poem in English. — Marilyn Hacker

It's much easier to become a hacker now. It was a private community before and you had to find your way in, like tumbling down a rabbit hole. Today, there are all-in-one desktops fully equipped with tools pre-built into the operating system, all related to hacking. They are all very powerful tools and free to download. — Michael Demon Calce

She noted the lack of female hardware hackers, and was enraged at the male hacker obsession with technological play and power. — Steven Levy

The end goal of every growth hacker is to build a self-perpetuating marketing machine that reaches millions by itself. - AARON GINN — Ryan Holiday

If Metias joined the Patriots, he'd be a Hacker too. If he were alive. — Marie Lu

There is a way in which all writing is connected. In a second language, for example, a workshop can liberate the students' use of the vocabulary they're acquiring. — Marilyn Hacker

The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth (aka AGW; aka ManBearPig) has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after a hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (aka CRU) and released 61 megabytes of confidential files onto the internet. (Hat tip: Watts Up With That) — James Delingpole

Every time a message seems to grab us, and we think, 'I just might try it,' we are at the nexus of choice and persuasion that is advertising. — Andrew Hacker

In early 1993, a hostile observer might have had grounds for thinking that the Unix story was almost played out, and with it the fortunes of the hacker tribe. — Eric S. Raymond

Friendship often grows out of shared experiences — Andrew Hacker

I'm a really good hacker, but I'm not a sensible person. — Richard D. James

Paris is a wonderful city. I can't say I belong to an especially anglophone community. — Marilyn Hacker

I find myself anticipating a new kind of storyteller, on who is half hacker, half bard. — Janet H. Murray