Hacker Culture Quotes

It's not enough to have a hacker culture anymore. You have to have a design culture, too.

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.

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.

When I first created the world of 'Mr. Robot,' I thought it would be a niche television series with a small, cult following.

First of all, a giant corporation probably shouldn't be being hacked by teenagers. I put that on the corporation, not the teenagers. Teenagers are going to do what teenagers are going to do - rebelling. But if they're able to hack a big corporation, that seems like the corporation should be better at security.

People in tech love to see their work as embodying the 'hacker ethos': a desire to break systems down in order to change them. But this pride can often be conveyed rather clumsily.

Everyone wants to be called an outsider so I'm a proud insider. If I was young I'd be in my parents' house shutting down the government on my computer. The new delinquent is the hacker.

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.

For me as a kid, reading cyberpunk was like seeing the world for the first time. Gibson's Neuromancer wasn't just stylistically stunning; it felt like the template for a future that we were actively building. I remember reading Sterling's Islands in the Net and suddenly understanding the disruptive potential of technology once it got out into the street. Cyberpunk felt urgent. It wasn't the future 15 minutes out - it was the future sideswiping you and leaving you in a full-body cast as it passed by.

I met a lot of hackers, and some of them were very arrogant. They thought I was stupid because I couldn't follow what they were talking about. But then I met this great guy whom companies hire to find their security holes, and he was very good about explaining so I could understand.

What fashion has started from hackers? They have bad posture, and they don't go out. I wish I had a hacker boyfriend - they stay at home up in the bedroom.

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.

A hacker is someone who enjoys playful cleverness—not necessarily with computers. The programmers in the old MIT free software community of the 60s and 70s referred to themselves as hackers. Around 1980, journalists who discovered the hacker community mistakenly took the term to mean “security breaker.”

Hacking is very interesting. Once they hack, if you don't catch them in the act, you're not going to catch them.

See, unlike most hackers, I get little joy out of figuring out how to install the latest toy.

If I compared myself to my kids, they know everything, and they're like small little hackers. I feel also that my identity can be stolen; I'm very paranoid about it compared to other people in the younger generation.

It was on a bulletin board that I first learned about hacker culture, the 'Let's just break through this wall and see what's on the other side' mentality.

We hackers are a playful bunch; we'll hack anything, including language, if it looks like fun (thus our tropism for puns). Deep down, we like confusing people who are stuffier and less mentally agile than we are, especially when they're bosses. There's a little bit of the mad scientist in all hackers, ready to discombobulate the world and flip authority the finger - especially if we can do it with snazzy special effects.