Mit Quotations

I loved music, and in my ninth year at MIT, I decided to buy a hi-fi set. I figured that all I needed to do was look at the specifications. So I bought what looked like the best one, turned it on, and turned it off in five minutes, the sound was so poor.

Imagine spending seven years at MIT and research laboratories, only to find out that you're a performance artist.

I had spent the summer of 1966 working at MIT in the group that was the MIT component of the Multics effort.

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.

One of the ideas that was developed at MIT in a workshop was, imagine this pipe, and you've got valves, solenoid valves, taps, opening and closing. You create like a water curtain with pixels made of water. If those pixels fall, you can write on it: you can show patterns, images, text.

College had little effect on me. I'd have been the same writer if I'd gone to MIT, except I'd have flunked out sooner.

I had studied at Harvard and MIT astronomy and a lot about the heavens and the star system and so forth.

When David Marr at MIT moved into computer vision, he generated a lot of excitement, but he hit up against the problem of knowledge representation; he had no good representations for knowledge in his vision systems.

Stanley Kubrick knew we had good graphics around MIT and came to my lab to find out how to do it. We had some really good stuff. I was very impressed with Kubrick; he knew all the graphics work I had ever heard of, and probably more.

The thing that we at MIT must understand is the amount of real damage that is being done to us in the fine structure of how research funds are expended.

There was a time when I was wondering about this business of going public, so I visited about a half-dozen companies in the Boston area, all of them formed by MIT faculty and all had gone public.

I moved to MIT from Stanford in 1984 to teach, and became the founding director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab.

I probably learned most at MIT by teaching and working with Peter Diamond, who acted like a big brother to me during my time in the department.

I've been a Fellow in a number of companies: Xerox, Apple, Disney, HP. There are certain similarities because all the Fellows programs were derived from IBM's, which itself was derived from the MIT 'Institute Professor' program.

My work at MIT had focused on what we could build in space once we had inexpensive space transportation and industrial facilities in orbit. And this led to various sorts of work in space development.

One of the best teaching experiences Ed Schein and I had when we were teaching at MIT in the 1960s was inventing a course on leadership through film.

MIT has always been key to NASA's success. Our people, technology development and scientific investigations have been intertwined since the earliest days of the space program.

One of the terrific aspects of MIT in those days was the enormous variety of experimental work that either took place there or was talked about in seminars by outside speakers aggressively recruited by the faculty.

Of course, MIT was notable not just for its faculty but also for its students. And, facing such extremely bright kids as a rookie teacher was something like being thrown to the wolves.

Naturally, we are honored that MIT has added our family of funds to its employees' retirement plans,

He felt he wanted to get some of that MIT magic. Our ultimate mission is to improve productivity, competitiveness, and entrepreneurship in the United Kingdom.

He didn't go to one of the top schools - Harvard or MIT or Stanford or Northwestern. I think that was an advantage. He didn't get brainwashed into one of the doctrines.

My cerebral cortex, the gray matter that MIT neuroscientist Steven Pinker likens to 'a large sheet of two-dimensional tissue that has been wadded up to fit inside the spherical skull,' is riddled instead of whole.

We are making sure that the courses we offer at MITx and HarvardX are quintessential MIT and Harvard courses. They are not watered down. They are not MIT Lite or Harvard Lite. These are hard courses. These are the exact same courses, so the certificate will mean something.

We already have a professor who's using an online social network of MIT alums to help educate students in programming. Just imagine expanding that in Facebook-fashion to tens or hundreds of millions of people around the world.

EdX will be a creating a platform which will be open source, not for profit, and a portal for a website where universities will offer their courses. For example, MIT courses will be offered as MITx and Harvard courses as HarvardX.

A large number of students around the world don't really have access to high quality education. So, launching EdX allows students all over the world to have much better access to a high quality education from a university such as Harvard, MIT, Berkeley and others as we add more universities.

Don’t ask me when be­cause I don’t re­mem­ber, but some­where along the way I keep for­get­ting to com­mit sui­cide.

Bruno Rossi was a giant at MIT, and as an MIT professor, I am humbled to receive an award named in his honor.

As it happens, although I was at MIT on the faculty full-time for 18 years and then at Harvard for another 16, so I've always been in full-time academia, I always found it was both beneficial for my research and beneficial for the other work to be involved in the practicing community.

Storage Center's stability and speed will help MIT Medical maintain its commitment to timely, personal patient care.

The MIT was a wake-up call for him. He just keeps getting better and better.

It's a great pro-Israel tool to have MIT students meet Israelis on campus.

In my early days, I wrote my dissertation for MIT at the London School of Economics, really under James Meade, but my dissertation was five chapters on the theory of capital movement, but it didn't mention money.

I'm on the MIT board, and a lot of our buildings now have daycare centers; it's becoming a standard.

MIT is governed by a second, even higher rule: the inalienable right of academic freedom.

If anybody thinks they should listen to me because I'm a professor at MIT, that's nonsense. You should decide whether something makes sense by its content, not by the letters after the name of the person who says it.

Two factors explain our success. One, MIT's renaissance after World War II as a federally supported research resource. Two, the mathematical revolution in macro- and micro-economic theory and statistics. This was overdue and inevitable, MIT was the logical place for it to flourish.

Amherst was pivotal in my broad intellectual development; MIT in my development as a professional economist.

Everything that I've learned about computers at MIT I have boiled down into three principles: Unix: You think it won't work, but if you find the right wizard, they can make it work. Macintosh: You think it will work, but it won't. PC/Windows: You think it won't work, and it won't.

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.”

I was at a speaking engagement for MIT... and I said, 'The Professor has all sorts of degrees, including one from this very institution [MIT]! And that's why I can make a radio out of a coconut, and not fix a hole in a boat!'

The rabble also vent their rage in words. [Ger., Es macht das Volk sich auch mit Worten Lust.]

For the nature of a women is closely allied to art. [Ger., Denn das Naturell der Frauen Ist so nah mit Kunst verwandt.]