What is there in a name? It is merely an empty basket, until you put something into it.

At each increase of knowledge, as well as on the contrivance of every new tool, human labour becomes abridged.

I have no desire to write my own biography, as long as I have strength and means to do better work.

The errors which arise from the absence of facts are far more numerous and more durable than those which result from unsound reasoning respecting true data.

Whenever a man can get hold of numbers, they are invaluable: if correct, they assist in informing his own mind, but they are still more useful in deluding the minds of others. Numbers are the masters of the weak, but the slaves of the strong.

The Council of the Royal Society is a collection of men who elect each other to office and then dine together at the expense of this society to praise each other over wine and give each other medals.

On two occasions I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.