The accumulation of skill and science which has been directed to diminish the difficulty of producing manufactured goods, has not been beneficial to that country alone in which it is concentrated; distant kingdoms have participated in its advantages.

Forget this world and all its troubles and if possible its multitudinous Charlatans – everything in short but the Enchantress of Numbers.

As soon as an Analytical Engine exists, it will necessarily guide the future course of the science. Whenever any result is sought by its aid, the question will then arise – by what course of calculation can these results be arrived at by the machine in the shortest time?

It can happen to but few philosophers, and but at distant intervals, to snatch a science, like Dalton, from the chaos of indefinite combination, and binding it in the chains of number, to exalt it to rank amongst the exact. Triumphs like these are necessarily ‘few and far between.’

I find no flaw in your reasoning about the Analytical Engine; I admire it; but you are aware that it rests entirely on the hypothesis that I care for the ’whole human race.

Miracles may be, for anything we know to the contrary, phenomena of a higher order of God’s laws, superior to, and, under certain conditions, controlling the inferior order known to us as the ordinary laws of nature.

Trimming consists of clipping off little bits here and there from those observations which differ most in excess from the mean, and in sticking them onto those which are too small; a species of ‘equitable adjustment,’ as a radical would term it, which cannot be admitted in science.

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.

The force of vapour is another fertile source of moving power; but even in this case it cannot be maintained that power is created.

Propose to any Englishman any principle or instrument, however admirable, and you will observe that the whole effort of the English mind is directed to find a difficulty, a defect, or an impossibility in it.