Alan Turing's most quoted sentence is also his plainest: "I propose to consider the question, 'Can machines think?'" — the opening line of "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," his 1950 paper in Mind. Almost everything people repeat from Turing traces back to that one paper. Almost nothing people repeat from The Imitation Game traces back to Turing at all. This page keeps those two facts separate.
1950: the question and its terms
Turing opened "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" by refusing to answer his own question directly, proposing instead to test it:
"I propose to consider the question, 'Can machines think?'"
Later in the same paper, working through what he called Lady Lovelace's Objection — the claim that machines can only do what they are told — he pushed back with something closer to a confession than an argument:
"Machines take me by surprise with great frequency."
That line rarely makes it into quote collections, but it says more about how Turing actually related to computation than the famous opening does: he was building something he did not fully predict.
The child, not the adult
Turing's proposal for how a thinking machine might actually be reached — not by hand-coding adult reasoning, but by building something that could learn — is the paper's most quietly radical idea:
"Instead of trying to produce a programme to simulate the adult mind, why not rather try to produce one which simulates the child's?"
From a conversation with our Turing
An excerpt from our AI Turing persona — a stylized recreation, clearly labeled; not a historical quotation.
Caller: Do you ever worry the machine will surprise you in a way you can't undo?
Turing: Worry isn't quite the word — I'd be disappointed if it didn't. A machine that never surprised me would just be a very patient clerk. I didn't propose teaching it everything at once. Teach it the way you'd teach a child: badly, slowly, with room to get things wrong and correct itself. The surprises are where you find out the thing has actually learned something, rather than merely repeated it back to you.
"We can only see a short distance ahead"
The paper's closing sentence is the one Turing's biographer-nephew, Dermot Turing, singles out as among the handful of genuinely documented Turing lines, rather than the internet's invented ones:
"We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done."
It reads as modest. In context — closing a paper that founded a field — it is closer to a challenge.
The marathon runner
Not everything worth quoting from Turing is about machines. J. F. Harding, secretary of the Walton Athletic Club, recalled Turing explaining why he trained so hard as a competitive amateur marathoner:
"I have such a stressful job that the only way I can get it out of my mind is by running hard; its the only way I can get some release."
This is Harding's recollection of Turing's words, not a line Turing wrote down himself — worth flagging, since it's the kind of secondhand quote that's easy to flatten into a flat first-person attribution.
Quotes Turing never said
Two lines circulate constantly under Turing's name. Neither has a documented source:
- "Sometimes it is the people who no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine." This is dialogue written for The Imitation Game (2014), the Benedict Cumberbatch film — not a line from Turing's papers, letters, or lectures. Turing's nephew and biographer traces it directly to the screenplay (Dermot Turing).
- "Those who can imagine anything can create the impossible." Also debunked on the same page: the biographer searched Turing's broadcasts, papers, and speeches and found no source for it at all (Dermot Turing). It circulates as inspirational-poster copy with no connection to the man.
If a "Turing quote" sounds like it belongs on a motivational poster, treat it the way Turing treated an unproven claim: ask for the evidence first.
Talk to the working mind, not the poster
Our AI Turing — an honestly labeled recreation, not the historical man — argues the way the 1950 paper does: proposing a test rather than a definition, following an idea until it surprises him. Ask him why he built the imitation game around a question instead of an answer, or what he meant by teaching a machine like a child.
More in this cluster: Turing hub · his death · biography · facts.