Codebreaking Quotes

Turing was a quite brilliant mathematician, most famous for his work on breaking the German Enigma codes. It is no exaggeration to say that, without his outstanding contribution, the history of the Second World War could have been very different.

For an old spy and codebreaker like myself, nothing in the world happens by coincidence.

Some of our best and unexpected discoveries have been born out of crises - from the Second World War, for example, came Alan Turing's decoding machine, widely considered as the precursor to modern day computers and artificial intelligence.

To me, Alan Turing was a mystery - it was sort of like something I needed to unravel. And he was also obsessed with puzzles. So I wanted to make the movie like a mystery, like a puzzle that you're piecing together.

In World War II, a British mathematician named Alan Turing led the effort to crack the Nazis' communication code. He mastered the complex German enciphering machine, helping to save the world, and his work laid the basis for modern computer science. Does it matter that Turing was gay?

Alan Turing is so important to me and to the world, and his story is so important to be told, so it was a big thing to take up, and I was a little petrified. Like, who am I to write the Alan Turing story? He's one of the great geniuses of the 20th century - who was horribly persecuted for being gay - and I'm a kid from Chicago.

It was one of those great miracles of history that they managed to smuggle an Enigma machines out to Britain just before they were invaded by the Nazis.

Through the skill and devotion to duty of their armed forces of all branches in the Midway area our citizens can now rejoice that a momentous victory is in the making.

I never could make out what those damned dots meant.

I thought I knew who Alan Turing was. I've always loved history, and I was actually shocked by how little I actually knew. I was amazed this wasn't common knowledge. Why wasn't he on the front covers of my history books? He's one of the great thinkers of the last century, and he was sort of pushed into the shadows.

Among tech-minded kids, I think Alan Turing was a tremendous inspiration. He was a guy that was so different than the people around him. He was an outsider in his own time, but because he was an outsider is precisely why he was able to accomplish things nobody thought was possible.

I'm not gay, but I don't think you have to be gay to have a gay hero. Growing up, Alan Turing was certainly mine. I'm also not the greatest mathematician of my generation. We have lots of biographical differences, but nonetheless, I always identified with him so much.

I had been a lifelong Alan Turing obsessive. Among incredibly nerdy teenagers, without a lot of friends, Alan Turing was always this luminary figure we'd all look up to.

'The Imitation Game' is a celebration of Alan Turing's life and legacy, and Joan's final monologue is our eulogy. It's the thing we all wished we could have said to him.

Everything. A letter may be coded, and a word may be coded. A theatrical performance may be coded, and a sonnet may be coded, and there are times when it seems the entire world is in code. Some believe that the world can be decoded by performing research in a library. Others believe that the world can be decoded by reading a newspaper. In my case, the only thing that made sense of the world was you, and without you the world will seem as garbled and tragic as a malfunctioning typewrit9.

Trying to explain Turing's work in encryption and decryption? It's complicated.

I felt like Alan Turing's story was such an important story to tell, and it was so wonderful to write the script and other people find it and say, 'I never heard this story.' It's such an amazing story that people don't believe it.

I start 'The Code Book' with the story of Mary Queen of Scots and the Babington Plot, which was foiled when Mary's enciphered messages fell into the hands of Elizabeth I's codebreakers.

Egyptologists, skilled in piecing together the papyri of lost civilisations, suddenly discovered that the same talent could be applied to working out the pattern of German radio traffic.

'The Imitation Game' is a very British film.

Alan Turing is such an amazing, tragic story.

I had first heard about Alan Turing when I was a teenager. I've known about him since I was a kid, and I always wanted to write about him.

Telling Alan Turing's story in a two-hour film was a tremendous challenge. It felt in some small way like our filmmaking version of breaking the enigma code.

I was shocked that I knew so little about Alan Turing. Then I started to read about him, and I got a little obsessed.

A lot of biopics to me feel very much like someone is standing in front of the camera and is reading a Wikipedia page to you, like someone is reciting event. Did you know this happened? Did you know that happened? But Alan Turing's life deserved a sort of passionate film, and an exciting film.