The earliest published source located on Google Books attributing this to Einstein is the 2000 book The Internet Handbook for Writers, Researchers, and Journalists by Mary McGuire, p. 14. It was attributed to him on the internet before that, as in this post from 1997. Variants of the quote can be found well before this however, as in the 1989 book Urban Surface Water Management by S. G. Walesh, which on p. 315 contains the statement (said to have been 'stated anonymously'): "The computer is incredibly fast, accurate, and stupid. Man is unbelievably slow, inaccurate, and brilliant. The marriage of the two is a challenge and opportunity beyond imagination." Even earlier, the article "A Paper Industry Application of Systems Engineering and Direct Digital Control" by H. D. Couture, Jr. and M. A. Keyes, which appears in the 1969 Advances in Instrumentation: Vol. 24, Part 4, has a statement on this page which uses phrasing similar to the supposed Einstein quote in describing computers and pe
More quotes by Albert Einstein
A happy man is too satisfied with the present to dwell too much on the future.
Try to become not a man of success, but try rather to become a man of value.
Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.
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Some of my youthful readers are developing wonderful imaginations. This pleases me.
There is an inverse relationship between imagination and money.
Attribution
Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Albert Einstein (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.