"Concevons qu’on ait dressé un million de singes à frapper au hasard sur les touches d’une machine à écrire et que, sous la surveillance de contremaîtres illettrés, ces singes dactylographes travaillent avec ardeur dix heures par jour avec un million de machines à écrire de types variés. Les contremaîtres illettrés rassembleraient les feuilles noircies et les relieraient en volumes. Et au bout d’un an, ces volumes se trouveraient renfermer la copie exacte des livres de toute nature et de toutes langues conservés dans les plus riches bibliothèques du monde." ("Imagine that a million monkeys have been trained to type at random on the keys of a typewriter and that, under the supervision of illiterate foremen, these typing monkeys work diligently ten hours a day with a million typewriters of various types. Illiterate foremen would collect the blackened sheets and bind them into volumes. And at the end of a year, these volumes would contain the exact copy of the books of all kinds and all languages preserved in the richest libraries in the world.")
- Émile Borel, Mécanique Statistique et Irréversibilité (1913)
"If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters they might write all the books in the British Museum."
- Arthur Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1928)
"...six monkeys, set to strum unintelligently on typewriters for millions of millions of years, would be bound in time to write all the books in the British Museum. If we examined the last page which a particular monkey had typed, and found that it had chanced, in its blind strumming, to type a Shakespeare sonnet, we should rightly regard the occurrence as a remarkable accident, but if we looked through all the millions of pages the monkeys had turned off in untold millions of years, we might be sure of finding a Shakespeare sonnet somewhere amongst them, the product of the blind play of chance."
- Sir James Jeans, The Mysterious Universe (1950)