There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.

A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.

Adapting old programs to fit new machines usually means adapting new machines to behave like old ones.

Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.

When someone says, "I want a programming language in which I need only say what I want done," give him a lollipop.

It is better to have 100 functions operate on one data structure than to have 10 functions operate on 10 data structures.

In software systems it is often the early bird that makes the worm.

A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.

Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.

If your computer speaks English, it was probably made in Japan.

A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.

When I grew up, we had no babysitters and nobody every observed us. People don't parent like that today. They're very hands-on; kids are constantly being supervised.

The purest suffering bears and carries in its train the purest understanding.

Learning to quit while you're not ahead, when the dull ooze of depression tells you things are not going to get any better, is one of the best financial and life skills you can master.

All I'm trying to do is wipe out heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, and obesity.

If you would and you could brighten my northern sky.

Sooner I'd try to change history than turn political, than try convincing others to write letters or to vote or to march or to do something they didn't already feel like doing.

In some dim beginning, man created the institution of government as a convenience for himself. And, ever since that time, government has been doing its best to become an inconvenience.

The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care to know. They are incurious. Incuriousity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is.

That even an apocalypse can be made to seem part of the ordinary horizon of expectation constitutes an unparalleled violence that is being done to our sense of reality, to our humanity.

The man whose silent daysIn harmless joys are spent,Whom hopes cannot delude,Nor sorrow discontent:That man needs neither towersNor armour for defence,Nor secret vaults to flyFrom thunder's violence.