“I think the trick with knowledge is to “acquire it, and forget all except the perfume” – because it is noisy and sometimes drowns out one’s own “brain voices”.”

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

There’s an element of surprise, and especially in science, there is often laughter that goes along with the “Aha.”

We cannot predict the future, but we can invent it.

Perl is another example of filling a tiny, short-term need, and then being a real problem in the longer term.

Change is easy, except for the changed part.

Humans are communications junkies. We just can’t get enough.

The idea that hardware on networks should just be caches for movable process descriptions and the processes themselves goes back quite a ways.

The perfume part is important because it will help find the knowledge again to help get to the destinations the inner urges pick.

School is basically about one point of view – the one the teacher has or the textbooks have.

The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.

When the Mac first came out, Newsweek asked me what I [thought] of it. I said: Well, it’s the first personal computer worth criticizing.

By the time I got to school, I had already read a couple hundred books.

It is not a tool, although it can act like many tools. It is the first metamedium, and as such it has degrees of freedom for representation and expression never before encountered and as yet barely investigated.

Yazılım konusunda iddialı insanlar kendi donanımlarını yapmalılar.

The biggest problem we have as human beings is that we confuse our beliefs with reality.

Lisp isn’t a language, it’s a building material.