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

The tree of research must be fed from time to time with the blood of bean-counters, for it is its natural manure.

Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible.

When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free?

I fear – as far as I can tell – that most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training.

If we value the lifelong learning of arts and letters as a springboard for personal and societal growth, should any less effort be spent to make computing a part of our lives?

A computer scientist is a machine for converting coffee into urine.

Technology is anything that wasn’t around when you were born.

Java and C++ make you think that the new ideas are like the old ones.

It’s all about long-term, sustaining relationships.

The real romance is out ahead and yet to come. The computer revolution hasn’t started yet.

Bad criticism drives good criticism out of circulation. You just can’t criticize anything.

But Basic happened to be on a GE timesharing system that was done by Dartmouth, and when GE decided to franchise that, it started spreading Basic around just because it was there, not because it had any intrinsic merits whatsoever.

If you’re utopian, you’re never satisfied.

And when they decided to beef up their OSs, they went to (different) very old bad mainframe models of OS design to try to adapt to personal computers.

A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points. Perspective is worth 80 IQ points. Point of view is worth 80 IQ points

Knowledge is silver. Outlook is gold. IQ is a lead weight.

Francis Galton, whose mission it seems to be to ride other men’s hobbies to death, has invented the felicitous expression ‘structureless germs’.

It is not true that I invented what is called the Montessori Method… I have studied the child; I have taken what the child has given me and expressed it, and that is what is called the Montessori Method.

Dictators never invent their own opportunities.

I just invent, then wait until man comes around to needing what I’ve invented.

Man who invented the hamburger was smart; man who invented the cheeseburger was a genius.

We didn’t invent the Grateful Dead, the crowd invented the Grateful Dead.

Why, we have invented the whole machinery of the supernatural, with its unseen spirits and powers, good and bad, to account for things, because we found the universal everyday nature too cheap, too common, too vulgar.

Liberals have invented whole college majors – psychology, sociology and women’s studies – to prove that nothing is anybody’s fault.