“Scratch the surface in a typical boardroom and we’re all just cavemen with briefcases, hungry for a wise person to tell us stories.”

Perspective is worth 80 IQ points.

Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.

I’ve heard complaints from even mighty Stanford University with its illustrious faculty that basically the undergraduate computer science program is little more than Java certification.

So I had read maybe 150 books by the time I hit 1st grade. And I already knew that the teachers were lying to me.

Television should be the last mass communication medium to be naively designed and put into the world without a surgeon-general’s warning.

The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs.

Having an intelligent secretary does not get rid of the need to read, write, and draw, etc.

Of course I would pipe up with my five-year-old voice.

But once the threshold is reached, then everyone demands to do whatever it is.

Technology is anything invented after you were born, everything else is just stuff.

Science requires a society because even people who are trying to be good thinkers love their own thoughts and theories.

The greatest single programming language ever designed

In our society we have hard nerds and soft nerds.

People are willing to pay you if you’re any good at all, and you have plenty of time for screwing around.

If you’re not failing 90% of the time, then you’re probably not working on sufficiently challenging problems.

The result is – document destruction – we’re really not going to be able to prove beyond a truth the negatives and some of the positive conclusions that we’re going to come to.

Quality is the responsibility of the top people. Its origin is in the boardroom. They are the ones who decide.

They don’t come off. I walk into a lot of very high-level boardrooms now, and I present to distinguished conferences, but these bracelets remind me of the places I’ve been and the people I’ve met.