“This is not secret knowledge. It’s just secret to this pop culture.”

Every technology really needs to be shipped with a special manual – not how to use it but why, when, and for what.

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

In a well functioning world, tools and agents are complementary.

The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made.

Possibly the only real object-oriented system in working order. (About Internet)

Computer literacy is a contact with the activity of computing deep enough to make the computational equivalent of reading and writing fluent and enjoyable.

Because the web has produced so much uninformed criticism. It’s kind of a Gresham’s Law-bad money drives the good money out of circulation.

This tends to result in very dumbed-down products that are easy to get started on, but are generally worthless and/or debilitating.

There will be always unresolved ambiguity here.

In success there’s a tendency to keep on doing what you were doing.

There’s a real sense in which MS and Apple never understood networking or operating systems (or what objects really are).

The computer is simply an instrument whose music is ideas.

Any company large enough to have a research lab is too large to listen to it.

It’s easier to invent the future than to predict it.

People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.

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

Kill if you must, but never hate: Man is but grass and hate is blight, The sun will scorch you soon or late, Die wholesome then, since you must fight

Culture, then, is a study of perfection, and perfection which insists on becoming something rather than in having something, in an inward condition of the mind and spirit, not in an outward set of circumstances.

The decline of true taste for food is the beginning of a decline in a national culture as a whole. When people have lost their authentic personal taste, they lose their personality and become the instruments of other people’s wills.

Culture is to know the best that has been said and thought in the world.

Hate is a fear, and fear is rot That cankers root and fruit alike, Fight cleanly then, hate not, fear not, Strike with no madness when you strike.

But that so many scholars are barbarians does not much matter so long as a few of them are ready to help with their specialized knowledge the few independent thinkers, that is to say the poets, who try to to keep civilization alive.

Not a having and a resting, but a growing and a becoming, is the character of perfection as culture conceives it.

The university is our culture’s assertion that what is made by the mind has value and can convey values.