“To get the medium’s magic to work for one’s aims rather than against them is to attain literacy.”

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.

Basic would never have surfaced because there was always a language better than Basic for that purpose.

There is the desire of a consumer society to have no learning curves.

An important technology first creates a problem and then solves it.

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

Artificial intelligence is what we don’t know how to do yet

A new friend is new wine, when it grows old, you will enjoy drinking it.

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.

There is nothing more stimulating than a case where everything goes against you.

There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.

When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it.

Against necessity, against its strength, no one can fight and win.

Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.

An atheist is someone who is certain that God does not exist, someone who has compelling evidence against the existence of God.

No one who goes against her can win.

What we need to do is always lean into the future; when the world changes around you and when it changes against you – what used to be a tail wind is now a head wind – you have to lean into that and figure out what to do because complaining isn’t a strategy.