“Art also has this element. Our job is to remind us that there are more contexts than the one that we’re in – the one that we think is reality.”

Some people worry that artificial intelligence will make us feel inferior, but then, anybody in his right mind should have an inferiority complex every time he looks at a flower.

The flip side of the coin was that even good programmers and language designers tended to do terrible extensions when they were in the heat of programming, because design is something that is best done slowly and carefully.

The future is not laid out on a track. It is something that we can decide.

I knew in the first grade that they were lying to me because I had already been exposed to other points of view.

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.

People may need something to celebrate. They need a context in which to celebrate things. They need something that fills the void that’s left by the bankruptcy of religion and so forth.

The context has to come from the human first, rather than bits and pieces of fragments of old religion and all of the old moral superstructure, whatever it used to be.

Most creativity is a transition from one context into another where things are more surprising.

There’s an interesting question here because if the gold price broke in that context, the thermometer would not be just a measuring tool. It would basically affect the underlying psychology.

But herein lies the rub: Christianity has been on a long-term trend of decline in every Western cultural context that we can identify.

In the context of general relativity, space almost is a substance.

I believe that the general growth in large [financial] institutions have occurred in the context of an underlying structure of markets in which many of the larger risks are dramatically — I should say, fully — hedged.

[talking about the Holocaust] ‘But to put something in context is a step towards saying it can be understood and that it can be explained.