“You can measure a programmer’s perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing vitality of FORTRAN.”

That it is meant to be discarded: that the whole point is to always see it as a soap bubble?

Any noun can be verbed.

Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.

Every program has (at least) two purposes: the one for which it was written and another for which it wasn’t.

We are on the verge: Today our program proved Fermat’s next-to-last theorem.

In the long run, every program becomes rococo, and then rubble.

When it started out, it was an awful lot of fun. Of course, the paying customers got shafted every now and then, and after a while we began to take their complaints seriously.

Often it is the means that justify the ends: goals advance technique and technique survives even when goal structures crumble.

A language that doesn’t affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.

Once you understand how to write a program get someone else to write it.

We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses.

I think it is inevitable that people program poorly.

You think you KNOW when you learn.

Adapting old programs to fit new machines usually means adapting new machines to behave like old ones.

Are more sure when you can write, even more when you can teach, but certain when you can program.

A LISP programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing.

In doing nothing men learn to do evil.

I asked, “What are words?” The tenzo said, “One, two, three, four, five.” I asked again, “What is practice?” “Nothing in the entire universe is hidden.”

There is nothing more requisite in business than despatch.

Nothing in the nature around us is evil. This needs to be repeated since one of the human ways of talking oneself into inhuman acts is to cite the supposed cruelty of nature.

If you want God’s grace, all you need is need, all you need is nothing. But that kind of spiritual humility is hard to muster.

There’s nothing prettier in the world than a melody. I can get lost in a song with a melody.

Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!

All this time i’ve hated myself for it. I thought i’d given it up for nothing. But if i hadn’t fallen, i wouldn’t have met you.