“What’s your personal computer, anyways? Your personal computer should be something that’s always on your person.”

A bomb is blown up only once-but one bot can become many, and quickly get out of control.

Although humankind inherently “desires to know”, if open access to, and unlimited development of, knowledge henceforth puts us all in clear danger of extinction, then common sense demands that we re-examine our reverence for knowledge.

Operating systems are like underwear – nobody really wants to look at them.

I got tired of people complaining that it was too hard to use UNIX because the editor was too complicated.

The problem is that those few programmers who crank out code aren’t interested in maintaining it.

Systems are going to get a lot more sophisticated.

You can drive a car by looking in the rear view mirror as long as nothing is ahead of you. Not enough software professionals are engaged in forward thinking.

Take responsibility for the things you build and invent.

Most of the bright people don’t work for you – no matter who you are.

Bitmap display is media compatible with dot matrix or laser printers.

I think one of the interesting things is that vi is really a mode-based editor.

Today scientists, technologists, businessmen, engineers don’t have any personal responsibility for the consequences of their actions.

I started to write a new editor not too long ago and had it about half done after two days.

But no, I don’t generally have trouble with spelling mistakes.

You can’t prove anything about a program written in C or FORTRAN. It’s really just Peek and Poke with some syntactic sugar.

We can’t simply do our science and not worry about the ethical issues.

I don’t even know which end of a computer one is supposed to gaze into. I’ve never used a computer.

When a professor insists computer science is X but not Y, have compassion for his graduate students.

The modern computer with all its various gadgets and wonderful electronic facilities now makes it possible to preserve and reinvigorate all the cultural richness of mankind.

I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun.

The protean nature of the computer is such that it can act like a machine or like a language to be shaped and exploited.

In computers, every ‘new explosion’ was set off by a software product that allowed users to program differently.

Computer Science is embarrassed by the computer.

[Computing] is just a fabulous place for that, because it’s a place where you don’t have to be a Ph.D. or anything else. It’s a place where you can still be an artisan.