“The IT people who have made such an effort to know and understand computer technology. They are frustrated that you cannot use Facebook, Twitter and YouTube in China. They are the first to recognize that the situation is terrible.”

There are no outdoor sports as graceful as throwing stones at a dictatorship.

If I really have nothing to do, I just watch my cats, take some photos, and go back to my personal blog.

It’s really rubbish that some kind of “technical” learning means you will be a better person because you know this skill better.

The American experience influenced my understanding of individuality, basic human rights, freedom of expression and the rights and responsibilities of citizens.

And who is going to win the competition if U.S. cannot hold a strong ideology? And even the U.S. would’ve lost the ground to win.

This so-called fame or being better off doesn’t really attract me at all.

Otherwise, I think the building can be bigger, larger, and the city can be much more crazy. The problem is the government structure is so deadly stupid, not really solving problems but creating a lot of problems itself every day.

China is at a different stage of development, human rights are violated here much more often. And still, we see improvements even here.

You start to see the society, how it functions, how it works. Then you have a lot of criticism about how it works.

I think optimism is whether you are still exhilarated by life, whether you are curious, whether you still believe there is possibility.

It [success] is really by mistake.

Destroy or build. Crazy or noncrazy. I’m not nostalgic about the old city. I don’t enjoy it that much.

Technology is a liberation. I think the information age probably is the best thing to happen to the human race in human evolution.

Of course, there [in China] has to be chaos. It has to be crazy, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong about it except this government, which is really incapable of doing anything meaningful.

This so-called contemporary art is not a form, but a philosophy of society.

If there is no freedom of expression, then the beauty of life is lost. Participation in a society is not an artistic choice, it’s a human need.

I think that it’s extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing.

A computer scientist is a machine for converting coffee into urine.

And when they decided to beef up their OSs, they went to (different) very old bad mainframe models of OS design to try to adapt to personal computers.

I go to live in Maine for the summer. Without computer, and without the telephone service we are mercifully without the faxes and e-mails.

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

The computer is simply an instrument whose music is ideas.

When the Mac first came out, Newsweek asked me what I [thought] of it. I said: Well, it’s the first personal computer worth criticizing.

I don’t know how many of you have ever met Dijkstra, but you probably know that arrogance in computer science is measured in nano-Dijkstras.