“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 hired finishers because I’m a good starter and a poor finisher.

I realized that my usual approach is usually critical. That is, a lot of the things that I do, that most people do, are because they hate something somebody else has done, or they hate that something hasn’t been done.

Don’t worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

The only way you can predict the future is to build it.

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.