“In a well functioning world, tools and agents are complementary.”

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.

I had the fortune or misfortune to learn how to read fluently starting at the age of three.

To get the medium’s magic to work for one’s aims rather than against them is to attain literacy.

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 man is truly free, even here in this embodied state, if he knows that God is the true agent and he by himself is powerless to do anything.

I don’t like the idea of agents in a typical form. The idea of agents, to me, brings up the idea of a man in a very boring suit who’s not very good looking and doesn’t have much attention to style.

War should never be entered upon until every agency of peace has failed.

Awareness is the greatest agent for change.

An immigration agent chased him for the last 10 miles.

The devil’s agents may be of flesh and blood, may they not?

The instinct of brutes and insects can be the effect of nothing else than the wisdom and skill of a powerful ever-living agent.

The motions which the planets now have could not spring from any natural cause alone, but were impressed by an intelligent agent.