“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 soft nerds are the ones who get violently ill whenever anybody mentions an integral sign.

I fear – as far as I can tell – that most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training.

Most creativity is a transition from one context into another where things are more surprising.

When I first prepared this particular talk…

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 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.

Years of misguided teaching have resulted in the destruction of the best in our society, in our cultures and in the environment.

The best way to predict your future is to create it.

Real education should consist of drawing the goodness and the best out of our own students. What better books can there be than the book of humanity?

Come grow old with me. The best is yet to be.

Always do your best. What you plant now, you will harvest later.

Remember that the most difficult tasks are consummated, not by a single explosive burst of energy or effort, but by the constant daily application of the best you have within you.

The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man

Kindness is one of the best gifts you can bestow, We know that inherently that feels great.