“Banality soothes our nerves.”

Learning French is trivial: the word for horse is cheval, and everything else follows in the same way.

There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.

What fun is there in making plans, acquiring discipline in organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail and learning to be self-critical?

Hardly any sets of 10K words can be adequately described with pictures.

You can measure a programmer’s perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing vitality of FORTRAN.

It goes against the grain of modern education to teach children to program.

In English every word can be verbed.

Dealing with failure is easy.

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

One can’t proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.

A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming.

Optimization hinders evolution.

If a listener nods his head when you’re explaining your program, wake him up.

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

Because of its vitality, the computing field is always in desperate need of new cliches.

That it is meant to be discarded: that the whole point is to always see it as a soap bubble?

Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.

Dawn was written well before 9/11. People speak a lot today about the banality of evil, but not all evil is banal.