“Banality soothes our nerves.”

When someone says, “I want a programming language in which I need only say what I want done,” give him a lollipop.

C programmers never die. They are just cast into void.

Training will not substantially help matters. We have to learn to live with it.

It is better to have 100 functions operate on one data structure than to have 10 functions operate on 10 data structures.

We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful, error-free perfect use of these machines.

In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.

There is no such thing as a free variable.

Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress.

You’ve solved the wrong problem. Work hard to improve.

It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.

In software systems it is often the early bird that makes the worm.

Work hard to improve. Success is also easy to handle.

Programmers are not to be measured by their ingenuity and their logic but by the completeness of their case analysis.

Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.

Every reader should ask himself periodically.

One can only display complex information in the mind.

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.