“When I say that we have met the Martians and they are us, I am using colorful language to suggest that we may have been seeded in the process of panspermia.”

If we can no longer believe in heavenly hierarchies, extraterrestrial hierarchies will suffice.

The problems of language here are really serious. We wish to speak in some way about the structure of the atoms. But we cannot speak about atoms in ordinary language.

I have three tools at my disposal – my whistle, my body language and my talk.

When a monkey nibbles on a weenis, it’s funny in any language.

In English every word can be verbed.

If you spend 72 hours in a place you’ve never been, talking to people whose language you don’t speak about social, political, and economic complexities you don’t understand, and you come back as the world’s biggest know-it-all, you’re a reporter. Either that or you’re President Obama.

If I knew the language enough to know it was a horrible love song with stupid lyrics.

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

The protean nature of the computer is such that it can act like a machine or like a language to be shaped and exploited.