Programming languages on the whole are very much more complicated than — C. A. R. Hoare

"The real value of tests is not that they detect bugs in the code, but that they detect inadequacies in the methods, concentration, and skills of those who design and produce the code."

"The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intentions of its user."

"I have learned more from my failures than can ever be revealed in the cold print of a scientific article. [...] [Failures] are much more fun to hear about afterwards; they are not so funny at the time."

"I have regarded it as the highest goal of programming language design to enable good ideas to be elegantly expressed."

"One fine morning, when the emperor felt hot and bored, he extricated himself carefully from under the mountain of clothes and is now living happily as a swineherd in another story. The tailor is canonized as the patron saint of all consultants, because in spite of the enormous fees he extracted, he was never able to convince his clients of his dawning realization that their clothes have no Emperor."

"Be the change that you wish to see in the world."

"we are engaged in a grim experiment never before attempted. We are subjecting whole populations to exposure to chemicals which animal experiments have proved to be extremely poisonous and in many cases cumulative in their effect. These exposures now begin at or before birth and-unless we change our methods-will continue through the lifetime of those now living. No one knows what the result will be, because we have no previous experience to guide us."

"pity this busy monster, manunkind, not. Progress is a comfortable disease: your victim (death and life safely beyond) plays with the bigness of his littleness"

"I believe that the unity of man as opposed to other living things derives from the fact that man is the conscious life of himself. Man is conscious of himself, of his future, which is death, of his smallness, of his impotence; he is aware of others as others; man is in nature, subject to its laws even if he transcends it with his thought."

"“We need brains, is the bottom line,” Ivy said. “We’re not hunter-gatherers anymore. We’re all living like patients in the intensive care unit of a hospital. What keeps us alive isn’t bravery, or athleticism, or any of those other skills that were valuable in a caveman society. It’s our ability to master complex technological skills. It is our ability to be nerds. We need to breed nerds.”"

"I have been clinically depressed for most of my life. I once used drugs to fix it. Then I stopped. I stopped because I decided they were making me stupid, and Id rather be miserable than stupid. I am what I am."