"The course was so basic—this was the fall of 1993, before the popularity of the Internet—my homework assignment for the class one day was to send me email. It sounds absurd today, but I said: “For homework, send me email.” Other students’ emails contained simple test messages, or unmemorable notes about the class. Tove asked me out for a date. I married the first woman to approach me electronically."
"Im personally convinced that computer science has a lot in common with physics. Both are about how the world works at a rather fundamental level. The difference, of course, is that while in physics youre supposed to figure out how the world is made up, in computer science you create the world. Within the confines of the computer, youre the creator. You get to ultimately control everything that happens. If youre good enough, you can be God. On a small scale."
"You see. I dont think any new thoughts. I think thoughts that other people have thought, and I rearrange them. But Sara, she thinks thoughts that never were before."
"Jobs made a big point of the fact that Mach’s low-level kernel is open source. He sort of played down the flaw in the setup: Who cares if the basic operating system, the real low-core stuff, is open source if you then have the Mac layer on top, which is not open source? He had no way of knowing that my personal opinion of Mach is not very high. Frankly, I think it’s a piece of crap. It contains all the design mistakes you can make, and managed to even make up a few of its own."
"Most days I wake up thinking Im the luckiest bastard alive."
"I wanted to introduce him to surfing, but it made sense to start out with . We drove over to Half Moon Bay one afternoon in early May, rented wet suits and boards, and Linus protested heavily at the thought of wading into the chilly waters of the Pacific, even in a wet suit. But within minutes something amazing happened: He delighted in riding the waves. “This is great,” he enthused like a five-year old at one point, slapping me a high five. Of course, about fifteen minutes later he developed a nasty leg cramp—from being so out of shape, he reasoned—and had to stop. (When the cramp hit, he just sat there in the white water, apparently unable to get up, as waves washed over him. My first thought was: “Oh fuck. If I kill this guy, I’ll have millions of nerds on my case.”)"
"As long as you keep getting born, it’s okay to die sometimes."
"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that theres free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."
"History is a strange experience. The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles. When you go to Mexico City through space, you find it a sort of cross between modern Madrid and modern Chicago, with additions of its own; but if you go to Mexico City through history, back only 500 years, you will find it as distant as though it were on another planet: inhabited by cultivated barbarians, sensitive and cruel, highly organized and still in the Copper Age, a collection of startling, of unbelievable contrasts."
"As soon as a thought or word becomes a tool, one can dispense with actually ‘thinking’ it, that is, with going through the logical acts involved in verbal formulation of it. As has been pointed out, often and correctly, the advantage of mathematics—the model of all neo-positivistic thinking—lies in just this ‘intellectual economy.’ Complicated logical operations are carried out without actual performance of the intellectual acts upon which the mathematical and logical symbols are based. … Reason … becomes a fetish, a magic entity that is accepted rather than intellectually experienced."
"Our feminist culture at the present moment is completely dependent on capitalism. My grandmother was still scrubbing clothes on the back porch on a washboard!"
"A word of the faith that never balks, Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely. It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all, That mystic baffling wonder alone completes all. (23)"