"Perhaps if we wrote programs from childhood on, as adults we'd be able to read them."

"Technology... is a queer thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other."

"The term reboot comes from the middle age (before computers). Horses who stopped in mid-stride required a boot to the rear to start again. Thus the term to rear-boot, later abbreviated into reboot."

"Adapting old programs to fit new machines usually means adapting new machines to behave like old ones."

"I like my job because it involves learning. I like being around smart people who are trying to figure out new things. I like the fact that if people really try they can figure out how to invent things that…"

"Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."

"eBay's business is based on enabling someone to do business with another person, and to do that, they first have to develop some measure of trust, either in the other person or the system."

"Come to think of it, there are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and Usenet is nothing like Shakespeare."

"Any teacher that can be replaced by a computer, deserves to be."

"Computation has made the tree flower."

"I want people to understand the amazing, positive way our software can make leisure time more enjoyable, and work and businesses more successful."

"The Internet? Is that thing still around?"

"A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God."

"The debate rages on: is PL/I Bachtrian or Dromedary?"

"Food for thought: A fully-protected-and-updated Windows box cannot, by definition, have an uptime of more than 30 days."

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

"We don’t have a traditional strategy process, planning process like you’d find in traditional technical companies. It allows Google to innovate very, very quickly, which I think is a real strength of the company."

"Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards."

"What do people mean when they say the computer went down on them?"

"I have an almost religious zeal.. not for technology per se, but for the Internet which is for me, the nervous system of mother Earth, which I see as a living creature, linking up."

"There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies."

"People always fear change. People feared electricity when it was invented, didn't they? People feared coal, they feared gas-powered engines... There will always be ignorance, and ignorance leads to fear. But with time, people will come to accept their silicon…"

"The best thing about a boolean is even if you are wrong, you are only off by a bit."

"Real programmers can write assembly code in any language."

"Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal."

"A program is never less than 90% complete, and never more than 95% complete."

"The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple."

"One man's constant is another man's variable."

"It was never clear that it wouldn't just stop (the WWW). Any time during that exponential growth, it could have stalled. I think we were never very confident until 1993."

"There is no programming language–no matter how structured–that will prevent programmers from making bad programs."

"There is a chasm of carbon and silicon the software can't bridge."

"The computer provides the only way to give students a real foundation in 21st-century skills."

"The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do."

"If you don't double-click me, I can't do anything."

"What is the difference between a Turing machine and the modern computer? It's the same as that between Hillary's ascent of Everest and the establishment of a Hilton hotel on its peak."

"I had a fortune cookie the other day and it said: 'Outlook not so good'. I said: 'Sure, but Microsoft ships it anyway'."

"Windows NT addresses 2 Gigabytes of RAM, which is more than any application will ever need."

"Customers are still setting the technology agenda. Not just you, our customers, but your customers as well. What more and more are telling you is what kind of services they need, and how and when they want those services delivered…"

"Dating a girl is just like writing software. Everything's going to work just fine in the testing lab (dating), but as soon as you have contract with a customer (marriage), then your program (life) is going to be facing new…"

"Western society has accepted as unquestionable a technological imperative that is quite as arbitrary as the most primitive taboo: not merely the duty to foster invention and constantly to create technological novelties, but equally the duty to surrender to…"

"I find sitting at a specially equipped desk in front of some pretty ugly plastics and staring at a little window is a very unnatural event."

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

"Because we do not understand the brain very well we are constantly tempted to use the latest technology as a model for trying to understand it. In my childhood we were always assured that the brain was a telephone switchboard.…"

"The perfect computer has been developed. You just feed in your problems and they never come out again."

"The computer programmer is a creator of universes for which he alone is responsible. Universes of virtually unlimited complexity can be created in the form of computer programs."

"In seeking the unattainable, simplicity only gets in the way."

"Well, another market is being created now out of Internet technology."

"Computers can now keep a man's every transgression recorded in a permanent memory bank, duplicating with complex programming and intricate wiring a feat his wife handles quite well without fuss or fanfare."