"You can define advertising as the science of creating and placing media that interrupts the consumer and then gets him or her to take some action."

"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…"

"In a 5 year period we get one superb programming language. Only we can't control when the 5 year period will be."

"We are always saying to ourself.. we have to innovate. We got to come up with that breakthrough. In fact, the way software works.. so long as you are using your existing software.. you don't pay us anything at all.…"

"Interfaces keep things tidy, but don't accelerate growth: Functions do."

"Around computers it is difficult to find the correct unit of time to measure progress. Some cathedrals took a century to complete. Can you imagine the grandeur and scope of a program that would take as long?"

"If a program is useful, it will have to be changed."

"Unix is simple. It just takes a genius to understand its simplicity."

"Saying your OS is the best in the world 'cause more people use it is like saying McDonalds makes the best food in the world."

"Programming is like sex: one mistake and you’re providing support for a lifetime."

"Technology has the shelf life of a banana."

"Every operating system out there is about equal… We all suck."

"The only constructive theory connecting neuroscience and psychology will arise from the study of software."

"The only people who have anything to fear from free software are those whose products are worth even less."

"Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower."

"Documentation is like term insurance: It satisfies because almost no one who subscribes to it depends on its benefits."

"One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man."

"Americans have the right to have their medical decisions made by them and their doctors, and not by those bureaucrats sitting behind a computer screen hundreds of miles away."

"To turn really interesting ideas and fledgling technologies into a company that can continue to innovate for years, it requires a lot of disciplines."

"Our mission is to organize the world's information. Clearly, the more information we have when we do a search, the better it's going to work."

"First words on the first telephone - "Mr. Watson -- come here -- I want to see you.""

"Don't have good ideas if you aren't willing to be responsible for them."

"It would appear that we have reached the limits of what it is possible to achieve with computer technology, although one should be careful with such statements, as they tend to sound pretty silly in 5 years."

"Structured Programming supports the law of the excluded muddle."

"Users truly don’t know what they want in a program until they use it."

"Database: the information you lose when your memory crashes."

"A friend called me up the other day and talked about investing in a dot-com that sells lobsters. Internet lobsters. Where will this end? The next day he sent me a huge package of lobsters on ice. How low can…"

"Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest."

"That’s what’s cool about working with computers. They don’t argue, they remember everything, and they don’t drink all your beer."

"If we had had the right technology back then, you would have seen Eva Braun on the Donahue show and Adolf Hitler on Meet the Press."

"To understand a program you must become both the machine and the program."

"The inside of a computer is as dumb as hell but it goes like mad!"

"Applying computer technology is simply finding the right wrench to pound in the correct screw."

"If brute force doesn't solve your problems, then you aren't using enough."

"America's technology has turned in upon itself; its corporate form makes it the servant of profits, not the servant of human needs."

"I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why ? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on…"

"COBOL programmers understand why women hate periods."

"Life would be so much easier if we only had the source code."

"The goal of computation is the emulation of our synthetic abilities, not the understanding of our analytic ones."

"There is so much media now with the Internet and people, and so easy and so cheap to start a newspaper or start a magazine, there’s just millions of voices and people want to be heard."

"The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people."

"You know you're a geek when... You try to shoo a fly away from the monitor with your cursor. That just happened to me. It was scary."

"A world technology means either a world government or world suicide."

"Windows is just DOS in drag."

"That can be a good tax planning tool for small businesses - especially if you get a computer or something that you were planning to buy (in the coming year anyway)."

"Technology is just a tool. In terms of getting the kids working together and motivating them, the teacher is the most important."

"Every program has (at least) two purposes: the one for which it was written, and another for which it wasn't."

"My software never has bugs. It just develops random features."