A picture is worth 10K words - but only those to describe the picture. Hardly any sets of 10K words can be adequately described with pictures.

You can measure a programmer's perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing vitality of FORTRAN.

Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.

The computing field is always in need of new cliches.

Computer Science is embarrassed by the computer.

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

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

A picture is worth 10K words - but only those to describe the picture. Hardly any sets of 10K words can be adequately described with pictures.

If a listener nods his head when you're explaining your program, wake him up.

In software systems it is often the early bird that makes the worm.

It goes against the grain of modern education to teach students to program. What fun is there to making plans, acquiring discipline, organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail, and learning to be self critical.

It is easier to write an incorrect program than understand a correct one.

The best book on programming for the layman is "Alice in Wonderland"; but that's because it's the best book on anything for the layman.

In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word "frustration".

Every program has two purposes: The one for which it was written and another for which it wasn't.

LISP programmers know the value of everything and the cost of nothing.

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

Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.

If your computer speaks English, it was probably made in Japan.

I think it is inevitable that people program poorly. Training will not substantially help matters. We have to learn to live with it.

It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.

In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.

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

We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses.

A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.

If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.

There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.

Is it possible that software is not like anything else, that it is meant to be discarded: that the whole point is to always see it as a soap bubble?

In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word 'frustration'.

The best book on programming for the layman is 'Alice in Wonderland'; but that's because it's the best book on anything for the layman.

When someone says, "I want a programming language in which I need only say what I want done," give him a lollipop.

In programming, as in everything else, to be in error is to be reborn.

Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.

Symmetry is a complexity-reducing concept (co-routines include subroutines); seek it everywhere.

I can remember the frustration of not being able to talk. I knew what I wanted to say, but I could not get the words out, so I would just scream.

In other words, I have no truck for anyone who goes out and does an eclectic building.

Kind thoughts are rarer than either kind words or deeds. They imply a great deal of thinking about others. This in itself is rare. But they also imply a great deal of thinking about others without the thoughts being criticisms. This is rarer still.

Style is as much under the words as in the words. It is as much the soul as it is the flesh of a work.

I want to promote poetry to the point where you got all the baldhead kids running around doing poetry, getting the music out of the way and having only words, the spoken word, and then see what happens.

Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.

But in the finished art of the song the use of words has no connection with the use of words in poetry.

Duty, Honor, Country. Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be.

So, in other words, how you respond to a sculpture, how a viewer sees the sculpture, is vital.

I think one's feelings waste themselves in words; they ought all to be distilled into actions which bring results.

Nature is a temple in which living columns sometimes emit confused words. Man approaches it through forests of symbols, which observe him with familiar glances.

Words are the children of reason and, therefore, can't explain it. They really can't translate feeling because they're not part of it. That's why it bugs me when people try to analyze jazz as an intellectual theorem. It's not. It's feeling.

Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves; vanity, to what we would have others think of us.

The President had every reason to believe that the text presented to him was sound... These 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the president.

They call it golf because all the other four-letter words were taken.