"A computer is like an Old Testament god, with a lot of rules and no mercy."

"The best computer is a man, and it's the only one that can be mass-produced by unskilled labor."

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

"Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand."

"I rigged my cellular to send a message to my PDA, which is online with my PC, to get it to activate the voicemail, which sends the message to the inbox of my email, which routes it to the PDA,…"

"We shouldn't build a technology to colour, or grey out, what people say. The media in general is balanced, although there are a lot of issues to be addressed that the media rightly pick up on."

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

"If google made $1 everytime someone used them to find an answer to a tech support question, they would own microsoft."

"Why is it drug addicts and computer afficionados are both called users?"

"Build a program that even a fool can use, and only a fool will want to use it."

"Technology innovation is starting to explode and having open-source material out there really helps this explosion. You get students and researchers involved and you get people coming through and building start ups based on open source products."

"The best programmers are not marginally better than merely good ones. They are an order-of-magnitude better, measured by whatever standard: conceptual creativity, speed, ingenuity of design, or problem-solving ability."

"Computers are getting smarter all the time. Scientists tell us that soon they will be able to talk to us. (And by ‘they’, I mean ‘computers’. I doubt scientists will ever be able to talk to us.)"

"Any given program, once deployed, is already obsolete."

"In June 1994, while it is still our hobby, we renamed it "yahoo" to stand for "yet another hierarchical officious oracle"."

"Unix was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things."

"It is extremely unlikely that anyone coming out of school with a technical degree will go into one area and stay there. Today's students have to look forward to the excitement of probably having three or four careers."

"Too few people in computer science are aware of some of the informational challenges in biology and their implications for the world. We can store an incredible amount of data very cheaply."

"In software, we rarely have meaningful requirements. Even if we do, the only measure of success that matters is whether our solution solves the customer’s shifting idea of what their problem is."

"The Star Trek computer doesn't seem that interesting. They ask it random questions, it thinks for a while. I think we can do better than that."

"After growing wildly for years, the field of computing appears to be reaching its infancy."

"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.…"

"If Unix is the face of the future I want to go back to quill pens."

"The insanity of the collective egoic mind, amplified by science and technology, is rapidly taking our species to the brink of disaster. Evolve or die: that is our only choice now."

"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are–by definition–not smart enough to debug it."

"The world is coming to an end... SAVE YOUR BUFFERS!"

"Good programmers use their brains, but good guidelines save us having to think out every case."

"We started putting together a "hotlist" of favorite sites from David and myself, and we called it "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" Before we knew it, people from all over the world were using this database that we…"

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

"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."

"In 20 or 30 years, you'll be able to hold in your hand as much computing knowledge as exists now in the whole city, or even the whole world."

"The great thing about Object Oriented code is that it can make small, simple problems look like large, complex ones."

"Software is like sex: It’s better when it’s free."

"Make no mistake about it: Computers process numbers - not symbols. We measure our understanding (and control) by the extent to which we can arithmetize an activity."

"The Internet's been so great, and it's so nice to have fans do nice, elaborate websites, but I think the down side is some of the things... for real fans to go on and see that 90 percent of the…"

"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…"

"I have gotten everything from a one-page letter written in pencil to a 50-page computer generated masterpiece."

"'Intel Inside': The world's most widely used warning label."

"Everyone has a right to a university degree in America, even if it's in Hamburger Technology."

"I think it's fair to say that personal computers have become the most empowering tool we've ever created. They're tools of communication, they're tools of creativity, and they can be shaped by their user."

"There's no set architecture in Linux. All roads lead to madness."

"Everything should be built top-down, except the first time."

"Beware of computer programmers that carry screwdrivers."

"Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon."

"There are three kinds of death in this world. There's heart death, there's brain death, and there's being off the network."

"The cybernetic exchange between man, computer and algorithm is like a game of musical chairs: The frantic search for balance always leaves one of the three standing ill at ease."

"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 lifeblood of our business is that R&D spend. There's nothing that flows through a pipe or down a wire or anything else. We have to continuously create new innovation that lets people do something they didn't think they could…"