I hired finishers because I'm a good starter and a poor finisher..

The greatest single programming language ever designed.

Sun Microsystems had the right people to make Java into a first-class language, and I believe it was the Sun marketing people who rushed the thing ou….

The idea that hardware on networks should just be caches for movable process descriptions and the processes themselves goes back quite a ways. There'….

If you're utopian, you're never satisfied..

In success there's a tendency to keep on doing what you were doing..

Quite a few people have to believe something is normal before it becomes normal - a sort of 'voting' situation. But once the threshold is reached, th….

Lisp isn't a language, it's a building material..

The computer is simply an instrument whose music is ideas..

Scratch the surface in a typical boardroom and we're all just cavemen with briefcases, hungry for a wise person to tell us stories..

Television should be the last mass communication medium to be naively designed and put into the world without a surgeon-general's warning..

The result is - document destruction - we're really not going to be able to prove beyond a truth the negatives and some of the positive conclusions t….

The protean nature of the computer is such that it can act like a machine or like a language to be shaped and exploited..

Perl is another example of filling a tiny, short-term need, and then being a real problem in the longer term..

It's easier to invent the future than to predict it..

The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language..

I made up the term "object-oriented," and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind..

Some people worry that artificial intelligence will make us feel inferior, but then, anybody in his right mind should have an inferiority complex eve….

Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it..

When I first prepared this particular talk... I realized that my usual approach is usually critical. That is, a lot of the things that I do, that mos….

I don't know how many of you have ever met Dijkstra, but you probably know that arrogance in computer science is measured in nano-Dijkstras..