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

If you're not failing 90% of the time, then you're probably not working on sufficiently challenging problems.

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

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

I fear - as far as I can tell - that most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training.

When the Mac first came out, Newsweek asked me what I [thought] of it. I said: Well, it's the first personal computer worth criticizing. So at the end of the presentation, Steve came up to me and said: Is the iPhone worth criticizing? And I said: Make the screen five inches by eight inches, and you'll rule the world.

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 most people do, are because they hate something somebody else has done, or they hate that something hasn't been done. And I realized that informed criticism has completely been done in by the web. Because the web has produced so much uninformed criticism. It's kind of a Gresham's Law-bad money drives the good money out of circulation. Bad criticism drives good criticism out of circulation. You just can't criticize anything.