Every technology really needs to be shipped with a special manual - not how to use it but why, when, and for what.

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

The greatest single programming language ever designed

Having an intelligent secretary does not get rid of the need to read, write, and draw, etc. In a well functioning world, tools and agents are complementary.

Perspective is worth 80 IQ points.

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.

People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.