LISP has jokingly been described as "the most intelligent way to misuse a computer." I think that description is a great compliment because it transmits the full flavour of liberation: it has assisted a number of our most gifted fellow humans in thinking previously impossible thoughts.

The prisoner falls in love with his chains.

Beware of "the real world". A speaker's apeal to it is always an invitation not to challenge his tacit assumptions.

Write a paper promising salvation, make it a "structured" something or a "virtual" something, or "abstract," "distributed" or "higher-order" or "applicative" and you can almost be certain of having started a new cult.

So-called "natural language" is wonderful for the purposes it was created for, such as to be rude in, to tell jokes in, to cheat or to make love in (and Theorists of Literary Criticism can even be content-free in it), but it is hopelessly inadequate when we have to deal unambiguously with situations of great intricacy, situations which unavoidably arise in such activities as legislation, arbitration, mathematics or programming.

Production speed is severely slowed down if one works with half-time people who have other obligations as well. This is at least a factor of four; probably it is worse.

Much of the excitement we get out of our work is that we don't really know what we are doing.