When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor.

When writing gateway software of any kind, take pains to disturb the data stream as little as possible - and never throw away information unless the recipient forces you to!

If Unix could present the same face, the same capabilities, on machines of many different types, it could serve as a common software environment for all of them.

The easiest programs to use are those which demand the least new learning from the user

Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong.

Any tool should be useful in the expected way, but a truly great tool lends itself to uses you never expected.

Lisp was far more powerful and flexible than any other language of its day; in fact, it is still a better design than most languages of today, twenty-five years later. Lisp freed ITS's hackers to think in unusual and creative ways. It was a major factor in their successes, and remains one of hackerdom's favorite languages.