Product procedure...must securely protect the crown jewels, but, equally important, it must eschew building high fences around the garbage cans.

Even the best planning is not so omniscient as to get it right the first time.

We tend to blame the physical media for most of our implementation difficulties; for the media are not "ours" in the way the ideas are, and our pride colors our judgement.

Systems program building is an entropy-decreasing process, hence inherently metastable. Program maintenance is an entropy-increasing process, and even its most skillful execution only delays the subsidence of the system into unfixable obsolescence.

To only a fraction of the human race does God give the privilege of earning one's bread doing what one would have gladly pursued free, for passion.

The hardest single part of building a software system is deciding precisely what to build.

A basic principle of data processing teaches the folly of trying to maintain independent files in synchonism.