American Stance: Everything not forbidden is permitted. Prussian Stance: Everything not permitted is forbidden.

In another thirty years people will laugh at anyone who tries to invent a language without closures, just as they'll laugh now at anyone who tries to invent a language without recursion.

The appropriate length of a name is inversely proportional to the size of its scope.

I know exactly what I would do with immortality: I would read every book in the library.

Of course, this is a heuristic, which is a fancy way of saying that it doesn't work.

A few months ago I was visiting my mother, and she said that as a child I had always wanted to learn everything, and that it took me a long time to realize that you couldn't learn everything. I got really angry, and I shouted "I'm not done yet!"

American Stance: Everything not forbidden is permitted. Prussian Stance: Everything not permitted is forbidden.