Of persons I will say this: it is difficult to tell when they are running aright but easy to see when something has gone awry.

I think visual literacy and media literacy is not without value, but I think plain old-fashioned text literacy and mathematical literacy are much more powerful and flexible ways to organize your mind.

Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs," I said. "We have a protractor.

Nothing is more important than that you see and love the beauty that is right in front of you, or else you will have no defense against the ugliness that will hem you in and come at you in so many ways.

Crappy old OSes have value in the basically negative sense that changing to new ones makes us wish we'd never been born.

Most of my colleagues go on backpacking trips when they have to do some thinking. I go to a good hardware store and head for the oiliest, dustiest corners... If they're really good, they don't hassle me. They let me wander around and think. Young hardware clerks have a lot of hubris. They think they can help you find anything... Old hardware clerks have learned the hard way that nothing in a hardware store ever gets bought for its nominal purpose. You buy something that was designed to do one thing, and you use it for another.

There's only four things we do better than anyone else: music movies microcode (software) high-speed pizza delivery