Part of being a sentient human is the ability to anticipate others' mental states - to say "Fred's going to hate this but Jane would love it."

What's hard, in hacking as in fiction, is not writing, it's deciding what to write.

They knew many things but had no idea why. And strangely this made them more, rather than less, certain that they were right.

Most countries are static, all they need to do is keep having babies. But America's like this big old clanking smoking machine that just lumbers across the landscape scooping up and eating everything in sight.

If you are a professional writer - i.e., if someone else is getting paid to worry about how your words are formatted and printed - Emacs outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars. It is not just bigger and brighter; it simply makes everything else vanish.

I feel that I am entitled to trample all other considerations into the dirt in my pursuit of a satisfying pun.

Technically, of course, he was right. Socially, he was annoying us.