Most people like to believe something is or is not true. Great scientists tolerate ambiguity very well. They believe the theory enough to go ahead; they doubt it enough to notice the errors and faults so they can step forward and create the new replacement theory. If you believe too much you'll never notice the flaws; if you doubt too much you won't get started. It requires a lovely balance.

Perhaps the central problem we face in all of computer science is how we are to get to the situation where we build on top of the work of others rather than redoing so much of it in a trivially different way.

True greatness is when your name is like ampere, watt, and fourier-when it's spelled with a lower case letter.

The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers.

The real problem is what can man and machine do together and not in competition.

Mathematicians stand on each others' shoulders and computer scientists stand on each others' toes.

Science is composed of laws which were originally based on a small, carefully selected set of observations, often not very accurately measured originally; but the laws have later been found to apply over much wider ranges of observations and much more accurately than the original data justified.