The world is not yet finished, but everyone is behaving as if everything was known. This is not true. In fact, the computer world as we know it is based upon one tradition that has been waddling along for the last fifty years, growing in size and ungainliness, and is essentially defining the way we do everything. My view is that today’s computer world is based on techie misunderstandings of human thought and human life. And the imposition of inappropriate structures throughout the computer is the imposition of inappropriate structures on the things we want to do in the human world.

A user interface should be so simple that a beginner in an emergency can understand it within ten seconds.

The purpose of computers is human freedom.

The World Wide Web is precisely what we were trying to PREVENT. We long ago foresaw the problems of one-way links, links that break (no guaranteed long-term publishing), no way to publish comments, no version management, no rights management.

Most people are fools, most authority is malignant, God does not exist, and everything is wrong.

So in my uncertainty, I went to graduate school and there it all happened.

Any nitwit can understand computers, and many do.