"If you optimize everything, you will always be unhappy."

"I decry the current tendency to seek patents on algorithms. There are better ways to earn a living than to prevent other people from making use of one's contributions to computer science."

"The most important thing in the programming language is the name. A language will not succeed without a good name. I have recently invented a very good name and now I am looking for a suitable language."

"Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do."

"The manuals we got from IBM would show examples of programs and I knew I could do a heck of a lot better than that. So I thought I might have some talent."

"Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs. Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do."

"The most important thing in the kitchen is the waste paper basket and it needs to be centrally located."

"The hardest thing is to go to sleep at night, when there are so many urgent things needing to be done. A huge gap exists between what we know is possible with today's machines and what we have so far been able to finish."

"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it."

"People think that computer science is the art of geniuses but the actual reality is the opposite, just many people doing things that build on eachother, like a wall of mini stones."

"In fact what I would like to see is thousands of computer scientists let loose to do whatever they want. That's what really advances the field."

"God is a challenge because there is no proof of his existence and therefore the search must continue."