Something out of nothing

Write a paper promising salvation, make it a "structured" something or a "virtual" something, or "abstract", "distributed" or "higher-order" or "applicative" and you can almost be certain of having started a new cult.
-- E.W. Dijkstra, "EWD 709: My hopes of computing science," April 1979.

Either way, you lose

Confusing "love of perfection" with "claim of perfection", people will accuse you of the latter and then blame you for the first.
-- E.W. Dijkstra, "EWD 709: My hopes of computing science," April 1979.

Extraterrestrial intelligent life?

"There is not much sign of it on Earth."
-- Stephen Hawking. "Stephen Hawking prepares for weightless flight," NewScientist.com, 26 April 2007.

Ignorant is bliss (or not)

"It's one thing not to know something, it's another thing altogether to choose not to know."
-- U.S. Representative Christopher Smith in "Jerry Yang on the Hot Seat," BusinessWeek, November 6, 2007.

The not-so-innocuous pencil

"Even a pencil could use a manual, though—how many years does it take to learn how to use it? It's more natural to use one as a weapon!"
-- Don Norman in "Are Cars Too Safe? Are User Manuals Necessary?," BusinessWeek, December 5, 2007.

It's all magic!

"Magic is science insufficiently explained."
-- Eric Schmidt in "Google's CEO on the Power of Clouds," BusinessWeek, December 13, 2007.

Low inhibitory ability

"Smoking is not something which is bad. It's not taking drugs. The only concern is that smoking causes cancer... I smoke cigars. You can ask my constituents if they are happy with my performance."
-- Datuk Seri Nazri Aziz, Minister in the Prime Minister's Department. A rather reckless response to a tame remark by Datuk Nik Abdul Aziz Nik Mat that he preferred to choose candidates who do not smoke. "Nazri Hits out at Pas over smoking remark," New Sunday Times, July 15, 2007.

Green lament

It's not easy being green.
It seems you blend in with so many other ord'nary things.
And people tend to pass you over 'cause you're
not standing out like flashy sparkles in the water
or stars in the sky.
-- Kermit the Frog, "Bein' Green"

Beautiful Mistakes

"…But you need to make mistakes. Making mistakes is a beautiful thing."
-- Patrizia Moroso, "The Moroso method", Wallpaper*, Oct 2005
(Taken from my old Kosa.Kata blog at Wordpress.com)

Laissez-faire

"I'm not religious in the normal sense... I believe the universe is governed by the laws of science. The laws may have been decreed by God, but God does not intervene to break the laws."
-- Stephen Hawking. "Stephen Hawking prepares for weightless flight," NewScientist.com, 26 April 2007.

Virtual Tivoization?

"Our virtualization features can also encapsulate components that are under the GPL open-source license protecting valuable company IP from the obligation to publish source code"
-- Steve Subar, CEO and Co-Founder of Open Kernel Lab. "Commercial version of NICTA open source L4 real time kernel released," Embedded.com, 17 April 2007.

The path to learning

"In my job, it's important not to be arrogant, not to be afraid to ask questions and say you don't know. How else can you learn?"
-- Keith Floyd. "A dash of Floyd," The Sunday Star, 22 April 2007.

A girl who knows her priority

"Tennis is only a little game, that's all. I hope people don't look at tennis players like me and think we aren't connected with life outside tennis. We do watch the news, we do see what's going on and we do care. I know that tennis isn't the most important thing,"
-- Maria Sharapova. "Sharapova still haunted by Chernobyl," Telegraph Group Ltd, 10 April 2007.

The ultimate reason for making money

"The coolest thing about making money is that you are able to give back... You have the opportunity to help people. You can only buy so many cars, so many houses, so many dresses and so many pairs of shoes, but it's not going to make you happy. But helping to save lives is incredible. I can't even begin to explain how amazing that is."
-- Maria Sharapova. "Sharapova still haunted by Chernobyl," Telegraph Group Ltd, 10 April 2007.

It's all in the semantics

The word semantics is used by different groups to mean different things.
-- Tim Berners-Lee on Semantic Web. "Q&A with Tim Berners-Lee," BusinessWeek.com, April 9, 2007. Hopefully Semantic Web itself could unlock its own meaning...

The New Republic

"What we have today is government of the people, by the flunkies, for the corporations."
-- Richard Stallman on Trusted Computing (what he called 'Treacherous Computing'), "GPLv3 - Transcript of Richard Stallman from the fifth international GPLv3 conference, Tokyo, Japan"

(Ouch! That hurts! (Parenthetical comment notwithstanding))

(lawyers are whores - they are paid to argue for their client, not for the law)
-- Linus Torvalds in the Linux Kernel Mailing List "Re:GPL V3 and Linux - Dead Copyright Holders".

Holy War Version III

I literally feel that we do not - as software developers - have the moral right to enforce our rules on hardware manufacturers. We are not crusaders, trying to force people to bow to our superior God. We are trying to show others that co-operation and openness works better.
-- Linus Torvalds in the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML) "Re: GPL V3 and Linux - Dead Copyright Holders".

Elitist?

The computer, Postscript, the Internet and "globalization" have unleashed a couple of cultural revolutions which also churned the understanding of writing in a mess. A clear lake was transformed into a muddy marsh landscape. All the old rules and values are jeopardized, being replaced with many contradictory new ones. Non-professionals are allowed to make typography - it's the end of knowledge in the hands of a few: a lot of people who have always been reading, but hardly writing, discovered a cultural asset - design, like with silverware or chairs.
-- Manfred Klein, "Manfred Klein - the interview" (This article is a translation from the original piece in German)

People is an important part of the equation

"Communication between people is what makes us a society... The World Wide Web is, together, technology and society. It is computers and people."
-- Tim Berners-Lee. "Sir Tim Berners-Lee Gives Congress Vision Of The Future", Embedded.com, Jan 3, 2007