"When the going gets weird the weird turn pro."
— Hunter S. Thompson

"You build a thing of beauty, and then the peasants storm the castle, hooting and chanting and calling you a heretic."
— Vic S. Sussman

"The purposeful destruction of information is the essence of intelligent work."
— Ray Kurzweil (The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence)

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code. "
— Edsger W. Dijkstra

"Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute."
— Harold Abelson (Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, Second Edition)

"When they first built the University of California at Irvine they just put the buildings in. They did not put any sidewalks, they just planted grass. The next year, they came back and put the sidewalks where the trails were in the grass. Perl is just that kind of language. It is not designed from first principles. Perl is those sidewalks in the grass."
— Larry Wall

"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."
— Charles Babbage

"The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne."
— Geoffrey Chaucer

"Programmers are not to be measured by their ingenuity and their logic but by the completeness of their case analysis."
— Alan Perlis

"The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies."
— Robert Conquest

"A basic principle of data processing teaches the folly of trying to maintain independent files in synchonism."
— Frederick Phillips Brooks (The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, 20th Anniversary Edition)

"Chance favors the prepared mind."
— Louis Pasteur

"The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong, it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair."
— Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

"Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know."
— Laozi (Tao Teh Ching)

"since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a far better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
--the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for eachother: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis"
— e.e. cummings

"There's no such thing as civilization. The word just means the art of living in cities."
— Roger Zelazny (The Great Book of Amber)

"In a Wonderland they lie, Dreaming as the days go by, Dreaming as the summers die:
Ever drifting down the stream- Lingering in the golden gleam- Life, what is it but a dream?"
— Lewis Carroll (Through The Looking Glass)

"Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell: Ding-dong
Hark! now I hear them,—Ding-dong, bell."
— William Shakespeare (The Tempest)