"I wear the chain I forged in life. I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it."
--Charles Dickens ("A Christmas Carol")


"I am going to write a complete Unix-compatible software system..."
--Richard Stallman


"I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time."
--Blaise Pascal


"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."
--Donald Knuth


"Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed."
--Neil Armstrong (~66 years after the first powered human flight)


"Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute."
--Hal Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman


"To teach is to learn twice."
--Joseph Joubert


"They copied all they could follow, but they couldn't copy my mind, And I left 'em sweating and stealing a year and a half behind."
--Rudyard Kipling ("The Mary Gloster")


"Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest."
--Mark Twain


"All his life he tried to be a good person. Many times, however, he failed. For after all, he was only human. He wasn't a dog."
--Charles M. Schulz


"It never gets easier, you just go faster."
--Greg LeMond


"Soon I'll find the right words, they'll be very simple."
--Jack Kerouac ("Some of the Dharma")


"Optimism is an occupational hazard of programming. Feedback is the treatment."
--Kent Beck