“Almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching.”

“Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration.”

“You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time. (Bertrand Meyer)”

“The only two things you can truly depend upon are gravity and greed.”

“Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.”

“Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins.”

“Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.”

“Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.”

“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 to, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.”

“You dance with the ones that brung ya, I guess.”

“Zuerst hatten wir kein Glück, und dann kam auch noch Pech dazu.”

“When in doubt, assume my tongue is in my cheek.”

“To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of the women!”

“When a coward sees a man he can beat, he becomes hungry for a fight.”

“When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross.”

“I’ll show you politics in America. Here it is, right here. ‘I think the puppet on the right shares my beliefs.’ ‘I think the puppet on the left is more to my liking.’ ‘Hey, wait a minute, there’s one guy holding both puppets!’ ‘Shut up! Go back to bed, America. Your government is in control. Here’s Love Connection. Watch this and get fat and stupid. By the way, keep drinking beer, you fucking morons.‘”

“Why shouldn’t I work for the N.S.A.? That’s a tough one, but I’ll give it a shot. Say I’m working at N.S.A. Somebody puts a code on my desk, something nobody else can break. So I take a shot at it and maybe I break it. And I’m real happy with myself, ‘cause I did my job well. But maybe that code was the location of some rebel army in North Africa or the Middle East. Once they have that location, they bomb the village where the rebels were hiding and fifteen hundred people I never had a problem... [More]”

“I have never won a debate with an ignorant person.”

“Never write when you can talk. Never talk when you can nod. And never put anything in an email.”

“What [people] are mostly interested in, lad[ies] and gentlemen, is going along to get along. Which only shows up for what it is—monstrous—if you pull back and take the long view.”

“Terrorists can attack our freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.”

“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

“Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”

“It is the purest arrogance to suppose that an instrument so fallible as the human mind can even conceive absolute truth, much less comprehend it.”

“It is the mark of an educated mind to rest satisfied with the degree of precision which the nature of the subject admits and not to seek exactness where only an approximation is possible.”

“You can kill a flock of sheep with witchcraft, provided you also feed them arsenic.”

“[The attitude towards Haiti] is a depressing illustration of how a highly disciplined intellectual class can reframe even the most depraved actions as yet another opportunity for self-adulation.”

“The Falklands thing was a fight between two bald men over a comb.”

“A comedian has to be one of the most serious of people, for he must be able to understand implicitly and to mimic his fellow man, and still be able not to hate him.”

“As long as people believe in absurdities they will continue to commit atrocities.”