It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC. As potential programmers, they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration. -- E. W. Dijkstra

The choice of the university is mostly important for the piece of paper you get at the end. The education you get depends on you. -- Andreas Zwinkau

The best people and organizations have the attitude of wisdom: The courage to act on what they know right now and the humility to change course when they find better evidence. The quest for management magic and breakthrough ideas is overrated; being a master of the obvious is underrated. Jim Maloney is right: Work is an overrated activity -- Bob Sutton

While I’ve always appreciated beautiful code, I share Jonathan’s concern about studying it too much. I think studying beauty in music and painting has led us to modern classical music and painting that the majority of us just don’t get. Beauty can be seen when it emerges, but isn’t something to strive for in isolation of a larger context. In the software world, the larger context would be the utility of the software to the end user. -- [A comment on a blog]

A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing. -- Alan Perlis

The acts of the mind, wherein it exerts its power over simple ideas, are chiefly these three: 1. Combining several simple ideas into one compound one, and thus all complex ideas are made. 2. The second is bringing two ideas, whether simple or complex, together, and setting them by one another so as to take a view of them at once, without uniting them into one, by which it gets all its ideas of relations. 3. The third is separating them from all other ideas that accompany them in their real existence: this is called abstraction, and thus all its general ideas are made. -- John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)

Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it. ~Maya Angelou

Don’t raise your voice, improve your argument. ~Anonymous

You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don't try. –Beverly Sills

If you do what you always did, you will get what you always got. ~Anonymous