“We know the past but cannot control it. We control the future but cannot know it.” #ClaudeShannon

“The most effective way to do it, is to do it.” #AmeliaEarhart

“No man ever wet clay and left it rest, expecting it to become bricks by chance and fortune.” #Plutarch

“Every sizable program ever written has achieved robustness through testing and is inadequately understood even by its designers.” #JohnRegehr

“The bottom of page 13 of the Lisp 1.5 manual was #Lisp itself. These were Maxwell's Equations of Software!” #AlanKay https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523

“Several sciences are often necessary to form the groundwork of a single art.” #JohnStuartMill, 1848

“Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.” #Dijkstra

“A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable.” #LeslieLamport

“Simplicity is not an end in art, but we usually arrive at simplicity as we approach the true sense of things.” #ConstantinBrancusi

“We build our computer [systems] the way we build our cities: over time, without a plan, on top of ruins.” #EllenUllman

“Software's like Egyptian pyramids: millions of bricks, no structural integrity, done by brute force and 1000s of slaves.” #AlanKay https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523

“An approximate answer to the right problem is worth a good deal more than an exact answer to an approximate problem.” John Tukey

“[O]ne can build objects & their behavior from little more than assignable value cells & good old lambda expressions.” #RichardGabriel https://dreamsongs.com/ObjectsHaveNotFailedNarr.html

“There are better ways to earn a living than to prevent other people from making use of one's contributions to computer science.” #DonaldKnuth on software patents

“One can make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies or make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.” #TonyHoare

“Humans are not physically normal in the absence of hard physical effort.” #MarkRippetoe

#Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.

“Human history makes no sense without prehistory, and prehistory makes no sense without biology.” #EOWilson

“At Atari we hired based on hobbies and not grades in school. We ended up with he best engineering group in the world.” #NolanBushnell

“Only the mediocre are always at their best.” #JeanGiraudoux

“#Emacs become part of me.” #YukihiroMatsumoto https://www.slideshare.net/yukihiro_matz/how-emacs-changed-my-life

“Scientific American should have a poetry column.” #ClaudeShannon

“Innovators in both [art and science] are basically dreamers and storytellers.” #EOWilson

“I can live with doubt [...] it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.” #Feynman

“Certum quod factum” “(One is certain only of what one builds)” #GiambattistaVico, presumably regarding library dependencies

“It is downright sinful to teach the abstract before the concrete.” #ZAMelzak

“I wrote my first 'cool' programs in Fortran IV, my first 'aha' programs in Algol, and my first 'wow' programs in LISP.” #RobPike

“I designed my own bitmap font for use with #Emacs.” #DonaldKnuth

“Any fact becomes important when it’s connected to another.” #UmbertoEco, Foucault’s Pendulum

“If you don't overcome your tendency to give up easily, your life will amount to nothing.” #MasutatsuOyama

“The prize is the pleasure of finding the thing out, the kick in the discovery, the observation that other people use it.” #Feynman

“Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.” #GeorgeBernardShaw

“When man resolved to imitate walking, he invented the wheel, which does not look like a leg.” #Apollinaire

“There is nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.” Peter Drucker

“The real hero of programming is the one who writes negative code.” #DougMcIlroy

“Order is a necessary condition for anything the human mind is to understand.” #RudolfArnheim

“What a disgrace it is for a man to grow old without ever seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.” #Socrates

“[F]unction calling and message-passing [a]re fundamentally the same, a lesson still not well and thoroughly learned today.” #RichardGabriel

“The greatest value of a picture is when it forces us to notice what we never expected to see.” #JohnTukey

“All perceiving is also thinking, all reasoning is also intuition, all observation is also invention.” #RudolfArnheim

“Let the machine do the dirty work.” #BrianKernighan, 1974

“No matter what language you work in, programming in a functional style provides benefits.” #JohnCarmack

“Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.” Albert von Szent-Gyorgy

“#UNIX resulted from research [...] we were merely interested in. We were very lucky it turned out to be very fruitful.” https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/05/japan-prize-honors-googler-ken-thompson.html

“I think the history of science has shown that valuable consequences often proliferate from simple curiosity.” #ClaudeShannon

“The teams that invented the laser, transistor and solar cell were not seeking profits. They were seeking understanding.” https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/opinion/sunday/innovation-and-the-bell-labs-miracle.html

“Science is as much for intellectual enjoyment as for practical utility.” #Feynman

“A scientist is not only a technician: he's also a child placed before natural phenomena which impress him like a fairy tale.” #MarieCurie

“Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.” #Voltaire

“Perl users were unable to write programs more accurately than those using a language designed by chance.” https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2089155.2089159