“But much oftener, the questions proposed by the physicist have transcended the utmost powers of the mathematics of the time, and a fresh mathematical creation has been needed to supply the logical instrument requisite to interpret the new enigma.”
— Henry John Stephen Smith

“There are no answers, only cross-references.”
— Norbert Wiener

A plethora of conversions from analog to digital and back makes the internet possible.

“Do not destroy what you cannot create.”
— Leó Szilárd

“Let us imitate him as he imitated others.”
— Erasmus

“Make men work together; show them that beyond their differences and geographical boundaries there lies a common interest.”
— Jean Monnet

“The computer can be used as a tool to liberate and protect people, rather than to control them.”
— Hal Finney

“If you ask beginning programmers to write a calendar control, they often think to themselves, "Oh, I'm going to write the world's best calendar control! It's going to be polymorphic with respect to the kind of calendar. It will have displayers, and mungers, and this, that, and the other." They need to ship a calendar application in two months. They put all this infrastructure into place in the control, and then spend two days writing a crappy calendar application on top of it. They'll think, "In the next version of the application, I'm going to do so much more."

Once they start thinking about how they're actually going to implement all of these other concretizations of their abstract design, however, it turns out that their design is completely wrong. And now they've painted themself into a corner, and they have to throw the whole thing out. I have seen that over and over. I'm a strong believer in being minimalistic. Unless you actually are going to solve the general problem, don't try and put in place a framework for solving a specific one, because you don't know what that framework should look like.”
— Anders Hejlsberg, The Trouble with Checked Exceptions

"It is what" illicits intensions.

“Words change their meanings, just as organisms evolve.”
— Stephen Jay Gould

“Life is a distributed object system.”
— Roy T. Fielding, 1998

“Bad concurrency models make programming artificially difficult.”
— Joe Armstrong, 2014

“The reasonable thing just doesn’t work.”
— John Stewart Bell

“It becomes very tempting to ask whether, in principle, it's possible to create a universe in the laboratory—or a universe in your backyard—by man-made processes.”
— Alan Guth

“I am rooting for the machines! I have always been on the machines' side.”
— Claude Shannon, 1987

“Space tells matter how to move;
Matter tells space how to curve.”
— John Archibald Wheeler

“There are only two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation and naming things.”
— Phil Karlton

“Show me your flowcharts and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won’t usually need your flowcharts; they’ll be obvious.”
— Fred Brooks

Frameworks increase productivity but decrease freedom.

“...we are not exactly computers.”
— Roger Penrose

“Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.”
— Arthur Schopenhauer