Ken Thompson

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.

The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.

To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.

The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.

The quieter you become, the more you can hear.

What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.

The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.

You can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself. (No amount of source-level verification or scrutiny will protect you from a Trojan horse designed to pass it.)

If you have to use a debugger, you've already lost.

I'm not a programmer; I'm a computer scientist.

The only way to make a program fast is to make it small.

The problem with object-oriented languages is they've got all this implicit environment that they carry around with them. You wanted a banana but what you got was a gorilla holding the banana and the entire jungle.

A good tool is an invisible tool. A bad tool is a tool that you're always aware of.

I don't think of myself as a great programmer. I think of myself as a pretty good programmer.

The only way to get rid of a bug is to understand it.

The most important thing in programming is to keep it simple.

The only way to write good code is to write a lot of bad code first.