Dennis Ritchie

The problem with C is that it makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; with C++ it's harder, but when you do, you blow off your whole leg.

Elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a quality that decides between success and failure.

The most damaging phrase in the language is: 'We've always done it this way.'

The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise.

We didn't have a grand vision. We had a small group of people who wanted to make their own computing environment more pleasant.

The best programs are written so that computing machines can perform them quickly and so that human beings can understand them clearly.

In many ways, C is a 'portable assembly language'.