The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry.

I cannot escape death, but at least I can escape the fear of it.

The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life.

From my point of view, patriotism is primarily not the sense of pride for your your country, but a burning sense of shame for the crimes that are being committed on behalf of your country, my country.

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

I see mass hysteria as part of the Future Shock of our accelerated social destabilization as 'life as we know it' vanishes and gets replaced more and more by 'life as we used to read it in science fiction.' Naive people have grown terrorized by text  books, by pop music, by games, and even by schoolteachers (the most inoffensive persons around) .... the whole modern (or post-modern) world seems incomprehensible, and therefore sinister, to millions of our citizen. If you want to grok what these ordinary beer-and-hotdog Americans feel when they see a Gay Pride parade on TV, try to imagine your own reaction to a Cannibal Pride parade. I do not mean that Gays should 'go back in the closet,' or that any other genies should or can go back into their bottles. I just mean that the world has begun to freak out a lot of ignorant people.

Nobody wants to believe happiness is a choice, because that puts responsibility in their hands. It’s the same reason people self-pity: to delay action, to make an outcry to the universe, as though the more they state how bad things are, the more likely it is that someone else will change them.

The most selfish act of all is kindness, because its reward is so much greater than the investment.

What people say about you behind your back is none of your business.

No man was ever wise by chance.

There is no failure in sports.

Nothing is clearer in history than the adoption by successful rebels of the methods they were accustomed to condemn in the forces they deposed.

Unspoken expectations are premeditated resentments.

Becoming a father isn’t hard, but being one is.

 -- German saying

If you believe that fighting for your freedom means denying someone else theirs, then you are not fighting for freedom. You are fighting for supremacy.

For most of history, man has had to fight nature to survive; in this century he is beginning to realise that, in order to survive, he must protect it.

And then he realized why he was thinking like this.

It was because he wanted there to be conspirators. It was much better to imagine men in some smoky room somewhere, made mad and cynical by privilege and power, plotting over the brandy. You had to cling to this sort of image, because if you didn’t then you might have to face the fact that bad things happened because ordinary people, the kind who brushed the dog and told their children bedtime stories, were capable of then going out and doing horrible things to other ordinary people. It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone’s fault. If it was Us, what did that make Me? After all, I’m one of Us. I must be. I’ve certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No-one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We’re always one of Us. It’s Them that do the bad things.

As mentioned earlier, all organisations, even the best of them, are absolutely filled with problems. I’ve worked with thousands. Even the organisations I admire most struggle to some degree. And the interesting thing is that most of the problems are about the same. Certainly, there are unique personalities and circumstances connected to the problems. But when it comes right down to it, at the core, most problems have common roots.

Effective leadership is putting first things first. Effective management is discipline, carrying it out.

I am not a product of my circumstances. I am a product of my decisions.