I'm supposed to be a scientific person but I use intuition more than logic in making basic decisions.

If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use? Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?

The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing until it's too late.

Interesting - I use a Mac to help me design the next Cray.(when he was told that Apple Inc. had recently bought a Cray supercomputer to help them design the next Mac )

Anyone can build a fast CPU. The trick is to build a fast system.

Thank heaven for startups; without them we'd never have any advances.

#3 pencils and quadrille pads.(when asked what CAD tools he used to design the Cray I supercomputer )

Parity is for farmers.

I just bought a Mac to help me design the next Cray.

Farmers buy a lot of computers.

#3 pencils and quadrille pads.

We usually don't realize the thing that is defining our identity until that thing is taken away.

The ignoramus crow of "love it or leave it" omits other viable options, such as staying and changing it.

Chicago is seriously my favorite city in the country. People have roots here, which is nice. When you go to Los Angeles, no one is actually from Los Angeles.

Still though, I think if you're not self-obsessed, you're probably boring.

I am mainly concerned with unqualified knowledge, by contrast with the varieties of expert knowledge: scientific knowledge of various sorts, legal knowledge, medically expert knowledge, and so on.

I wonder what ants do on rainy days?

Mandarin ducks mate for life and will die of loneliness if separated from their chosen mate.

I risked getting my tyres nicked by going to Robbie Fowler's home in Liverpool!

The prophet who fails to present a bearable alternative and yet preaches doom is part of the trap that he postulates.

For the storyteller, for the arrowmaker, language does indeed represent the only chance for survival.