Over and over, people try to design systems that make tomorrow's work easy. But when tomorrow comes it turns out they didn't quite understand tomorrow's work, and they actually made it harder.

The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question, it's to post the wrong answer.

Each routine you read turns out to be pretty much what you expected. You can call it beautiful code when the code also makes it look like the language was made for the problem.

What is simplicity? Simplicity is the shortest path to a solution.

What's the simplest thing that could possibly work?

I don't claim to be a methodologist, but I act like one only because I do methodology to protect myself from crazy methodologists.

The shortest path to exceeding expectations doesn't generally pass through meeting expectations.

A wiki works best where you're trying to answer a question that you can't easily pose, where there's not a natural structure that's known in advance to what you need to know.

Global collaboration is something that Wiki mastered in a small way and here we can master it in a big way.

When a manager asks for hard data, that's usually just his way of saying no.

There's been an awful lot of discussion about what is or isn't simple, and people have gotten a pretty sophisticated notion of simplicity, but I'm not sure it has helped.

When the time comes for you to die, you need not be afraid, because death cannot separate you from God's love.

a society in which there is widespread economic insecurity can turn freedom into a barren and vapid right for millions of people.

I didn't hit the ball like I was 46. But I putted like I was 66.

Egypt is a large, complex, very important country.

I find it actually the height of romance to legally bind yourself to someone because you're really taking care of someone, and letting them take care of you. I actually have no cynicism about that.

The novelist helps us to see things we might not notice otherwise.

The moment you let your courage leave you, you turn to an abandoned old house!

Good riddance to bad rubbish.

Whenever we accept an idea as authority instead of as instrument, an idol is set up. We worship the plough, and not the fruit.

As of today, the Postfix mail transport agent has almost 50,000 lines of code, comments not included.