Donald Knuth

"The real problem is that programmers have spent far too much time worrying about efficiency in the wrong places and at the wrong times; premature optimization is the root of all evil."

"Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do."

"Programming is the art of telling another human what one wants the computer to do."

"The most important principle for the good algorithm designer is to refuse to be content."

"Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world."

"Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope."

"Be careful to salvage the pearls from the slop."

"I think of programming as something very much like teaching."

"The real problem is that programmers have spent far too much time worrying about efficiency in the wrong places."

"I would rather discover one single fact about nature than to be the king of Persia."

"An algorithm must be seen to be believed."

"The process of preparing programs for a digital computer is especially attractive because it combines a twentieth-century computing machine with nineteenth-century craftsman discipline."

"Literate programming is writing an explanation of the logic of the program, in a language suited to humans, in such a way that it can also be compiled and executed by a computer."

"If you optimize everything, you will always be unhappy."

"I'm a fairly well-known guy in the computer science world."

"One of my favorite programming languages is Lisp."

"I define UNIX as thirty million lines of C code surrounding a kernel written in the early 1970s."

"Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."

"The most important principle for the good algorithm designer is to refuse to be content."

"I'm convinced that every bit of knowledge is useful, and I'm sure that you don't know what you don't know."

"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it."

"The real problem is that programmers have spent far too much time worrying about efficiency in the wrong places and at the wrong times."

"I would advise everyone to start their day with a smile."

"The problem of computer science is that it's just how the world is going to be."

"Don't just read the easy stuff. You have to read the hard stuff."

"I've never been in situations where someone has forced me against my will to do anything."

"What I have done is already enough."

"I have a passion for making sure that scientific endeavors are collaborative."

"The real deal is how you organize your thoughts."

"To understand a program you must become both the machine and the program."