Grace Hopper

"The key to understanding the future is understanding the past."

"I think we should all aspire to leave a legacy of positive change."

"Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change."

"The world is full of possibilities for those who are willing to look for them."

"You should always do what you believe is right, regardless of what others think."

"I believe in the power of education to transform lives."

"The greatest invention of my era has been the computer, but its greatest impact is yet to come."

"The most important thing I've accomplished, besides building the compiler, is training young people. They're just as good as we are, just more impatient."

"I always try to hire people smarter than I am, because if you hire people just like you, you get more of the same."

"Humans are allergic to change. They love to say, 'We've always done it this way.' I try to fight that. That's why I have such a strong bias toward implementation."

"The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it."

"If it's a good idea, go ahead and do it. It is much easier to apologize than it is to get permission."

"I received the National Medal of Technology. I got it for my work on compilers."

"We've always done it this way is the most dangerous phrase in the language."

"In my life, I've found that speed in the wrong direction isn't helpful."

"The wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from."

"I deliberately created the compiler, because I believed that the future of programming lay in making it easier for people to communicate with machines."

"Navy computers are the fastest computers in the world and we're not about to admit we lost something that important."

"I've always been more interested in the future than in preserving the past."

"One of my favorite sounds is the sound of a young programmer learning something new."

"I had a running compiler and nobody believed I did. I had to keep repeating it over and over."

"You manage things; you lead people. I went down the path of managing computers."

"People think they want to hear about the miracles of science. What they really want is to know how to do things better."

"I found myself in a foreign service. It was very interesting to work on the first computer."

"The programmer is a creator of universes for which he alone is responsible."

"Teaching is the one profession that creates all other professions."

"In the business world, it is not the crook who is to be feared most, it is the incompetent."

"One thing I always believe: it is important to believe in yourself even when others don't."

"I want to show that there is no difference between a man and a woman in their capacity to think, to reason, and to create."

"The only place success comes before work is in the dictionary."