Quotes

Good decisions come from experience. Experience comes from making bad decisions.

After we had conducted thousands of experiments on a certain project without solving the problem, one of my associates, after we had conducted the crowning experiment and it had proved a failure, expressed discouragement and disgust over our having failed to find out anything. I cheerily assured him that we had learned something. For we had learned for a certainty that the thing couldn’t be done that way, and that we would have to try some other way.

When everyone thinks the same, how much thinking is actually taking place?

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems.

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.

A common fallacy is to assume authors of incomprehensible code will somehow be able to express themselves lucidly and clearly in comments.

In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.