"Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can."

Jamie Zawinski Technology See all quotes by Jamie Zawinski →

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More by Jamie Zawinski

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

“I dug in a bit but then the smell of gasoline and burning flesh drove me away.”

“There is a lot of money to be made in the business of secrets, of course.”

“Your "use case" should be, there's a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?”

“combines all the worst aspects of C and Lisp: a billion different sublanguages in one monolithic executable. It combines the power of C with the readability of PostScript.”

“I'd just like to take this moment to point out that C has all the expressive power of two dixie cups and a string.”

Resonant Thoughts

"With effort, we can roll back poverty and the roadblocks to opportunity. Americans don’t accept a free ride for anybody, nor do we believe in equality of outcomes. But we do expect equal opportunity. …"

— Barack Obama

Politics1961

#justice

"I do not believe that our friends at the South have any just idea of the state of feeling, hurrying at this moment to a pitch of intense exasperation, between those who respect their political obligat…"

— Franklin Pierce

Politics1804–1869

#family

"In spite of the growing differences of income, the ever-increasing concentration of capital and the steady increase of the proletariat, in a word, in spite of the growing opposition between classes, t…"

— Arnold Hauser (art historian)

Philosophy1892–1978

#success