Donald Knuth

"I define UNIX as 30 definitions of regular expressions living under one roof."

"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 in programming."

"In a way, you'd say my life is a convex combination of English and mathematics. ... And not only that, I want my kids to be that way: use left brain, right brain at the same time – you got a lot more …"

"The whole thing that makes a mathematician’s life worthwhile is that he gets the grudging admiration of three or four colleagues."

"Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible…"

"The psychological profiling is mostly the ability to shift levels of abstraction, from low level to high level. To see something in the small and to see something in the large."

"Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs: Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human b…"

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