2000s Quotes
1,524 quotes
"Microsoft has had clear competitors in the past. It's a good thing we have museums to document that."
"Trustworthy Computing has four pillars: reliability, security, privacy and business integrity."
"We don't have the user centricity. Until we understand context, which is way beyond presence — presence is the most trivial notion, just am I on this device or not; it doesn't say am I meeting with something, am I focused on writing something."
"Like almost everyone who uses e-mail, I receive a ton of spam every day. Much of it offers to help me get out of debt or get rich quick. It would be funny if it weren't so irritating."
"Spam will be a thing of the past in two years' time."
"Does the e-mail say it's about 'enlargement' — that might be spam."
"Personal computing today is a rich ecosystem encompassing massive PC-based data centers, notebook and Tablet PCs, handheld devices, and smart cell phones. It has expanded from the desktop and the data center to wherever people need it — at their desks, in a meeting, on the road or even in the air."
"If you show people the problems and you show people the solutions they will be moved to act."
"Understand that this is the last physical format there will ever be."
"I wish I wasn't ... There's nothing good that comes out of that. You get more visibility as a result of it."
"Stolen's a strong word. It's copyrighted content that the owner wasn't paid for. So yes."
"I'm a big believer that as much as possible, and there's obviously political limitations, freedom of migration is a good thing."
"If you just want to say, "Steve Jobs invented the world, and then the rest of us came along," that's fine. If you're interested, [Vista development chief] Jim Allchin will be glad to educate you feature by feature what the truth is. ... Let's be realistic, who came up with "File/Edit/View/Help"? Do you want to go back to the original Mac and think about where those interface concepts came from?"
"It's easier for our software to compete with Linux when there's piracy than when there's not."
"I'm not for women, frankly, in any job. I don't want any of them around. Thank God we don't have any in the Cabinet."
"I don't think women should be in any government job whatever. I mean, I really don't. The reason why I do is mainly because they are erratic and emotional."
"As long as I'm sitting in the chair, there's not going to be any Jew appointed to that court. [No Jew] can be right on the criminal-law issue."
"I can't ever say that, but I believe it."
"You don't want to know."
"I think most Americans understood that the My Lai massacre was not representative of our people, of the war we were fighting, or of our men who were fighting it; but from the time it first became public the whole tragic episode was used by the media and the antiwar forces to chip away at our efforts to build public support for our Vietnam objectives and policies."
"What are our schools for if not for indoctrination against communism?"
"Now listen here: Printing top secret information. I don't care how they feel about the war. Whether they're for or against it. They can't and should not do this and attack the integrity of government and by God, I'm gonna fight that son of a bitching paper. They don't know what's gonna hit them now."
"I want to tell you that I was so damn mad when that Supreme Court had to come down. First, I didn't like the decision. Unbelievable, wasn't it? You know, those clowns we got on there, I tell you, I hope I outlive the bastards."
"The required techniques of effective reasoning are pretty formal, but as long as programming is done by people that don't master them, the software crisis will remain with us and will be considered an incurable disease. And you know what incurable diseases do: they invite the quacks and charlatans in, who in this case take the form of Software Engineering gurus."
"It is not the task of the University to offer what society asks for, but to give what society needs."
"There are very different programming styles. I tend to see them as Mozart versus Beethoven. When Mozart started to write, the composition was finished. He wrote the manuscript and it was 'aus einem Guss' (from one cast). In beautiful handwriting, too. Beethoven was a doubter and a struggler who started writing before he finished the composition and then glued corrections onto the page. In one place he did this nine times. When they peeled them, the last version proved identical to the first one."
"What is the shortest way to travel from Rotterdam to Groningen, in general: from given city to given city. It is the algorithm for the shortest path, which I designed in about twenty minutes. One morning I was shopping in Amsterdam with my young fiancée, and tired, we sat down on the café terrace to drink a cup of coffee and I was just thinking about whether I could do this, and I then designed the algorithm for the shortest path. As I said, it was a twenty-minute invention. In fact, it was published in '59, three years late. The publication is still readable, it is, in fact, quite nice. One of the reasons that it is so nice was that I designed it without pencil and paper. I learned later that one of the advantages of designing without pencil and paper is that you are almost forced to avoid all avoidable complexities. Eventually that algorithm became, to my great amazement, one of the cornerstones of my fame."
"I cannot shift the blame for Chechnya, for the sorrow of numerous mothers and fathers. I made the decision, therefore I am responsible."
"We don't appreciate what we have until it's gone. Freedom is like that. It's like air. When you have it, you don't notice it."
"You are a woman, aren't you?"
"How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to get them through the test?"
"You managed not to get eaten then?"
"Do you still throw spears at each other?"
"Do you know they're now producing eating dogs for the anorexics?"
"You look like you’re ready for bed!"
"Ah good, there's so many over there you feel they breed them just to put in orphanages."
"The food prices are going up – everyone thinks it’s to do with not enough food but it's really that demand is too great, [there are] too many people. It’s embarrassing and no one knows how to handle it because nobody wants their family life to be interfered with by Government... overpopulation is to blame for many of the problems afflicting millions of people around the world... It seemed to me that most religions attributed the world to some special creation and I said, ‘Well, look, if you believe God created the world, you ought to take an interest in its wellbeing... People don’t realise it is the species that matter – not the individual – from the conservation point of view. You’ve got to be fairly hard-hearted about it. Conservation is not a romantic business. It’s a very practical business, trying to ensure as many different species of wildlife can exist, and which means in some cases controlling some so the others can have a better chance."
"Well, you'll never fly in it, you're too fat to be an astronaut."
"Shakespeare wrote, Einstein thought, Atatürk built."
"You know, if I were a single man, I might ask that mummy out. That's a good-looking mummy."
"Yesterday is yesterday. If we try to recapture it, we will only lose tomorrow."
"History has shown us, that you can't allow the mass extermination of people, and just sit by and watch it happen."
"Let me tell you what the facts are. Now, we had a hard time getting those facts into these debates, because they're so inconvenient for the other side. And I admire that about the Republicans: The evidence does not faze them. ... They are not bothered at all by the facts. And you've got to kind of give it to them. ... They know what they're for."
"A preemptive action today, however well-justified, may come back with unwelcome consequences in the future. And because ... I've done this. I've ordered these kinds of actions — I don't care how precise your bombs and your weapons are, when you set them off, innocent people will die."
"Because Israel believes, when it comes right down to it America is the only big country that cares whether they live or die. That's why I can say, give up the West Bank, because the Israelis knew that if the Iraqi or the Iranian army came across the Jordan river, I would personally grab a rifle, get in a ditch, and fight and die, and I would."
"You should have disagreements with your leaders and your colleagues, but if it becomes immediately a question of questioning people's motives, and if immediately you decide that somebody who sees a whole new situation differently than you must be a bad person and somehow twisted inside, we are not going to get very far in forming a more perfect union."
"And I think America, if we're ever going to truly defeat terror without changing the character of our own country or compromising the future of our children, has got to not only say, "Okay, I want to shoulder my responsibilities, I want to create my share of opportunities" but we have to find a way to define the future in terms of a humanity that goes beyond our country, that goes beyond any particular race, that goes beyond any particular religion."
"I felt like a pickle stepping into history."
"People like you always help the far-right, because you like to hurt people, and you like to talk about how bad people are and all their personal failings."
"Strength and wisdom are not opposing values."
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