Art is partly communication, but only partly. The rest is discovery.

What's in a book is not what the author put into it, it's what the reader gets out of it.

I'm not smart, but I like to observe. Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton was the one who asked why

All our scientific and philosophic ideals are altars to unknown gods.

Now comes the mystery.

When you are describing, A shape, or sound, or tint; Don't state the matter plainly, But put it in a hint; And learn to look at all things, With a sort of mental squint.

My scientific work is motivated by an irresistible longing to understand the secrets of nature not by other feelings.

James Clerk Maxwell's [work is the] most profound and the most fruitful.

I have spoken to people in intelligence. And they are big believers in, as an example, waterboarding. Because they say it does work. It does work.

Audiences like to be challenged and to be actively involved and try to guess an outcome.

legends to surround it—giving history to what had just

If you understand McCarthy's eval, you understand more than just a stage in the history of languages. These ideas are still the semantic core of Lisp today. So studying McCarthy's original paper shows us, in a sense, what Lisp really is. It's not something that McCarthy designed so much as something he discovered. It's not intrinsically a language for AI or for rapid prototyping, or any other task at that level. It's what you get (or one thing you get) when you try to axiomatize computation.