"The rest of the world in which I lived was still stumbling about in search of a weapon with which to exterminate this monster [homosexuality] whose shape and size were not yet known or even guessed at. It was thought to be Greek in origin, smaller than socialism but more deadly, especially to children."

"In an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast."

"Keeping up with the Joneses was a full-time job with my mother and father. It was not until many years later when I lived alone that I realized how much cheaper it was to drag the Joneses down to my level."

"At the age of ninety, it has finally been explained to me that I am not really homosexual, I'm transgender. I now accept that. I no longer see myself as homosexual, though it is a word I have used to describe myself and which others have understandably used to describe me. I don't actually see myself as a man though, of course, I know I'm not physically a woman. The only thing in my life I have wanted and didn't get was to be a woman. [...] I don't dress like a woman ... I think my body is too like a man's body to have lived as a woman with any kind of success. I refer to myself as homosexual without thinking because of how I have lived my life."

"A pinch of notoriety will do."

"I have come to think that both sex and politics are a mistake and that any attempt to establish a connection between the two is the greatest error of all."

"Fashion is a way of not having to decide who you are. Style is deciding who you are and being able to perpetuate it."

"I suppose when I was a child, when I lived almost entirely in a dream world, I suppose I thought of myself as a woman, but later on you realise you have to live in the real world and that you are not. You are only in some senses effeminate or feminine, and you must make this compromise, you must learn to live in a world where statistically you are a man, whatever you may think about yourself. I didn't want to become anything. Once I'd accepted the world, all I wanted was that the world should understand what kind of person I was."

"If you write something wrong enough, I'll be glad to make up a new witticism just for you."

"We must tighten the nut! We are selling motorcycles not clothes!"

"Many people dream of success. To me success can only be achieved through repeated failure and introspection. In fact, success represents the 1% of your work which results only from the 99% that is called failure."

"As for whether Perl 6 will replace Perl 5, yeah, probably, in about 40 years or so."

"Easy things should be easy, and hard things should be possible."

"Jesse Vincent: My dog is Web 2.0. Prove me wrong. Larry: Does your dog have a long tail? Damian Conway: If you enjoyed these practices, find 245 more like this in this book. Larry: Does your dog have a long tail?"

"When's the last time you used duct tape on a duct?"

"Larry's 2nd Law of Language Redesign: Larry gets the colon."

"…I also discovered Larry's First Law of Language Redesign: Everyone wants the colon."

"There's really no way to fix this and still keep Perl pathologically eclectic."

"The problem with being consistent is that there are lots of ways to be consistent, and they're all inconsistent with each other."

"The three chief virtues of a programmer are: Laziness, Impatience and Hubris."

"...Then you start building things like the Berlin wall to keep people inside your community. In anthropological terms, that's tribalism. A tribal Perl programmer might say, "If you leave the Perl tribe to go and join the Python tribe, we will hunt you down, cook you, and eat you." Or if you join the Ruby tribe, you will explode. By and large, I am not in favor of tribalism. Except for my tribe, of course."

"[Boxed] Multiple bouncing balls in a box are a metaphor for community. Notice how the escaping balls explode. This is what happens to people who move from Perl to Ruby."

"The only reason I've managed to run this open source project, is that I have learned to delegate even the delegation to other people. (final words of the video)."

"As a linguist, I don't think of Ada as a big language. Now, English and Japanese, those are big languages. Ada is just a medium-sized language."

"Is LISP a candidate for a scripting language? While you can certainly write things rapidly in it, I cannot in good conscience call LISP a scripting language. By policy, LISP has never really catered to mere mortals... And, of course, mere mortals have never really forgiven LISP for not catering to them."

"But you could do extreme programming. In fact, I had a college buddy I did pair programming with. We took a compiler writing class together and studied all that fancy stuff from the dragon book. Then of course the professor announced we would be implementing our own language, called PL/0. After thinking about it a while, we announced that we were going to do our project in BASIC. The professor looked at us like we were insane. Nobody else in the class was using BASIC. And you know what? Nobody else in the class finished their compiler either. We not only finished but added I/O extensions, and called it PL 0.5. That's rapid prototyping."

"I started out as a BASIC programmer. Some people would say that I'm permanently damaged. Some people are undoubtedly right... But I'm not going to apologize for that. All language designers have their occasional idiosyncracies. I'm just better at it than most."

"Suppose you went back to Ada Lovelace and asked her the difference between a script and a program. She'd probably look at you funny, then say something like: Well, a script is what you give the actors, but a program is what you give the audience. That Ada was one sharp lady..."

"There are a lotta computer languages out there doing drugs."

"If there's a particular problem that Perl is trying to solve, it's the basic fact that all programming languages suck. Sort of the concept of original sin, applied to programming languages."

"How do you type it? With your keyboard."

"Now, I'm not the only language designer with irrationalities. You can think of some languages to go with some of these things."

"I simultaneously believe that languages are wonderful and awful. You have to hold both of those. Ugly things can be beautiful. And beautiful can get ugly very fast. You know, take Lisp. You know, it's the most beautiful language in the world. At least up until Haskell came along. (laughter) But, you know, every program in Lisp is just ugly. I don't figure how that works."

"So... Perhaps the Perl 6 slogan should be "All Your Paradigms Are Belong To Us". We'll get to that."

"And C was good at something I like to call manipulexity, that is the manipulation of complex things. While shell was good at something else which I call whipuptitude, the aptitude for whipping things up."

"But I'm not here to talk about postmodernism. I tried to do that last spring, and afterwards I was thoroughly deconstructed by the deconstructionists for attempting to deconstruct deconstructionism. At least, that's the construction I put on their construction of it. I was talking about postmodern culture, and they thought I was talking about postmodern literature. Not at all the same thing!"

"People understand instinctively that the best way for computer programs to communicate with each other is for each of the them to be strict in what they emit, and liberal in what they accept. The odd thing is that people themselves are not willing to be strict in how they speak, and liberal in how they listen. You'd think that would also be obvious. Instead, we're taught to express ourselves."

"When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi."

"The previous line contains the naughty word '$&'.\n if /(ibm|apple|awk)/; # :-)"

"The autodecrement is not magical."

"Remember though that THERE IS NO GENERAL RULE FOR CONVERTING A LIST INTO A SCALAR."

"Perl is designed to give you several ways to do anything, so consider picking the most readable one."

"Okay, that's definitely enough hype."

"In general, they do what you want, unless you want consistency."

"If you want your program to be readable, consider supplying the argument."

"Help save the world!"