"The Supreme Court is an institution far more dominated by centrifugal forces, pushing toward individuality and independence, than it is by centripetal forces pulling for hierarchical ordering and institutional unity."

"To the extent that libraries wish to offer unfiltered access, they are free to do so without federal assistance."

"[T]he Constitution does not guarantee the right to acquire information at a public library without any risk of embarrassment."

"A public library does not acquire Internet terminals in order to create a public forum for Web publishers to express themselves, any more than it collects books in order to provide a public forum for the authors of books to speak."

"At the heart of the First Amendment is the recognition of the fundamental importance of the free flow of ideas and opinions on matters of public interest and concern. The freedom to speak one's mind is not only an aspect of individual liberty – and thus a good unto itself – but also is essential to the common quest for truth and the vitality of society as a whole. We have therefore been particularly vigilant to ensure that individual expressions of ideas remain free from governmentally imposed sanctions. The First Amendment recognizes no such thing as a "false" idea."

"[Jury selection] is best based upon seat-of-the-pants instincts, which are undoubtedly crudely stereotypical and may in many cases be hopelessly mistaken."

"The considered professional judgment of the Air Force is that the traditional outfitting of personnel in standardized uniforms encourages the subordination of personal preferences and identities in favor of the overall group mission."

"No amount of repetition of historical errors in judicial opinions can make the errors true. The "wall of separation between church and State" is a metaphor based on bad history, a metaphor which has proved useless as a guide to judging. It should be frankly and explicitly abandoned."

"The Constitution requires that Congress treat similarly situated persons similarly, not that it engage in gestures of superficial equality."

"This result […] will daily stand as a veritable sword of Damocles over every succeeding president and his advisers."

"Pregnancy is of course confined to women, but it is in other ways significantly different from the typical covered disease or disability."

"It is, I believe, impossible to justify the sacrifice of even a portion of our historic individual freedom for a purpose such as [giving blacks, Latinos and Jews the right to be served in local motels, hotels and restaurants]."

"[I]f...a society adopts a constitution and incorporates in that constitution safeguards of individual liberty, these safeguards do indeed take on a general moral rightness or goodness. They assume a general social acceptance neither because of any intrinsic worth nor because of any unique origins in someone's idea of natural justice but instead simply because they have been incorporated in a constitution by the people."

"The important thing, once you have enough to eat and a nice house, is what you can do for others, what you can contribute to the enterprise as a whole."

"For his major contributions to the analysis of algorithms and the design of programming languages, and in particular for his contributions to the "art of computer programming" through his well-known books in a continuous series by this title."

"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 beings what we want a computer to do."

"To summarize: We have seen that computer programming is an art, because it applies accumulated knowledge to the world, because it requires skill and ingenuity, and especially because it produces objects of beauty. A programmer who subconsciously views himself as an artist will enjoy what he does and will do it better. Therefore we can be glad that people who lecture at computer conferences speak of the state of the Art."

"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 (or at least most of it) in programming."

"In this sense, we should continually be striving to transform every art into a science: in the process, we advance the art."

"Science is knowledge which we understand so well that we can teach it to a computer; and if we don't fully understand something, it is an art to deal with it."

"Trees sprout up just about everywhere in computer science..."

"Any inaccuracies in this index may be explained by the fact that it has been sorted with the help of a computer."

"The reason is not to glorify "bit chasing"; a more fundamental issue is at stake here: Numerical subroutines should deliver results that satisfy simple, useful mathematical laws whenever possible. [...] Without any underlying symmetry properties, the job of proving interesting results becomes extremely unpleasant. The enjoyment of one's tools is an essential ingredient of successful work."

"The sun comes up just about as often as it goes down, in the long run, but this doesn't make its motion random."

"Random numbers should not be generated with a method chosen at random"

"People who are more than casually interested in computers should have at least some idea of what the underlying hardware is like. Otherwise the programs they write will be pretty weird."

"An algorithm must be seen to be believed."

"By understanding a machine-oriented language, the programmer will tend to use a much more efficient method; it is much closer to reality."

"Most people only know pi in decimal."

"Let's face it, if there were 10 people like me in the world, we wouldn't have time to read each other's books."

"I came to philosophy finally phrased as "0.8 is enough". … If I had a way to rate happiness, I think it's a good design to have an organism that's happy about 80% of the time. If it was 100% of the time, it would be like everybody's on drugs and everything collapses and nothing works because everybody is just too happy. … There are times when I am down and I know that I've actually been programmed to be depressed a certain amount of time."

"I am assuming that God exists and I am glad that there is no way to prove this. [Because] I would run through the proof once, and then I'd forget it, and I would never speculate about spiritual things and mysteries otherwise. And, I think, my life would be very incomplete."

"A good technical writer, trying not to be obvious about it, but says everything twice: formally and informally. Or maybe three times."

"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 done. That was part of the bargain."

"If you find that you're spending almost all your time on theory, start turning some attention to practical things; it will improve your theories. If you find that you're spending almost all your time on practice, start turning some attention to theoretical things; it will improve your practice."

"The psychological profiling [of a programmer] 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."

"In fact, my main conclusion after spending ten years of my life working on the TEX project is that software is hard. It’s harder than anything else I’ve ever had to do."

"How can you own [...] numbers? Numbers belong to the world."

"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 concentration."

"I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime."

"I can’t go to a restaurant and order food because I keep looking at the fonts on the menu."

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

"A mathematical formula should never be "owned" by anybody! Mathematics belong to God."

"I can’t be as confident about computer science as I can about biology. Biology easily has 500 years of exciting problems to work on. It’s at that level."

"Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do."

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

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