Jamie Zawinski

"Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems."

"Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can."

"The real bug here is that the design of the system even permits this class of bug. It is unconscionable that someone designing a critical piece of security infrastructure would design the system in such a way that it does not fail safe."

"You can't take a dying project, sprinkle it with the magic pixie dust of "open source," and have everything magically work out."

"Using these toolkits is like trying to make a bookshelf out of mashed potatoes."

"I'd just like to take this moment to point out that C has all the expressive power of two dixie cups and a string."

"Linux is only free if your time has no value."

"Today, I use Linux as my primary OS (on an x86 PC, and on a Thinkpad), and I also use Irix (on an SGI O2). Linux has improved a great deal since I wrote this, specifically with respect to its ease of installation."

"Your "use case" should be, there's a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?"

"My one purpose in life is to serve as a warning to others."

"I dug in a bit but then the smell of gasoline and burning flesh drove me away."

"If you're using Windows, go fuck yourself."

"Don't do drugs, kids. Stay in school."

"C (it's not just a language, it's a grade)"

"I've noticed that when I get quoted in .sig files, it's never any of the actual clever things I say all the time. Usually it's something dumb."

"Browser compatibility problems are nature's way of saying "stop trying to be so fuckin' clever"."

"Professionalism has no place in art, and hacking is art. Software Engineering might be science; but that's not what I do. I'm a hacker, not an engineer."

"[Perl] combines all the worst aspects of C and Lisp: a billion different sublanguages in one monolithic executable. It combines the power of C with the readability of PostScript."

"Your needs are big because the Internet is big."

"Nothing comes for free."

"These people also tended to pretend to care deeply about the blind and otherwise disabled. I am sympathetic to the needs of those users, but I can't help but think that those who claimed to speak for the blind were being more than a little disingenuous, just like those Hemp people who present their arguments in terms of their deep and abiding care for the textile industry, when their real motives are … something else entirely."

"There is a lot of money to be made in the business of secrets, of course."

"Our focus in the client group had always been to build products and features that people wanted to use. That we wanted to use. That our moms wanted to use."

"If you want to do something that's going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy."

"But instead I'm stuck inside under fluorescent lights, pushing bits around inside a computer in ways that are only interesting to other nerds."

"Self hosting email is like pounding needles into your eyes. You should never do that. Pay someone else to pound those needles so you can just lie back and enjoy it."

"One of the best programmers I ever hired had only a High School degree; he's produced a lot of great software, has his own news group, and made enough in stock options to buy his own nightclub."