Quotes from Ken Thompson


Sorted by Popularity


No amount of source-level verification or scrutiny will protect you from using untrusted code.


We tried to avoid, you know, records. We were told over and over that was probably the most serious mistake and the reason was the system would never catch on, because we didn't have records.


Unauthorized access to computer systems is already a serious crime in a few states and is currently being addressed in many more state legislatures as well as Congress.


There's a lot of power in executing data - generating data and executing data.


There are no projects per se in the Computing Sciences Research Center.


So maybe I can go back to being a Gardeners' World addict again.


One is that the perfect garden can be created overnight, which it can't.


I am a very bottom-up thinker.


Grant, if we edited Fortran, I assume that you'd put a column thing in there.


A well installed microcode bug will be almost impossible to detect.


I still have a full-time day job, which is why it took me five years to write An Ear to the Ground, and why I won't have another book finished by next week.


I have to keep up with the scientific literature as part of my job, but increasingly I found myself reading things that weren't really relevant to my academic work, but were relevant to gardening.


You can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself.


The average gardener probably knows little about what is going on in his or her garden.


That brings me to Dennis Ritchie. Our collaboration has been a thing of beauty.


On the one hand, the press, television, and movies make heroes of vandals by calling them whiz kids.



It's always good to take an orthogonal view of something. It develops ideas.


If you want to go somewhere, goto is the best way to get there.


I wanted to separate data from programs, because data and instructions are very different.