“Modernism was based on a kind of arrogance ... and led designers to believe that if they thought of something cool, it must be considered universally cool. That is, if something's worth doing, it's worth driving into the ground to the exclusion of all other approaches. Look at the use of parentheses in Lisp or the use of white space as syntax in Python. Or the mandatory use of objects in many languages, including Java. All of these are ways of taking freedom away from the end user "for their own good". They're just versions of Orwell's Newspeak, in which it's impossible to think bad thoughts. We escaped from the fashion police in the 1970s, but many programmers are still slaves of the cyber police.”

“The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use. The African writer should aim to use English in a way that brings out his message best without altering the language to the extent that its value as a medium of international exchange will be lost. He should aim at fashioning out an English which is at once universal and able to carry his peculiar experience.”

“High school was so typical and predictable. Everyone here was so occupied with discovering the definition of cool. To some, cool was Abercrombie and popped collars. Some thought cool was playing sports. Some thought cool was drinking before the homecoming dance. And others swore that cool was not trying to be cool: nonconformists with black nail polish, leather boots, and oversized safety pins in their ears.Our free expression was in so many ways just a restriction of our identities. All of us trying to be something we weren't. Even the nonconformists were conforming. High school, I guessed, was just a chapter, something standing in the way of real freedom. High school didn't even seem real. It seemed so fake.”

“I used to think--and given the way we ended up, maybe I still do--that all relationships need the kind of violent shove that a crush brings, just to get you started and to push you over the humps. And then, when the energy from that shove has gone and you come to something approaching a halt, you have to look around and see what you've got. It could be something completely different, it could be something roughly the same, but gentler and calmer, or it could be nothing at all.”

“The police are there to do the job, not to think about it,' was the line used by critics, the harshest of which were often other police. But police officers see and hear at first hand the things that ail a society, and along the way they gain trememdous insight into how to fix problems or processes, even if they can't change people's behaviours or attitudes. With the right systems and resources, their personal capacity for creating a safer society is far more powerful than the guns they carry. This would be the thinking driving my direction when I later came to Victoria to take charge of its police force.”

“...are you a person - with volition and maybe some stubborness and at least the capacity if not the actual determination to do something surprising - or are you a tool? A tool just serves its user. It's only as good as the skill of its user, and its not good for anything else. So if you want to accomplish something special - something more than you can do for yourself - you can't use a tool. You have to use a person and hope the surprises will work in your favor. You have to use something that's free to not be what you had in mind.”