“Software development, like professional sports, has a way of making thirty-year-old men feel decrepit.”

“Other people - store clerks, burger flippers, software engineers, the whole vocabulary of meaningless jobs that make up Life in America - other people just rely on plain old competition. Better flip your burgers or debug your subroutines faster than your high school classmate two blocks down the strip is flipping or debugging, because we're in competition with those guys, and people notice these things.What a fucking rat race that is.”

“If money is a science, then it is a dark science...it has gone on developing...by its own rules”

“There's only four things we do better than anyone else:musicmoviesmicrocode (software)high-speed pizza delivery”

“When it gets down to it — talking trade balances here — once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here — once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel — once the Invisible Hand has taken away all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity — y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else:musicmoviesmicrocode (software)high-speed pizza delivery”

“Men who believe that they are accomplishing something by speaking speak in a different way from men who believe that speaking is a waste of time.”

“. . . if money is a science, then it is a dark science, darker than alchemy. It split away from Natural Philosophy millennia ago, and has gone on developing ever since, by its own rules.”