Top 31 Quotes by Ken Thompson

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

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

I think the major good idea in Unix was its clean and simple interface: open, close, read, and write.

We have persistant objects, they're called files.

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.

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

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

One of my most productive days was throwing away 1,000 lines of code.

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

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.