The average gardener probably knows little about what is going on in his or her garden. – Ken Thompson
In fact, we started off with two or three different shells and the shell had life of its own. – Ken Thompson
I think the major good idea in Unix was its clean and simple interface: open, close, read, and write. – Ken Thompson
In college, before video games, we would amuse ourselves by posing programming exercises. – Ken Thompson
No amount of source-level verification or scrutiny will protect you from using untrusted code. – Ken Thompson
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. – Ken Thompson
On the one hand, the press, television, and movies make heroes of vandals by calling them whiz kids. – Ken Thompson
The X server has to be the biggest program I’ve ever seen that doesn’t do anything for you. – Ken Thompson
It is only the inadequacy of the criminal code that saves the hackers from very serious prosecution. – Ken Thompson
I wanted to separate data from programs, because data and instructions are very different. – Ken Thompson
I also have an idea for a book on biodiversity, and why and how we should be conserving it. – Ken Thompson
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. – Ken Thompson
