Top 50 Alan Kay Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.”

— Alan Kay

Featured in: IT Quotes

2. “It’s easier to invent the future than to predict it.”

— Alan Kay

3. “Don’t worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”

— Alan Kay

4. “The only way you can predict the future is to build it.”

— Alan Kay

5. “Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible.”

— Alan Kay

Featured in: Simplicity Quotes

6. “If you’re not failing 90% of the time, then you’re probably not working on sufficiently challenging problems.”

— Alan Kay

7. “A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points. Perspective is worth 80 IQ points. Point of view is worth 80 IQ points.”

— Alan Kay

8. “Perspective is worth 80 IQ points.”

— Alan Kay

9. “Artificial intelligence is what we don’t know how to do yet.”

— Alan Kay

10. “The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.”

— Alan Kay

Featured in: Programming Quotes

11. “Change is easy, except for the changed part.”

— Alan Kay

12. “An important technology first creates a problem and then solves it.”

— Alan Kay

13. “Lisp isn’t a language, it’s a building material.”

— Alan Kay

14. “I had the fortune or misfortune to learn how to read fluently starting at the age of three. So I had read maybe 150 books by the time I hit 1st grade. And I already knew that the teachers were lying to me.”

— Alan Kay

15. “In computers, every ‘new explosion’ was set off by a software product that allowed users to program differently.”

— Alan Kay

16. “The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs.”

— Alan Kay

17. “The computer is simply an instrument whose music is ideas.”

— Alan Kay

18. “I hired finishers because I’m a good starter and a poor finisher.”

— Alan Kay

19. “The biggest problem we have as human beings is that we confuse our beliefs with reality.”

— Alan Kay

20. “If you’re utopian, you’re never satisfied.”

— Alan Kay

21. “Some people worry that artificial intelligence will make us feel inferior, but then, anybody in his right mind should have an inferiority complex every time he looks at a flower.”

— Alan Kay

22. “Technology is anything invented after you were born, everything else is just stuff.”

— Alan Kay

23. “Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.”

— Alan Kay

24. “Humans are communications junkies. We just can’t get enough.”

— Alan Kay

25. “If the pros at Sun had had a chance to fix Java, the world would be a much more pleasant place. This is not secret knowledge. It’s just secret to this pop culture.”

— Alan Kay

26. “The future is not laid out on a track. It is something that we can decide, and to the extent that we do not violate any known laws of the universe, we can probably make it work the way that we want to.”

— Alan Kay

27. “School is basically about one point of view – the one the teacher has or the textbooks have. They don’t like the idea of having different points of view,...”

— Alan Kay

28. “In success there’s a tendency to keep on doing what you were doing.”

— Alan Kay

29. “Knowledge is silver. Outlook is gold. IQ is a lead weight.”

— Alan Kay

30. “Scratch the surface in a typical boardroom and we’re all just cavemen with briefcases, hungry for a wise person to tell us stories.”

— Alan Kay

31. “I don’t know how many of you have ever met Dijkstra, but you probably know that arrogance in computer science is measured in nano-Dijkstras.”

— Alan Kay

32. “Any company large enough to have a research lab is too large to listen to it.”

— Alan Kay

33. “Sun Microsystems had the right people to make Java into a first-class language, and I believe it was the Sun marketing people who rushed the thing out before it should have gotten out.”

— Alan Kay

34. “In natural science, Nature has given us a world and we’re just to discover its laws. In computers, we can stuff laws into it and create a world.”

— Alan Kay

35. “A new friend is new wine, when it grows old, you will enjoy drinking it.”

— Alan Kay

36. “The flip side of the coin was that even good programmers and language designers tended to do terrible extensions when they were in the heat of programming, because design is something that is best done slowly and carefully.”

— Alan Kay

37. “I fear – as far as I can tell – that most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training.”

— Alan Kay

38. “Understanding- -like civilization, happiness, music, science and a host of other great endeavors – is not a state of being, but a manner of traveling. This great road has no final destination. The journey itself is the reward.”

— Alan Kay

39. “The real romance is out ahead and yet to come. The computer revolution hasn’t started yet.”

— Alan Kay

Featured in: Romance Quotes

40. “The greatest single programming language ever designed.”

— Alan Kay

41. “Technology is anything that wasn’t around when you were born.”

— Alan Kay

42. “A computer scientist is a machine for converting coffee into urine.”

— Alan Kay

43. “I think the trick with knowledge is to “acquire it, and forget all except the perfume” – because it is noisy and sometimes drowns out one’s own “brain voices”. The perfume part is important because it will help find the knowledge again to help get to the destinations the inner urges pick.”

— Alan Kay

44. “Quite a few people have to believe something is normal before it becomes normal – a sort of ‘voting’ situation. But once the threshold is reached, then everyone demands to do whatever it is.”

— Alan Kay

45. “Science requires a society because even people who are trying to be good thinkers love their own thoughts and theories – much of the debugging has to be done by others.”

— Alan Kay

46. “The protean nature of the computer is such that it can act like a machine or like a language to be shaped and exploited.”

— Alan Kay

47. “Television should be the last mass communication medium to be naively designed and put into the world without a surgeon-general’s warning.”

— Alan Kay

48. “To get the medium’s magic to work for one’s aims rather than against them is to attain literacy.”

— Alan Kay

49. “In our society we have hard nerds and soft nerds. The hard nerds are the ones who used to have the slide rules at their belt; now they have calculators. The soft nerds are the ones who get violently ill whenever anybody mentions an integral sign.”

— Alan Kay

50. “Perl is another example of filling a tiny, short-term need, and then being a real problem in the longer term.”

— Alan Kay