Top 30 Ken Thompson Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Ken Thompson

Featured in: Programming Quotes, IT Quotes

2. “When in doubt, use brute force.”

— Ken Thompson

3. “You can’t trust code that you did not totally create yourself.”

— Ken Thompson

4. “If you want to go somewhere, goto is the best way to get there.”

— Ken Thompson

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

— Ken Thompson

6. “That brings me to Dennis Ritchie. Our collaboration has been a thing of beauty.”

— Ken Thompson

7. “It’s always good to take an orthogonal view of something. It develops ideas.”

— Ken Thompson

8. “Just think, IBM and DEC in the same room, and we did it.”

— Ken Thompson

9. “The steady state of disks is full.”

— Ken Thompson

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

— Ken Thompson

11. “We have persistent objects, they’re called files.”

— Ken Thompson

12. “FORTRAN was the language of choice for the same reason that three-legged races are popular.”

— Ken Thompson

13. “The X server has to be the biggest program I’ve ever seen that doesn’t do anything for you.”

— Ken Thompson

14. “I am a very bottom-up thinker.”

— Ken Thompson

15. “SCCS, the source motel! Programs check in and never check out!”

— Ken Thompson

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

— Ken Thompson

17. “I wanted to separate data from programs, because data and instructions are very different.”

— Ken Thompson

18. “One is that the perfect garden can be created overnight, which it can’t.”

— Ken Thompson

19. “It is only the inadequacy of the criminal code that saves the hackers from very serious prosecution.”

— Ken Thompson

20. “I wanted to avoid, special IO for terminals.”

— Ken Thompson

21. “I also enjoy writing my regular column for Organic Gardening magazine, so I may do more of that sort of thing in the future, if anybody wants it!”

— Ken Thompson

22. “In college, before video games, we would amuse ourselves by posing programming exercises.”

— Ken Thompson

23. “I view Linux as something that’s not Microsoft-a backlash against Microsoft, no more and no less.”

— Ken Thompson

24. “I wanted to have virtual memory, at least as it’s coupled with file systems.”

— Ken Thompson

25. “There’s a lot of power in executing data – generating data and executing data.”

— Ken Thompson

26. “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

27. “In fact, we started off with two or three different shells and the shell had life of its own.”

— Ken Thompson

28. “No amount of source-level verification or scrutiny will protect you from using untrusted code.”

— Ken Thompson

29. “For most of that time, I’ve also been a keen gardener, but for many years I failed to make the connection between gardening and science.”

— Ken Thompson

30. “I also have an idea for a book on biodiversity, and why and how we should be conserving it.”

— Ken Thompson

31. “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

32. “On the one hand, the press, television, and movies make heroes of vandals by calling them whiz kids.”

— Ken Thompson

33. “I don’t think there are many people up in research who have strong ideas about things that they haven’t really had experience with.”

— Ken Thompson

34. “But I love the teaching: the hard work of a first class, the fun of the second class. Then the misery of the third.”

— Ken Thompson