Quote

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

Alan Kay

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Alan Kay
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: May 17
Computer Scientist
Jazz Guitarist
Jazz Musician
Programmer
University Teacher
Springfield
Massachusetts
Alan Curtis Kay
Alan C. Kay
Problem
Human
Humans
Confuse
Beliefs
Biggest
Beings
Belief
Reality

More quotes by Alan Kay

Image
Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
Alan Kay
Image
[Computing] is just a fabulous place for that, because it's a place where you don't have to be a Ph.D. or anything else. It's a place where you can still be an artisan. People are willing to pay you if you're any good at all, and you have plenty of time for screwing around.
Alan Kay
Image
A new friend is new wine, when it grows old, you will enjoy drinking it.
Alan Kay
Image
Yazılım konusunda iddialı insanlar kendi donanımlarını yapmalılar.
Alan Kay
Image
The real romance is out ahead and yet to come. The computer revolution hasn't started yet.
Alan Kay
Image
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
Image
The tree of research must be fed from time to time with the blood of bean-counters, for it is its natural manure.
Alan Kay
Image
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
Image
The result is - document destruction - we're really not going to be able to prove beyond a truth the negatives and some of the positive conclusions that we're going to come to. There will be always unresolved ambiguity here.
Alan Kay
Image
In success there's a tendency to keep on doing what you were doing.
Alan Kay
Image
Any company large enough to have a research lab is too large to listen to it.
Alan Kay
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Any medium powerful enough to extend man's reach is powerful enough to topple his world.
Alan Kay
Image
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
Image
If you're not failing 90% of the time, then you're probably not working on sufficiently challenging problems.
Alan Kay
Image
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
Image
Having an intelligent secretary does not get rid of the need to read, write, and draw, etc. In a well functioning world, tools and agents are complementary.
Alan Kay
Image
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