A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on. Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong. Knight turned the machine off and on. The machine worked.

I want to build a clock that ticks once a year. The century hand advances once every one hundred years, and the cuckoo comes out on the millennium. I want the cuckoo to come out every millennium for the next 10,000 years. If I hurry I should finish the clock in time to see the cuckoo come out for the first time.

I am convinced that we humans are just at the beginning of our journey, on our way to becoming something more wonderful than we can imagine.

What we need is a plan B ... independent of the Internet. [It] doesn't necessarily have to have the performance of the Internet, but the police department has to be able to call up the fire department.

Design: holding conflicting ideas in your head without difficulty

If transportation technology was moving along as fast as microprocessor technology, then the day after tomorrow I would be able to get in a taxi cab and be in Tokyo in 30 seconds.

Technology is everything that doesn’t work yet.

The computers are in control. We just live in their world.

If you hear an expert talking about the Internet and saying it [does] this, or it will do that, you should treat it with the same skepticism that you might treat the comments of an economist about the economy or a weatherman about the weather.

Your genome knows much more about your medical history than you do.

An attitude of only taking what you need was built into the protocols of the Internet itself.