The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.

Because not one of those people said: “Please pass this so that I won’t be able to do something I know I should stop.” Nyet, tovarishchee, was always something they hated to see neighbors doing. Stop them “for their own good” — not because speaker claimed to be harmed by it.

To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.

America isn’t easy. America is advanced citizenship. You’ve got to want it bad, because it’s going to put up a fight. It’s going to say, “You want free speech? Let’s see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil; who’s standing center stage, advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours.” You want to claim that this land is the land of the free? Then the symbol of your country cannot just be a flag. The symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest.

Now show me that. Defend that. Celebrate that in your classrooms. Then you can stand up and sing about the land of the free.

Cutting the space budget really restores my faith in humanity. It eliminates dreams, goals, and ideals and lets us get straight to the business of hate, debauchery, and self-annihilation.

Oh, drat these computers! They’re so naughty and so complex. I could pinch them!

Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.

Perhaps it is unnecessary to be so explicit about it, but there are a lot of 16-byte addresses. Specifically, there are 2^128^ of them, which is approximately 3 × 10^38^. If the entire earth, land and water, were covered with computers, IPv6 would allow 7 × 10^23^ IP addresses per square meter. Students of chemistry will notice that this number is larger than Avogadro’s number. While it was not the intention to give every molecule on the surface of the earth its own IP address, we are not that far off.

I want an Internet. Can I have one of those?

WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. HTML IS LAYOUT.