Brian Kernighan Quotes

The good news is, being a digital citizen comes naturally to many of us once we get the opportunity - human beings have been taking things apart and putting them back together throughout history.

If students get a sound education in the history, social effects and psychological biases of technology, they may grow to be adults who use technology rather than be used by it.

Architecture and building is about how you get around the obstacles that are presented to you. That sometimes determines how successful you'll be: How good are you at going around obstacles?

Good questions outrank easy answers.

Good thinkers always prime the pump of ideas. They always look for things to get the thinking process started, because what you put in always impacts what comes out.

I suppose I have very undesirable traits. I am very critical, which is very undesirable. But it is good from a business point of view.

I always look on imagination as one of the most powerful things we can cultivate in young people. If they have a good, active imagination, they can cope with life better; they are... able to imagine possibilities and to think around problems.

He whose wisdom cannot help him, gets no good from being wise.

Steve Martin said that philosophy is good for comedy because it screws up your thinking just enough, and I agree with that. Being forced to see life's metadata is good training for looking for interesting angles on a topic.

I found I wasn't asking good enough questions because I assumed I knew something. I would box them into a corner with a badly formed question, and they didn't know how to get out of it. Now, I let them take me through it step by step, and I listen.

I never did any training in journalism or in finance, so I really was in the deep end. I got very good at going to press conferences and nodding. I'd figure it out when I got back to the office. Charts and numbers. I've never been great with facts, ever, my whole life. For a journalist, that's not a very good trait.

Good politics starts with empathy, proceeds to analysis, then sets out values and establishes the vision, before getting to the nitty-gritty of policy solutions.

I have made good judgments in the past. I have made good judgments in the future.

It's always good to take an orthogonal view of something. It develops ideas.

A good leader can engage in a debate frankly and thoroughly, knowing that at the end he and the other side must be closer, and thus emerge stronger. You don't have that idea when you are arrogant, superficial, and uninformed.

Intelligence is not to make no mistakes, but quickly to see how to make them good.

Management teams aren't good at asking questions. In business school, we train them to be good at giving answers.

A good engineer thinks in reverse and asks himself about the stylistic consequences of the components and systems he proposes.

Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground-floor. But if a man hasn't got plenty of good common sense, the more science he has, the worse for his patient.

I guess some people are brilliant enough to be brilliant on their own and never doubt anything and come up with fabulous things. But I think it's good to get into arguments with people and have them say, 'That sucks' or 'You're crazy' or 'That's cheesy' or 'What do you think of this?'

I have some ideas on how to fix that. They're not very good ideas, but at least they're ideas!

One of the things that characterizes good intellectual work is a certain self-importance.

The lack of free, child-directed play time for our kids today will have dire consequences for these future leaders, making them less prepared to solve complex challenges and problems.

The common question that gets asked in business is, 'why?' That's a good question, but an equally valid question is, 'why not?'

In my experience, if people don't have a sense of humor, they are usually not very good scientists, either.