118 Quotes by Alan Kay

"Lisp isn't a language, it's a building material."

"The real romance is out ahead and yet to come. The computer revolution hasn't started yet."

"It's easier to invent the future than to predict it."

"Any company large enough to have a research lab is too large to listen to it."

"Java and C++ make you think that the new ideas are like the old ones. Java is the most distressing thing to hit computing since MS-DOS."

"The future is not laid out on a track. It is something that we can decide, and to the extent that we do not violate any known laws of the universe, we can probably make it work the way that we want to."

"I invented the term 'Object-Oriented', and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind."

"Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it."

"Perspective is worth 80 IQ points."

"Most creativity is a transition from one context into another where things are more surprising. There’s an element of surprise, and especially in science, there is often laughter that goes along with the “Aha.” Art also has this element. Our job is to remind us that there are more contexts than the one that we’re in — the one that we think is reality."