The citation of a quotation below is not intended to imply that I agree with the point made in the quotation. Some quotes are selected because they are amusing or amazing; some are actually insightful. (You decide which are which.)
Science is what people understand well enough to explain to a computer. All else is art.
Donald Knuth, cited in Robert Slater, Portraits in Silicon (MIT, 1987), p. 351
There is no idea so simple and powerful that you can't get zillions of people to misunderstand it.
Alan Kay, The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet (OOPSLA '97)
The purpose of computing is not numbers but insight.
Richard Hamming, in the forward to one of his books (with thanks to Larry Krummel)
A picture is worth a thousand words (which is why it takes a thousand times longer to load...)
Eric Tilton, Composing Good HTML
If FORTRAN has been called an infantile disorder, then PL/I must be classified as a fatal disease.
Edsger Dijkstra, A Short Introduction to the Art of Programming
C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off.
C is one of my favorite languages because it is the only programming language I know whose name tells us the grade it deserves.
The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.
Edsgar W. Dijkstra
See also ACM's biography of Dijkstra and more quotes attributed to Dijkstra.
See also these great quotes on distributed systems, LISP, etc.