Quotes from John McCarthy

When there's a will to fail, obstacles can be found.

He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.

We understand human mental processes only slightly better than a fish understands swimming.

All travel is, after all, a journey in time & in mind.... physical landscapes are a mirror of, or perhaps a key into, our inner landscape.

You don't get to choose the value of what you do in others' eyes, so you have to take stock in knowing that doing the right thing is enough, no matter who notices.

as soon as it works, no one calls it AI anymore.

Who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense - from "Progress and it's Sustainability

Foolishness is rarely a matter of lack of intelligence or even lack of information.

Alas few socialists are either benevolent enough to work hard at these occupations out of benevolence or self-interested enough to work hard at them for money.

When thugs by nature meet thugs by political conviction, 5-0 is not surprising.

My hobby of not attending meetings about recycling saves more energy than your hobby of recycling.

Don't try to talk anyone out of concentrating his hatred on Ayn Rand or any other dead person. It can't harm the dead. Diverted to a living person, it might actually do harm.

Compassion is contempt with a human face.

His ambition is to be the spider in the World Wide Web.

Amateur bureaucrats are often even worse than professional bureaucrats.

If I owned Marseilles and Hell, I'd rent out Marseilles and live in Hell.

Once a person has killed other people on behalf of an ideology, he becomes rather devoted to it.

A true intellectual is a man who, after reading a book and being convinced by its arguments, will shoot someone or, more likely, order someone shot.

Proposals to forbid golf courses have about the same motivations as proposals to forbid skate boarding, although the rationalizations are different.

Committing genocide on behalf of an institution generates greater loyalty to it than merely getting people fired from their jobs on its behalf.

Self-righteousness has killed more people than smoking.

An excessive knowledge of Marxism is a sign of a misspent youth.

The slogan was 'Don't trust anyone over thirty'. Sixty years later the slogan became, 'Don't trust anyone over ninety'.

The peace movement is a great force for peace. Some of the world's most quarrelsome people act out their aggressions through the peace movement.