“I was actually planning to merge CK for a while. The code didn’t faze me. [But] Con was fixated on one single workload, and argued against people who reported problems.

“I don’t trust mailing lists with a narrow topic. If you cannot get many different people from different areas to test your patches, and cannot see the big picture, the end result won’t likely be very interesting to others, will it?

“If the history of alcohol prohibition is a guide, drug prohibition will not end merely because there are many sound, sensible and humane reasons to end it. It will only end if Congress gets desperate for another revenue source.

“Anybody who’s considering not voting for Senator Obama because he’s black, or for Senator Clinton because she’s a woman, I don’t want their vote.

“We knew that Google was going to get better every single day as we worked on it, and we knew that sooner or later everyone was going to try it. So our feeling was that the later you tried it, the better it was for us because we’d make a better impression with better technology. So we were never in a big hurry to get you to use it today. Tomorrow would be better.

“If you are trying to decide between a few people to fill a position, always hire the better writer. Being a good writer is about more than words. Good writers know how to communicate. They make things easy to understand. They can put themselves in someone else’s shoes. They know what to omit. They think clearly. And those are the qualities you need.

“Most companies don’t outsource things they need to win a customer, but they have no problem outsourcing things the customer needs to use the product.

“The Simpsons did say that Flanders, who opposed the teaching of evolution, is sincere in his beliefs. We tried to take his emotions seriously.

“Religions dislike each other, but no heretic is as damned as someone who starts with your religion and makes a modification to it.

“Anytime a comment thread becomes huge enough to exhibit emergent behavior, up to and including spawning new species of monsters, you know you’ve touched a nerve.