Dissertations are not finished; they are abandoned.

Conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design.

When fits of creativity run strong, more than one programmer or writer has been known to abandon the desktop for the more spacious floor.

Software and hardware design is less different than software designers think, but more different than hardware designers think.

Good judgment comes from experience and experience comes from bad judgment.

The fundamental problem with program maintenance is that fixing a defect has a substantial chance of introducing another.

The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.

System debugging, like astronomy, has always been done chiefly at night.

Scientists build to learn; Engineers learn to build.

It is very difficult to make a vigorous, plausible, and job-risking defense of an estimate that is derived by no quantitative method, supported by little data, and certified chiefly by the hunches of the managers.

Men and months are interchangeable commodities only when a task can be partitioned among many workers with no communication among them.

The hardest part of the software task is arriving at a complete and consistent specification, and much of the essence of building a program is in fact the debugging of the specification.

To only a fraction of the human race does God give the privilege of earning one's bread doing what one would have gladly pursued free, for passion.

Nine people can't make a baby in a month.

Adjusting to the requirement for perfection is, I think, the most difficult part of learning to program.

A little retrospection shows that although many fine, useful software systems have been designed by committees and built as part of multipart projects, those software systems that have excited passionate fans are those that are the products of one or a few designing minds, great designers.

But I will argue that knowing complete product requirements up front is a quite rare exception, not the norm.

More software projects have gone awry for lack of calendar time than for all other causes combined.

Product procedure...must securely protect the crown jewels, but, equally important, it must eschew building high fences around the garbage cans.

Present to inform, not to impress. If you inform, you will impress.