Skip to content

One can even conjecture that Lisp owes its survival specifically to the fact that its programs are lists, which everyone, including me, has regarded as a disadvantage.

— John McCarthy

Another quote →

More quotes by John McCarthy

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

Comparing oneself with Galileo or Einstein is certainly good for the ego — provided one refrains from going into too much detail.

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

John McCarthy (1983)

An atheist doesn't have to be someone who thinks he has a proof that there can't be a god. He only has to be someone who believes that the evidence on the God question is at a similar level to the evidence on the werewolf question.

Whenever we write an axiom, a critic can say that the axiom is true only in a certain context. With a little ingenuity the critic can usually devise a more general context in which the precise form of the axiom doesn't hold. [...] There simply isn't a most general context.

All John McCarthy quotes →

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: John McCarthy (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.