Larry Wall Quotes

Ger-mans love the ambiguous word, verbal assonances as ends in themselves,vague concepts. Anglosaxons are more clear.

Unlike the ambiguity of life, the ambiguity of language does reach a limit.

Words can have no single fixed meaning. Like wayward electrons, they can spin away from their initial orbit and enter a wider magnetic field. No one owns them or has a proprietary right to dictate how they will be used.

In fact, from then on scholars engaged in a kind of game of comparing different Indo-European languages with one another, and eventually they could not fail to wonder what exactly these connections showed, and how they should be interpreted in concrete terms.

If we are to look only at the words, then we inquire, not what this man meant, but what those words would mean in the mouth of a normal speaker.

Whatever the framers … intended, there is no reason to believe that they possessed the best insights or ultimate wisdom as to the meaning of their words for subsequent generations ... Words do not have fixed meanings.

An easy solution for many controversies may be found as long as we are able to be on our guard for the same words being used with conflicting meanings by different authors.

There were no ill language, if it were not ill taken.

I have this theory about words. There's a thousand ways to say "Pass the salt". It could mean, you know, "Can I have some salt?" or it could mean, "I love you.". It could mean, "I'm very annoyed with you". Really, the list could go on and on. Words are little bombs, and they have a lot of energy inside them.

When you say words a lot they don't mean anything. Or maybe they don't mean anything anyway, and we just think they do.

The difference between us and a computer is that, the computer is blindingly stupid, but it is capable of being stupid many, many million times a second.

Of course language is not an infallible guide, but it contains, with all its defects, a good deal of stored insight and experience.

XML is not a language in the sense of a programming language any more than sketches on a napkin are a language.

You who read me, are You sure of understanding my language?

[In] 2029, I think, computers will match and exceed human intelligence in the ways we're now superior, like being funny, where we still have an edge.

You can prove anything by mentioning another computer language.

I can understand German as well as the maniac that invented it, but I talk it best through an interpreter.

There are words and words and none mean anything. And then one sentence means everything.

The largest and most powerful computers are still no match for the smallest and weakest humans.

Words never mean what we want them to mean.

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite.

Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.

Computers are so deeply stupid. What bother me most when they talk about technology is they don't realize how much more exciting their minds are. That machine is stupid. And boring. It does just a few things and then it'll crash. People think, 'I am on the Net, I am in touch with the world'. Wrong! The point is how we work, not how machines work.

Cats virtually always underestimate human intelligence just as we, perhaps, underestimate theirs.

As a poet who has the tools for interpreting the poem differently, you can begin to deconstruct it. But the human being who's like, "I know about conversation, I know about language, I know about hard times," will approach the poem differently.