“The only way to stay alive is work on something you like. If you do not, you are slowly making yourself weaker.

“Centuries are sometimes accorded exaggerated value; this was an innings far more significant, both in quality and importance to his team, than Tendulkar’s last two hundreds.

“You spend so much time checking off what you’ll do that you never do anything.

“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.