Lisp is a programmable programming language.
— John Foderaro, CACM, September 1991
Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming: any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc
informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.
— Philip Greenspun
Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that
experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a
lot.
— Eric Raymond, "How to Become a Hacker"
Lisp ... made me aware that software could be close to executable mathematics.
— L. Peter Deutsch
SQL, Lisp, and Haskell are the only programming languages that I've seen where one spends more time thinking than
typing.
— Philip Greenspun
The continuation that obeys only obvious stack semantics, O grasshopper, is not the true continuation.
— Guy Steele