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.

The computer is just a tool. The pencil is also a tool. It's about how you use it.

"Model checking is a powerful technique for verifying the correctness of finite-state concurrent systems."

I'm the only person I know that's lost a quarter of a billion dollars in one year...It's very character-building.