Quotations
Inspirational and Enlightening
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I believe that if, at the end of it all, according to our abilities, we have done something
to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is
about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy
is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no
matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn’t always
know this, and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.
- — Roger Ebert, The Essential Man
- I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other
side of death to fear, he writes in a journal entry titled "Go Gently into That Good Night."
I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content
before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. What I am grateful for is the gift of
intelligence, and for life, love, wonder, and laughter. You can’t say it wasn’t
interesting. My lifetime’s memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will
require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home
from Paris.
- — Roger Ebert, re: knowing he is dying, The Essential Man
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Sometimes I wake up feeling tired and unable to run in the morning and go to bed having run
one of my longest days ever.
- — Ryan Johns, Day 95
- Brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick
walls are there to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop
the people who don’t want something badly enough. They are there to keep out the
other people.
- — Randy Pausch (The Last Lecture)
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Some men have thousands of reasons why they cannot do what they want to, when all they need
is one reason why they can.
- — Mary Frances Berry
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I have a new philosophy. I’m only going to dread one day at a time.
- — Charles M. Schulz
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You can surrender without a prayer, but never really pray ... pray without surrender. You can
fight without ever winning, but never ever win ... win without a fight.
- — Neil Peart, Rush, Resist (Test for Echo)
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The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to
adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
- — George Bernard Shaw
- In time
- I will
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collect the world
- — Glen Phillips, Toad the Wet Sprocket, Butterflies (fear)
Work
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We know screwups are an essential part of making something good. That’s why
[Pixar’s] goal is to screw up as fast as possible.
- — Lee Unkrich, director of Toy Story 3
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The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.
- —Walt Disney
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When all is said and done, more is said than done.
- — Lou Holtz
- Work like a dog being taken for a walk, instead of an ox being yoked to the plow.
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Most people don’t take enough pride in their work, but not enough employers give people
work worth taking pride in.
- — Jared
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Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else.
- — James M. Barrie
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By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may eventually get to be boss and work
twelve.
- — Robert Frost
Love
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Choose your Love and love your Choice.
- — Unknown, quoted by Anne
Wisdom
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Wisdom is the quality that keeps you from getting into situations where you need it.
- — Doug Larson
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We are what we believe we are.
- —C. S. Lewis
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Do you know the difference between who and what you are?
- — Neal Morse, Transatlantic, Duel with the Devil
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You may easily play a joke on a man who likes to argue—agree with him.
- — Ed Howe
Humor
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Drastic measures call for drastic time signatures.
- — Jared
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The grass is always greener on the other side—but that’s because they use more
manure.
- — Schapiro’s Explanation
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In theory there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is
- — Jan L.A. van de Snepscheut
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Step one: Shave Shrodinger’s cat with Occam’s razor...
- — Pegr
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One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I’ll never
know.
- — Groucho Marx
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Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted.
- — Groucho Marx
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Zip bop doodley bop a doo frang da dappy!
- —Duck and Cover song, Teddy Newton, from the film, The Iron Giant
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At my lemonade stand I used to give the first glass away free and charge five dollars for the
second glass. The refill contained the antidote.
- — Emo Phillips
- All power corrupts, but we need the electricity.
- — Unknown
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The early bird gets the worm but the second mouse gets the cheese.
- —Anonymous
- It just hasn’t been the same since we held those National Sentimental Society of Nostalgia meetings. Not the same at all.
- My other car
- has a better license plate holder
- —Purportedly seen on the back of Jared’s car
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Hold stick near centre of its length. Moisten pointed end in mouth. Insert in tooth space,
blunt end next to gum. Use gentle in-out motion.
- —Instructions for using toothpicks (Douglas Adams)
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[Updike.org] looks like one of those dot org sites.
- — Mike W.
Culture
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One of the most important things you learn from the internet is that there is no
’them’ out there. It’s just an awful lot of ’us’.
- — Douglas Adams, How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet
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There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it’s
only a hundred billion. It’s less than the national deficit! We used to call them
astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.
- — Richard Feynman
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Disney escapee Jeffrey Katzenberg knows the animation business. He also knows his toon
factory can’t compete with Pixar on quality. So he’s making it up on volume.
- —WIRED magazine
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He wrapped himself in quotations—as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of
Emperors.
- — Rudyard Kipling
- I think this album [Van Halen III] actually does a service for VH fans with split loyalties: it will unite the legions of Sammy-haters and Dave-haters against new lead singer Gary Cherone.
- On a log scale [growing up in suburbia] was midway between crib and globe.
- The main tool used by schools to manage large groups is competition. Whenever you get two or more people to compete then they have to be, by definition, doing the same thing. The rest of the rules are only there to cover the corner cases that competition misses.
- Similarly, no one who is the best at something can ever, by definition, push the human race forward. Because to be the best at something means you have to be, by definition, doing the same thing as everyone else.
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When I was a kid, I used to think adults had it all figured out. I had it backwards. Kids are
the ones who have it all figured out. They’re just mistaken.
- — Paul Graham, The Age of the Essay
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After eagerly awaiting the outcome of the format war between DVD-Audio and SACD, only to see
them both tank in favor of 128,000 bps Auditory Sandpaper(TM), I’m pretty much in
despair on that front. We have a whole generation now who are capable of listening to that
without covering their ears and screaming: “Make it stop!” and worse yet, are
willing to pay money for it. Meanwhile, people will pay hundreds of dollars for “Home
Theater Systems” with 9% (!) Total Harmonic Distortion, when 0.1% was entry-level for
$100 receivers 30 years ago! Oh, well... by the time my Carver separates die,
hopefully my hearing will have deteriorated to the point I won’t be able to “tell
the difference” either.
- — Gatesbasher comment
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In an artificial world, only extremists live naturally.
- — Paul Graham, You Weren’t Meant to Have a Boss
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The only difference between the Democrats and the Republicans is that the Democrats allow the
poor to be corrupt, too.
- — Oscar Levant
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The multitude of books is making us ignorant.
- — Voltaire
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But what is the difference between literature and journalism? ... Journalism is unreadable
and literature is not read. That is all.
- — Oscar Wilde
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Imitation is the sincerest form of television.
- — Fred Allen
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A liberal is a person whose interests aren’t at stake at the moment.
- — Willis Player
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I’ve tried to teach people autodidactism, but I’ve realized they have to learn it
for themselves.
- — shapr, #Haskell IRC channel
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I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other
room and read a book.
- — Groucho Marx
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I don’t think anyone should write their autobiography until after they’re
dead.
- — Samuel Goldwyn
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Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after
them.
- — Bill Vaughn
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If there is anything the nonconformist hates worse than a conformist, it’s another
nonconformist who doesn’t conform to the prevailing standard of nonconformity.
- — Bill Vaughn
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Is sloppiness in speech caused by ignorance or apathy? I don’t know and I don’t
care.
- — William Safire
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During a political campaign everyone is concerned with what a candidate will do on this or
that question if he is elected except the candidate; he’s too busy wondering what
he’ll do if he isn’t elected.
- — Everett Dirksen
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Without the aid of prejudice and custom I should not be able to find my way across the
room.
- — William Hazlitt
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You get fifteen Democrats in a room, and you get twenty opinions.
- — Senator Patrick Leahy
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We’re actors — we’re the opposite of people.
- — Tom Stoppard
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We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex—but Congress
can.
- — Cullen Hightower
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To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worthwhile. The first discipline of
education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter.
- — Aleister Crowley
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Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped.
- — Elbert Hubbard
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Biography lends to death a new terror.
- — Oscar Wilde
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In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is stoned to death.
- — Joan D. Vinge
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Advertising is the art of convincing people to spend money they don’t have for
something they don’t need.
- —Will Rogers
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Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to
tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.
- — Ben Hecht
- Wittgenstein is popularly credited with the idea that most philosophical controversies are due to confusions over language. I’m not sure how much credit to give him. I suspect a lot of people realized this, but reacted simply by not studying philosophy, rather than becoming philosophy professors.
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Nights are 9pm to 6am.
- —Cingular Wireless Money Hounds
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Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.
- —Timothy Leary
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If government were a product, selling it would be illegal.
- —P. J. O’Rourke
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Many young men are more likely to show daredevil tendencies in their driving because of
factors such as emotional immaturity and misplaced feelings of immortality.
- —Carolyn Gorman, Institute of Insurance Information
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Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings,
either a liberal or a conservative.
- —Kurt Vonnegut, "Cold Turkey", In These Times, May 10, 2004
- On the internet, no one knows you’re wearing a hyper-sleeve shirt.
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Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything
from history.
- —George Bernard Shaw
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No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come.
- — Victor Hugo
- It’s wrong to say what’s right and wrong.
Art
Great Design
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Design doesn’t have to be new, but it has to be good. Research doesn’t have to be
good, but it has to be new.
- — Paul Graham, Design and Research
- Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
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The trouble with doing something right the first time is that nobody appreciates how
difficult it was.
- — Walt West
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A lot of effort went into making this look effortless.
- —Steve Jobs
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The height of cleverness is to be able to conceal it.
- — Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Originality
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Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting where you heard
it.
- — Laurence J. Peter
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Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.
- —Igor Stravinsky (quoting Picasso)
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For those that understand, no explanation is needed. For those that do not understand, no
explanation is possible
- — seen here
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Don’t worry about people stealing an idea. If it’s original, you will have to ram
it down their throats.
- — Howard Aiken
The Power of Music
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In the work by Christoph Christian Sturm cited above, Beethoven highlighted the following
words:
- “By all rights, one can call nature a school for the heart, because it teaches us in a highly rational manner the responsibilities which we not only owe to God, but also to ourselves and to our fellow man.”
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Following this, one could even view the “Pastorale” less as a musical depiction
of nature than as a resounding illustration of Beethoven’s principles of life:
“The moral law in us and the starry heavens above us.”
- — Michael Lewin, Essay on Beethoven’s Fifth and Sixth Symphonies
- A song on the radio can move me so much it leaves me sobbing, elated and destroyed at the same time.
Photography
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We admire the work of those we admire precisely because they showed us who they are. No one
else can be them, and likewise, only you can be you. No one else can be as good at being you
as you are. Show us.
- — Ken Rockwell, the Pen and the Signature
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A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about
what is being photographed.
- — Ansel Adams
- I have often thought that if photography were difficult in the true sense of the term—meaning that the creation of a simple photograph would entail as much time and effort as the production of a good watercolor or etching—there would be a vast improvement in total output. The sheer ease with which we can produce a superficial image often leads to creative disaster.
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There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.
- —Ansel Adams
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A true photograph need not be explained, nor can it be contained in words.
- —Ansel Adams
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When a photographer masters the tools and processes of the art, then the quality of the work
is only limited by his creative vision.
- — Edward Weston, California and the West, paraphrased by Morgan P. Yates in Westways, May 2009
Learning and Understanding
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One of the first duties of the physician is to educate people not to take medicine.
- — Sir William Osler, widely revered as the father of modern medicine
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What I cannot create, I do not understand.
- —On the blackboard of Richard Feynman at time of death in 1988; as quoted in The Universe in a Nutshell by Stephen Hawking
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I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it.
- — Pablo Picasso
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I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by
understanding, they learn by some other way—by rote or something. Their knowledge is so
fragile!
- — Richard Feynman
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It is the quality of your observation, not your technique, that most contributes to your
progress as an artist.
- — Judy martin, Sketching School , pg. 9
Science
- As the saying goes; everybody may have a right to their own opinion, but they certainly don’t have the right to their own facts.
- In his remarkable book about the workings of science, Science in Action, the philosopher Bruno Latour brings a note of caution to the distinction between science and art [7].
- ... [Science as] a systematized body of knowledge, ability to make predictions, validation of models ... is part of what he calls ready-made-science, science that is ready to be used and applied, science that is ready to support art. Much science-in-the-making appears as art until it becomes settled science.
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The separation between "matters of faith" and "matters of science" is itself a lie we tell
ourselves and each other so we can tolerate living in a world populated by irrational people
and irrational beliefs. But it’s artifice, there’s no reason any actual phenomenon
can’t be investigated “scientifically.”
- — partdavid, hacker news comment
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The remark which I read somewhere, that science is all right as long as it doesn’t
attack religion, was the clue I needed to understand the problem. As long as it doesn’t
attack religion it need not be paid attention to and nobody has to learn anything. So it can
be cut off from society except for its applications, and thus be isolated. And then we have
this terrible struggle to try to explain things to people who have no reason to want to know.
But if they want to defend their own point of view, they will have to learn what yours is a
little bit. So I suggest, maybe correctly and perhaps wrongly, that we are too polite.
- —Richard Feynman, From lecture “What is and What Should be the Role of Scientific Culture in Modern Society”, given at the Galileo Symposium in Italy, 1964.
- The ones we wish could hear us
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have heard it all before.
- — Neil Peart, Rush, Peaceable Kingdom
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Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand.
- — Kurt Vonnegut
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Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
- — Arthur C. Clarke
- I never guess. It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one
begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts. (Sherlock
Holmes)
- — Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
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God exists since mathematics is consistent, and the Devil exists since we cannot prove
it.
- — Andre Weil
Reality
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Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.
- — Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (quoted in Obama’s 2010 Speech at University of Michigan).
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Today’s scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off
through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to
reality.
- — Nikola Tesla
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There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all
traces of reality.
- — Pablo Picasso
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Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.
- — Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying
Programming
- To write a big program, you just break it into lots of small programs, right? Well, that’s true a sense, in the same sense that writing a book is merely a matter of writing chapters, which is merely a matter of writing paragraphs etc. But writing books is hard because the pieces have to hang together in a coherent whole. If part of a book doesn’t quite fit with the whole, the result is aesthetically disappointing. If a part of a program doesn’t quite fit in, it’s called a crash. Paper doesn’t abort, but programs do.
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Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.
- —Edsger Dijkstra
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The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance.
- — Robert R. Coveyou, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
- There are only two kinds of software: released too early and never released at all.
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We will encourage you to develop the three great virtues of a programmer: laziness,
impatience, and hubris.
- — Larry Wall, Programming Perl (1st edition)
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The principal lesson of Emacs is that a language for extensions should not be a mere
"extension language". It should be a real programming language, designed for writing and
maintaining substantial programs. Because people will want to do that!
- —Richard Stallman, Why you shouldn’t use Tcl
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In the software business there are many enterprises for which it is not clear that science
can help them; that science should try is not clear either.
- — E. W. Dijkstra
- #haskell (IRC channel) humor:
- quicksilver: #haskell is a loquacracy!
-
The Windows API is so broad, so deep, and so functional that most Independent Software
Vendors would be crazy not to use it. And it is so deeply embedded in the source code of many
Windows apps that there is a huge switching cost to using a different operating system
instead... It is this switching cost that has given the customers the patience to stick with
Windows through all our mistakes, our buggy drivers, our high TCO (total cost of ownership),
our lack of a sexy vision at times, and many other difficulties [...] Customers constantly
evaluate other desktop platforms, [but] it would be so much work to move over that they hope
we just improve Windows rather than force them to move. In short, without this exclusive
franchise called the Windows API, we would have been dead a long time ago.
- — Aaron Contorer, internal memo for senior management Microsoft’s head of C++ development
Haskell IRC quotes:
- quicksilver: I ACCIDENTALLY THE WHOLE VERB
- dons: we had 15 years building ivory towers - time to throw rocks from the top!
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Nothing much has changed, those folks who have a strong educational background in Comp Sci
and have allowed themselves to be exposed to the full breadth of computing typically become
excellent programmers regardless of the software language of choice. Those that choose to
specialize early and only have a narrow view of the field typically have significant knowledge
gaps that can be seen at the code level.
- — kinch, comment to C and Morse Code
- I am downloading the [iPhone] SDK and I don’t even know how to program. This is too awesome not to learn how.
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Operating System:
- An operating system is a collection of things
- that don’t fit into a language.
- There shouldn’t be one.
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The hardest part of the software task is arriving at a complete and consistent specification,
and much of the essence of building a program is in fact the debugging of the
specification.
- — Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. No Silver Bullet
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This message is encoded ROT0. Decoding is punishable by death under the DMCA.
- — slashdot signature, user "hard burn"
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There are three kinds of programmers: those who make off by one errors, and those who
don’t.
- — seen on signature of Benjamin Franksen, Haskell mailing list.
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Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better
idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the
Universe is winning.
- — Rich Cook
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At the mention of ugly source code, people will of course think of Perl. But the superficial
ugliness of Perl is not the sort I mean. Real ugliness is not harsh-looking syntax, but having
to build programs out of the wrong concepts. Perl may look like a cartoon character swearing,
but there are cases where it surpasses Python conceptually.
- —Paul Graham, the Python Paradox.
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Microsoft offers the quality of a Chinese knockoff without the lower price tag.
- — Daniel Eran Dilger, Myths of Leopard #8
- Every 5 minutes you spend writing code in a new language is more useful than 5 hours reading blog posts about how great the language is.
- There was once a wise young man who tried all kinds of implements to tend his garden–spades, hoes, rakes, and much, much more—and found them all lacking. Well, there was an ancient rusty shovel in his shed that would fit him just right, except it missed the most part of the handle and could not be easily repaired. The young man then put all his skills to the task of re-creating an old shovel, while secretly smirking on his neighbours who all used the much inferior implements. To do this right he needed first to produce an identical alloy for the blade, to forge it just right, to grind it just right (the whetstone also needed to be produced somehow), to find the right tree for the handle’s wood, and many, many more things that ought to be done just right.
- Finally he had his shovel made. He took it in his hands, plunged the blade in the ground, put his foot on it, and died of old age with a happy smile on his lips.
-
Decades later a wise young man looking for an implement to tend his garden found an ancient
rusty shovel in his shed.
- — comment by Hot Giraffe on Thumbs Down for Clojure, a tirade pining for the good ol’ days of Symbolics Genera. OK. Program in Symbolics Genera. Can I download your App or see your website running on that system?
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The quality of their programmers was inversely proportional to the density of goto statements
in their programs.
- —Edsgar Dijkstra, Programming Considered as a Human Activity
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Interaction is the mind-body problem of computing.
- —Philip L. Wadler
- Never write five lines of code when one will do. Never write fifty lines of code when three short one-liners will do. Never write 500 lines of code when ten three-liners will do.
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We now appear to be living in a world where even the most laughable paranoid fantasies about
commercially controlling simple social concepts [i.e. Microsoft attempt to patent emoticons]
are being outdone in the real world by well-funded armies of lawyers on behalf of some of the
most powerful companies on the planet.
- —Mark Taylor, Open Source Consortium
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[Microsoft, Adobe, or any large company, for that matter] can’t pay people enough to
build something better than a group of inspired hackers will build for free.
- —Paul Graham, What Businesses Can Learn from Open Source
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Except the GIMP and Blender, apparently.
- —Jared Updike, Programmers are Really Bad at Designing Interfaces for Designers