% % This cookie jar contains stuff gathered mostly from the Internet: % articles, web pages, usenet postings, e-mail messages, irc chats, etc. % But also a few from books or people I know. % %%% Taoful and untaoful % “What you’re not changing, you’re choosing.” % “Listen to the voice of criticism. It’s always right. (You just have to figure out in what way.)” — Jordan Mechner % “Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.” - Japanese Proverb % “You can’t give your life more time, so give the time you have left more life.” % “How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.” — Ernest Hemingway, “The Sun Also Rises” 1926 % “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for its not the same river and he’s not the same man.” – Heraclitus % “To complicate is simple, to simplify is complicated. Everybody is able to complicate. Only a few can simplify.” — Bruno Munari % “If you’re a giver, remember to learn your limits — because the takers don’t have any.” % “If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s.” % — Joseph Campbell % Cited by Leonard Sweet 2001. Source material by Campbell not searchable by Google % “When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.” % “Consider how hard it is to change yourself and you’ll understand what little chance you have in trying to change others.” % “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, creatively misquoted. % “A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.” — John Augustus Shedd % https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/12/09/safe-harbor/ % “It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.” — Karl Kristian Steincke % http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/10/20/no-predict/ % “The future has arrived — it’s just not evenly distributed yet.” — William Gibson % https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/01/24/future-has-arrived/ % “The idea is not to confront bad ideas but to come up with good ideas. Otherwise, your enemies define the game and you are the loyal opposition.” — Terence McKenna % (1946–2000), ‘The Primacy of Direct Experience’ (1994) % “The accumulated evidence of human nature tells us that the only improvement that lies within our control is the improvement of ourselves.” — Roger Scruton % “Dans la vie, rien n’est à craindre, tout est à comprendre.” — Marie Curie (In life, nothing is to be feared, everything is to be understood.) % “The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.” — Dan Millman % (1946–) ‘Way of the Peaceful Warrior: A Book that Changes Lives’, 1980 % Spoken by his mentor, a gas attendant he nicknamed "Socrates" % “Immoral means cannot bring moral ends, for the ends are pre-existent in the means... Destructive means cannot bring constructive ends, because the means represent the-ideal-in-the-making and the-end-in-progress. All this is saying that, in the final analysis, means and ends must cohere because the end is pre-existent in the means, and ultimately destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends.” — Martin Luther King, Jr., Strength to Love % “One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.” — Martin Luther King, Letters From Birmingham Jail % “Pick the fight that if you win it will make every other fight easier to win.” — Tarren Bragdon % “Uniquely in us, nature opens her eyes and sees that she exists.” — Raymond Tallis (1946–) % “To play a wrong note is insignificant; to play without passion is inexcusable.” — Beethoven character in the movie Immortal Beloved % https://www.reddit.com/r/quotes/comments/3smbdd/to_play_a_wrong_note_is_insignificant_to_play/ % “Whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing well.” — Chesterfield % “The world is changed by your example, not by your opinion.” ― Paulo Coelho % (1947–) % “It’s your road and yours alone; others may walk it *with* you, but no one will walk it *for* you...” — Rumi % “Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.” — Rumi (1207–1273) % “If you want to awaken all of humanity, then awaken all of yourself. If you want to eliminate the suffering in the world, then eliminate all that is dark and negative in yourself. Truly, the greatest gift you have to give is that of your own self-transformation.” — Lao Tzu (sixth century B.C.) % “Watch your thoughts; they become words. Watch your words; they become actions. Watch your actions; they become habit. Watch your habits; they become character. Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.” — Lao Tzu (sixth century B.C.) % “New beginnings are often disguised as painful endings.” — Lao Tzu % “If you want to awaken all of humanity, then awaken all of yourself, if you want to eliminate the suffering in the world, then eliminate all that is dark and negative in yourself. Truly, the greatest gift you have to give is that of your own self-transformation.” — Hua Hu Ching (not actually by Lao Tzu) % NOT by Lao Tzu. % http://ianchadwick.com/blog/bad-lao-tzu-meme-adds-to-growing-list-of-mis-identified-quotes-online/ % “Give up all hope for a better yesterday, even a better just now. Never give up hope for a better tomorrow.” — Patri Friedman % “Only a fool tests the depth of the water with both feet.” — African proverb % “Souvent un sot croira profonde une eau qui n’est que trouble.” % d’après une citation d’origine inconnue transmise par Greg Bodylski % “La vie n’est pas un restaurant mais un buffet. Levez-vous pour vous servir.” (Life is not a restaurant but a buffet. Stand up to serve yourself.) — Dominique Glocheux % God, Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. % (The Serenity Prayer is generally thought to have been written by Reinhold Niebuhr) % Luck occurs when preparedness meets opportunity. % La chance est la rencontre de l’opportunité et de la préparation. % “Truth comes as conqueror only to those who have lost the art of receiving it as friend.” — Tagore % «La vérité ne vient en conquérante qu’à ceux qui ont perdu l’art de la recevoir en amie.» — Tagore % “The people who offend you with truth do not hate you. The people who comfort you with lies hate you. And if you prefer a comfortable lie over an offensive truth—you hate yourself.” — % “The mice which helplessly find themselves between the cats teeth acquire no merit from their enforced sacrifice.” — Mahatma Gandhi % “That man who dares to waste one hour of time, has not discovered the value of life.” — Charles Darwin % “Appropriate fear keeps you alive. Excessive fear prevents the very thing it’s supposed to protect: life.” — Attila Lendvai % “Just remember: no matter who drives the tank, it won’t ever harvest the wheat.” — Attila Lendvai, about people fighting about who’ll be in power % “The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.” — Mark Twain % “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” — Mark Twain % “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t.” — Mark Twain % — Following the Equator, Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar % “Everything has its limit — iron ore cannot be educated into gold.” — Mark Twain % “Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.” — Mark Twain % “If you don’t read the newspaper you’re uninformed. If you do read it you’re misinformed.” — Not Mark Twain % Not Mark Twain https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/12/03/misinformed/ % “Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that’s the stuff life is made of.” — Benjamin Franklin % “im always happy // even when im sad // im happy to be sad // it doesnt happen often // so its like gift for me // and gift make me happy” — q % “When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.” % Often Misattributed to John Lennon — https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/05/29/grow-up-happy/ % “Nous cherchons tous le bonheur, mais sans savoir où, comme les ivrognes qui cherchent leur maison, sachant confusément qu’ils en ont une.” — Voltaire % Every task involves constraint, Solve the thing without complaint; There are magic links and chains Forged to loose our rigid brains. Structures, strictures, though they bind, Strangely liberate the mind. % James Falen, as quoted in dughof’s "Le ton beau de Marot", p. 272 % “Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context — a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.” — Eliel Saarinen % “Friedrich Hayek was the first object-oriented programmer.” — Bill Tulloh % You’re currently going through a difficult transition period called “Life.” % “All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes to make it possible.” % quoted by Jakes on #linpeople % “He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.” — John McCarthy, in his webpage on Progress and Sustainability % http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/ % “Your denial of the importance of objectivity amounts to announcing your intention to lie to us. No-one should believe anything you say.” — John McCarthy % — John McCarthy http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/09/rationality-q-1.html % % From http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_McCarthy “You say you couldn’t live if you thought the world had no purpose. You’re saying that you can’t form purposes of your own — that you need someone to tell you what to do. The average child has more gumption than that.” — John McCarthy % % From http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_McCarthy “You say the only alternative to nuclear war is world government. There is only one possibility worse than nuclear war for the survival of modern civilization, and that is world government. Civilization might recover from the damage of a nuclear war, but judging by past static empires in Egypt and China, it might never recover from world government, there being no chance of external intervention. As it is, present governments are only prevented from becoming dominated by crazy ideas that will suppress all opposition by the existence of other governments. The only way a people can be sure that their government is substandard is that it does worse than those of other countries.” — John McCarthy % % From http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_McCarthy “There is only one thing more harmful to society than an elected official forgetting the promises he made in order to get elected; that’s when he doesn’t forget them.” — John McCarthy % % From http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_McCarthy “The politicians have a most touching faith in technology — that it can make up for any dumb thing the politicians decide to do.” — John McCarthy % % From http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_McCarthy “The last ten percent of any reform is the most difficult to achieve. Moreover, it is often harmful.” — John McCarthy % % From http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_McCarthy “Soccer riots kill at most tens. Intellectuals’ ideological riots sometimes kill millions.” — John McCarthy % % From http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_McCarthy “Suicidal terrorists may have short shelf lives.” — John McCarthy % % From http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_McCarthy “The difference between a contemporary liberal and a socialist is that to a liberal the most beautiful word in the English language is ‘forbidden’, whereas to a socialist the most beautiful word is ‘compulsory’.” — John McCarthy % % From http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_McCarthy “Personal dishonesty is not needed to produce a dishonest business plan or research proposal. Wishful thinking suffices.” — John McCarthy % % From http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_McCarthy “Slogans rarely convince the unconvinced. However, they do rally the troops already on your side.” — John McCarthy % % From http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_McCarthy “Of course, Third World leaders love you. By ascribing third world ills to First World sins, you absolve them of blame for their countries’ failure to advance.” — John McCarthy % % From http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_McCarthy “Oh, he’s sincere all right. The question is: what is he sincere about?” — John McCarthy % % From http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_McCarthy “Once a person has killed other people on behalf of an ideology, he becomes rather devoted to it.” — John McCarthy % % From http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_McCarthy “Language is froth on the surface of thought.” — John McCarthy % % From http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_McCarthy “Malthus was right. It’s hard to see how the solar system could support much more than 10^28 people or the universe more than 10^50.” — John McCarthy % % From http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_McCarthy “My hobby of not attending meetings about recycling saves more energy than your hobby of recycling.” — John McCarthy % % From http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_McCarthy “Never abandon a theory that explains something until you have a theory that explains more.” — John McCarthy % % From http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_McCarthy “If you want to do good, work on the technology, not on getting power.” — John McCarthy % % From http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_McCarthy “Inside of many liberals is a fascist struggling to get out.” — John McCarthy % % From http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_McCarthy “It is deplorable that many people think that the best way to improve the world is to forbid something. However, they’re morally more advanced than the people who think the best way to improve the world is to kill somebody.” — John McCarthy % % From http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_McCarthy “It’s just a pissing contest, but unfortunately the contestants never seem to run out of piss.” — John McCarthy % % From http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_McCarthy “It’s possible to program a computer in English. It’s also possible to make an airplane controlled by reins and spurs.” — John McCarthy % % From http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_McCarthy “He who says he will die for a cause will probably lie for it and may kill for it.” — John McCarthy % % From http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_McCarthy “Honor among thieves is the ancestor of all honor.” — John McCarthy % “L’honneur entre brigands est l’ancêtre de tout honneur.” — John McCarthy % % From http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_McCarthy “If everyone were to live for others all the time, life would be like a procession of ants following each other around in a circle.” — John McCarthy % % From http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_McCarthy “If it doesn’t work right, we can always try something else.” — John McCarthy % % From http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_McCarthy “He has the first half of the Golden Rule down pat: Do unto others.” — John McCarthy % % From http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_McCarthy “Here’s a way to tell scientific intelligence from legal intelligence. Both may start from the idea that something cannot be done and think up arguments to explain why. However, it is possible that the scientist may discover a flaw in the argument that leads him to change his mind and discover a way to do it. He will be pleased. The legal thinker will merely try to patch the flaw in the argument, because once he has chosen a side, all his intelligence is devoted to finding arguments for that side.” — John McCarthy % % From http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_McCarthy “Foolishness is rarely a matter of lack of intelligence or even lack of information.” — John McCarthy % % From http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_McCarthy “Both politicians and journalists face situations which strain their honesty and humanity. My opinion is that politicians on the average stand up somewhat better than journalists.” — John McCarthy % % From http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_McCarthy “Committing genocide on behalf of an institution generates greater loyalty to it than merely getting people fired from their jobs on its behalf.” — John McCarthy % % From http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_McCarthy “Comparing oneself with Galileo or Einstein is certainly good for the ego — provided one refrains from going into too much detail.” — John McCarthy % % From http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_McCarthy “A true intellectual is a man who, after reading a book and being convinced by its arguments, will shoot someone or, more likely, order someone shot.” — John McCarthy % % From http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_McCarthy “Amateur bureaucrats are often even worse than professional bureaucrats.” — John McCarthy % % From http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_McCarthy “An atheist doesn’t have to be someone who thinks he has a proof that there can’t be a god. He only has to be someone who believes that the evidence on the God question is at a similar level to the evidence on the werewolf question.” — John McCarthy % % From http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_McCarthy “An excessive knowledge of Marxism is a sign of a misspent youth.” — John McCarthy % % From http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_McCarthy “An extreme optimist is a man who believes that humanity will probably survive even if it doesn’t take his advice.” — John McCarthy % % From http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_McCarthy “As the Chinese say, 1001 words is worth more than a picture.” — John McCarthy % % From http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_McCarthy “As we have recently seen, the function of the anti-trust laws is to protect the poor little fellow with a mere $5 billion from being bullied by the big guy with $50 billion.” — John McCarthy % % From http://commonsensewonder.com/quotes.htm “If six billion people have both more food and more forest than their three billion parents did; if the prices of copper, wheat and natural gas are going down, not up; if there are 20 times more carcinogens in three cups of organic coffee than in daily dietary exposure to the worst pesticide both before and after the DDT ban; if renewable resources such as whales are more easily exhausted than non-renewables such as coal; if lower infant mortality leads to falling populations, not rising ones, then perhaps we need to think differently about what sustainability means. Perhaps the most sustainable thing we can do is develop new technology, increase trade and spread affluence.” — Matt Ridley % “Innovation is the child of freedom and parent of prosperity.” — Matt Ridley % “The college idealists who fill the ranks of the environmental movement seem willing to do absolutely anything to save the biosphere, except take science courses and learn something about it.” — P.J. O’Rourke % “When politics are used to allocate resources, the resources all end up being allocated to politics.” — P.J. O’Rourke % “There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.” — P. J. O’Rourke % http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6857 % % From http://www.smalltalk.org/alankay.html “Don’t worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it. Really smart people with reasonable funding can do just about anything that doesn’t violate too many of Newton’s Laws!” — Alan Kay, 1971 % See Dennis Gabor: % http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/09/27/invent-the-future/ % “Ceci n’est pas une thèse — c’est seulement une impression d’une thèse.” — René Magritte % “Merely having an open mind is nothing; the object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.” — G.K. Chesterton % “Avoir l’esprit ouvert, en soi, n’est rien. L’esprit ne sert d’être ouvert, comme la bouche, que pour être refermé sur quelque chose de substantiel.” — G.K. Chesterton % “To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.” — G.K. Chesterton % “Avoir le droit de faire quelque chose n’est pas du tout la même chose qu’avoir raison de le faire.” — G.K. Chesterton % “The free man owns himself. He can damage himself with either eating or drinking; he can ruin himself with gambling. If he does he is certainly a damn fool, and he might possibly be a damned soul; but if he may not, he is not a free man any more than a dog.” - G.K. Chesterton % “A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.” — G.K. Chesterton, Heretics % “The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.” — G.K. Chesterton % “The world will never starve for want of wonders, but for want of wonder.” — Gilbert K. Chesterton % “Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.” — Albert Einstein % “I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.” — Tolstoy % “Not only does the action of Governments not deter men from crimes; on the contrary, it increases crime by always disturbing and lowering the moral standard of society.” — Leo Tolstoy, “The Meaning of the Russian Revolution” (1906) % “When you love someone, you love the person as they are, and not as you’d like them to be.” — Leo Tolstoy % “Oignez villain, il vous poindra ; poignez villain, il vous oindra.” — Rabelais % http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/%C5%92uvres_de_Rabelais/%C3%89dition_1868/Gargantua % “Brevity is the soul of wit.” — Shakespeare % “First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.” — Gandhi % % The same as above in an older but less concise quote: “Every truth passes through three stages before it is recognized. In the first, it is ridiculed. In the second, it is opposed. In the third, it is regarded as self-evident.” — Arthur Schopenhauer, 19th century German philosopher % “Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.” ― Arthur Schopenhauer % “L’exagération de la piété filiale n’est pas le juste milieu.” — Mo-Tse % “Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is always a vice.” — Thomas Paine % “In matters of principle, stand like a rock; in matters of taste, swim with the current.” — Thomas Jefferson. % “Lorsqu’on veut accomplir quelque belle action, il faut la faire et oublier les peines qu’elle peut entrainer.” — Mo-Tse % Nihil in intellectu nisi prius in sensu (Nothing in intellect unless first in the senses) % When words are unfit, speech is unadapted and actions are unsuccessful — Confucius % “A common man marvels at uncommon things; a wise man marvels at the commonplace.” — Confucius % “L’homme vulgaire s’émerveille en voyant l’extraordinaire. Le sage s’émerveille en voyant l’ordinaire.” — Confucius % “A man of humanity is one who, in seeking to establish himself, finds a foothold for others and who, in desiring attaining himself, helps others to attain.” — Confucius (551–479 BC) % “The demands that good people make are upon themselves; Those that bad people make are upon others.” — Confucius (551–479 BC) % “In a just society, it is shameful to be poor. In a corrupt society, it is shameful to be rich.” — Confucius % When a country is well governed, poverty and a mean condition are things to % be ashamed of. When a country is ill governed, riches and honor are things % to be ashamed of. — Confucius (551–479 BC), ‘The Analects’, Chapter VIII % (邦有道貧且賤焉恥也，邦無道富且貴焉恥也。) % “Là où règne la justice, il est honteux d’être pauvre. Là où règne la corruption, il est honteux d’être riche.” — Confucius % “Watch your thoughts, they become words; watch your words, they become actions; watch your actions, they become habits; watch your habits, they become character; watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.” — Frank Outlaw, Late President of the Bi-Lo Stores % https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/01/10/watch-your-thoughts/ % “The best place to find a helping hand is at the end of your own arm.” % — Swedish Proverb % “Factum, non dictum, amicus quaerit.” % “Sapience n’entre poinct en âme malivole, et science sans conscience n’est que ruine de l’âme.” — Maistre Alcofrybas Nasier % Chuangtse and Hueitse had strolled onto the bridge over the Hao, when the former observed, “See how the small fish are darting about! That is the happiness of the fish.” “You are not a fish yourself,” said Hueitse. “How can you know the happiness of the fish?” “And you not being I,” retorted Chuangtse, “how can you know that I do not know?” — Chuangtse, circa 300 B.C. % “Never try not to think, it won’t work.” — Tril % “The highest goal of computer science is to automate that which can be automated.” — Derek L. VerLee % “I object to doing things that computers can do.” — Olin Shivers % from http://www.paulgraham.com/quotes.html % information we gather and create overflows our means of managing it our ppl r only happenstancely synergistic % “There is a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.” — Morpheus, in “The Matrix” % C’est toute l’histoire de ma vie. Sauf que contrairement au héros du film, % moi, je connais la Voie au lieu que de la suivre... % “I’m trying to free your mind, Neo. But I can only show you the door. You’re the one that has to walk through it.” — Morpheus, in “The Matrix” % “A map isn’t the territory.” — Alfred Korzybski % “Une carte n’est pas le territoire.” — Alfred Korzybski % First Person: “Why are you snapping your fingers?” Second Person: “To keep the tigers away.” First Person: “But, there are no tigers in this area!” Second Person: “You see: it’s working.” % “Imitation is the sincerest of flattery.” — Charles Caleb Colton % “L’imitation est la flatterie la plus sincère.” — Charles Caleb Colton % %%% Complexity % “There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are *obviously* no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no *obvious* deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult. It demands the same skill, devotion, insight, and even inspiration as the discovery of the simple physical laws which underlie the complex phenomena of nature.” — C.A.R. Hoare, Turing Award Lecture % “Complexity is the hallmark of stupidity.” — Erik Naggum % “Ce qui se conçoit bien s’énonce clairement, les mots pour le dire arrivent aisément.” — Boileau % “Keep things as simple as you can, but no simpler.” — Albert Einstein s/things/explanation/ ; s/A.*Einstein/Occam/ % “Everything is interesting if you go into it *deeply* enough.” — Richard Feynman % “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” — Richard Feynman % “Fall in love with some activity, and do it! Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn’t matter. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough. Work as hard and as much as you want to on the things you like to do the best. Don’t think about what you want to be, but what you want to do.” — Richard Feynman % “If the human mind were simple enough to understand, we’d be too simple to understand it.” — Pat Bahn % “Si l’esprit humain était assez simple pour être compris, nous serions trop simples pour le comprendre.” — Pat Bahn % “The reason truth is stranger than fiction is that fiction has to make sense.” % washort: who says? % Fare: i forget. % since this makes sense, it is more fictive than true, % according to itself. % no, it's just that fiction has a need for suspension of disbelief % truth doesn't % %%% Tao of Computing % “Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.” — John F. Woods (cited by Matthias Felleisen) % Patterns mean “I have run out of language.” — Rich Hickey % “We reject: kings, presidents and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code.” — David Clark for the IETF % “Any time you’re asking the user to make a choice they don’t care about, you have failed the user.” — Jeff Atwood % http://bit.ly/1JnUkW % “Computer programming is omnipotence without omniscience.” — Prospero, as cited by Eliezer Yudkowsky % http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/01/quotes-25.html % “My understanding of macros is expanding.” — Matthias Felleisen wrt the PLT Scheme module system % “Meta is Better. Anything you can do, I can do Meta.” — Patrick Logan % http://radio.weblogs.com/0100812/2002/07/16.html#a535 % “From a programmer’s point of view, the user is a peripheral that types when you issue a read request.” — P. Williams % “If you could make a programming language where programmers could write in english, you’d find that most people can’t write english.” — "Masoud Pirnazar" on comp.lang.lisp 2001-10-12 % “I understand that the new Telecom Bill that just passed Congress has outlawed the ab*rting of tasks (or at least the discussion of it on Usenet). This process will heretofore be called ‘termination enhancement’, and an ab*rted task will be considered ‘termination-enhanced’. Please update your programs and language standards.” — Henry G. Baker % “Perhaps those of us who care about quality programs have not spoken up often enough — ‘for bad programs to triumph requires only that good programmers remain silent.’ I call this passivity the ‘Silence of the Lambdas.’” — hbaker % http://www.pipeline.com/~hbaker1/sigplannotices/gigo-1997-03.html % “[A] Computer [programming] language is inherently a pun — [it] needs to be interpreted by both men & machines.” — Henry Baker % http://www.international-lisp-conference.org/2005/speakers.html#henry_baker % “Toute technique est mise au point, utilisée, importante, obsolète, normalisée puis comprise.” % “Every technique is first developed, then used, important, obsolete, normalized, and finally understood.” % “Be liberal in what you accept and conservative in what you send.” — Jon Postel % “Be tolerant with others and strict with yourself.” — Marcus Aurelius % “Debugging is like being the detective in a crime movie where you are also the murderer.” — Filipe Fortes % https://twitter.com/fortes/status/399339918213652480 % “If debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.” — Dijkstra % “Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.” — E. W. Dijkstra % «[I]f we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as “lines produced” but as “lines spent”: the current conventional wisdom is so foolish as to book that count on the wrong side of the ledger.» — E. W. Dijkstra % «Lisp has jokingly been called “the most intelligent way to misuse a computer”. I think that description is a great compliment because it transmits the full flavor of liberation: it has assisted a number of our most gifted fellow humans in thinking previously impossible thoughts.» — Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930–2002) % “The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise.” - Edsger Dijkstra % Computerese Irregular Verb Conjugation: I have preferences. You have biases. He/She has prejudices. % “A computer is like an Old Testament god, with a lot of rules and no mercy.” — Joseph Campbell % “Backwards compatible — If it’s not backwards it’s not compatible.” — Greg Newton % “Actually a person does not _really_ understand something until teaching it to a _computer_, i.e. expressing it as an algorithm.” — D.E. Knuth. % “Premature optimization is the root of all evil.” — D.E. Knuth % “Structured Programming with go to Statements,” % Computing Surveys, Vol. 6, No. 4, December, 1974, page 268. % http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:ezgzIz-4XD8:www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/editorial-10.html+premature+optimization+knuth&hl=en % Attributed to C.A.R. Hoare — http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PrematureOptimization % “A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.” — Alan Perlis % “Don’t have good ideas if you aren’t willing to be responsible for them.” — Alan Perlis % “You think you know when you can learn, are more sure when you can write, even more when you can teach, but certain when you can program.” — Alan Perlis % “Pascal is for building pyramids—imposing, breathtaking, static structures built by armies pushing heavy blocks into place. Lisp is for building organisms…” – Alan Perlis % “Memory is like an orgasm… it’s better when you dont have to fake it.” — Seymour Cray % Luser, n.: Human-like creature that doesn’t dare to use elevator, because of its belief that only horrible geeks can master arcane and obscure art of using control panel. % “Better, faster, cheaper — pick any two.” % “If a trainstation is where the trains stop, what is then a workstation…” — Lars Lundgren % “Plug and Pray!” % “Speed has always been important otherwise one wouldn’t need the computer.” —Seymour Cray % “Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature.” — Rich Kulawiec % “Les anciens informaticiens français disaient sentencieusement que l’informatique c’est 20 % de hardware et de software et 80 % de footware dans les harmwares.” — FdS % “Un hacker fait par amour de l’art ce que d’autres ne peuvent faire, même pour de l’argent.” % “The hacker: someone who figured things out and made something cool happen.” — Alan Schmitt % “If it’s not worth doing, it’s not worth doing well.” — Donald Hebb % as cited by Daniel C. Dennett. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_9w8JougLQ % “If it’s not worth doing right, it’s not worth doing.” — Scott McKay % “The difference between a claim and a real thing is about 5 million lines of code.” — Rainer Joswig % “Increasingly, people seem to misinterpret complexity as sophistication, which is baffling — the incomprehensible should cause suspicion rather than admiration. Possibly this trend results from a mistaken belief that using a somewhat mysterious device confers an aura of power on the user.” — Niklaus Wirth % “Tu as lu les docs. Tu es devenu un informaticien. Que tu le veuilles ou non. Lire la doc, c’est le Premier et Unique Commandement de l’informaticien.” — TP in: Guide du linuxien pervers — “L’évangile selon St Thomas” % “Floating point numbers are like sandpiles; every time you move one you lose a little sand and pick up a little dirt” — Vic Vissotsky % “All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection.” — David Wheeler % “Almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching.” — Terje Mathisen, well-known programming optimization guru % “As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn’t as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs.” — Maurice Wilkes, designer of EDSAC, on programming, 1949. % %%% LISP % “Lisp doesn’t look any deader than usual to me.” — David Thornley % “Dynamic typing is simply lazy static typing.” — Pierre de Lacaze, explaining Lisp to Haskellers % “Lisp programmer available: Will write code that writes code that writes code for food.” — Rob Warnock % http://tourdelisp.blogspot.com/2009/03/let-over-lambda-final-review.html % http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/browse_thread/thread/2316d0f5fb475f19/c6a69d33e632a559?hl=en&pli=1 % In same thread, by jcoo...@sagepub.com “Code code codes codes code code codes.” % Slobodan Blazeski also talks of “Three Macro Programmer” in reference to ThreeStarProgrammer % Schemer: “Buddha is small, clean, and serious.” Lispnik: “Buddha is big, has hairy armpits, and laughs.” — Nikodemus Siivola % % See jargon toolsmith “I’d rather write programs that write programs than write programs.” — Dick Sites % “We could have an obfuscated-scheme contest, but if call/cc and macros are allowed, that would be like using nuclear bombs to hunt bunnyrabbits…” — Ray Dillinger % “The greatest danger of Lisp is that it may spoil you. Once you’ve used Lisp for a while, you become so sensitive to the fit between language and application that you won’t be able to go back to another language without always feeling that it doesn’t give you quite the flexibility you need.” — Paul Graham, “On Lisp”, Chapter 1 % “[In Lisp, as compared to other languages] You can get fast programs, but you have to work for them. In this respect, using Lisp is like living in a rich country instead of a poor one: it may seem unfortunate that one has to work so as to stay thin, but surely this is better than working to stay alive, and being thin as a matter of course.” — Paul Graham, “On Lisp”, p.285 % “Lisp is a programmable programming language.” — John Foderaro % If you give someone Fortran, he has Fortran. If you give someone Lisp, he has any language he pleases. — Guy L. Steele Jr. % “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.” % Data and procedures and the values they amass, Higher-order functions to combine and mix and match, Objects with their local state, the messages they pass, A property, a package, the control point for a catch - In the Lambda Order they are all first-class. One Thing to name them all, One Thing to define them, One Thing to place them in environments and bind them, In the Lambda Order they are all first-class. — from the printed copy of MIT AI Memo 848b (aka R4RS), Guy Louis Steele, with apologies to J. R. R. Tolkien. % “A long time ago, someone in the Lisp industry told me it was poor form quote people; it suggests that they lack value. But I don’t want to get bound up into that argument, so let’s just achieve closure by agreeing that the point is that you can feel free to point people to my earlier pointer, which works as a reference for certain reference works that are particularly on point in their pointers about pointer references. Did you copy all that?” — Kent M Pitman “Take my advice, I for one have always believed in share and share alike. I’m constant on that. If I were to modify my argument, however slightly, those that depend on me (and I get calls all the time, and I return most of them), might accuse me of corruption. I may have no class, but at least my values haven’t changed.” — Jrm % (define (cthulhu_fhthagn) ; Iver Odin Kvello, iverk@hfstud.uio.no (call/cthulhu (lambda (destroy) ; Lambda, the Ultimate Horror (if (stars-are-right? (now)) (destroy 'everything) (cthulhu_fhtagn))))) % Lambda calculus: Casual call dumb, A bad CACM lull us, Ada club all scum. Abacus clad mull, Lab calculus mad. A Dacca bull slum? Bald caucus mall Balm ad calculus; Calamus call bud. MBA calculus lad, A clad callus bum, CACM laud as bull. UCLA all bad scum: A scald alum club, A baud clam scull. Lambda calculus — Call us a mad club. - - - Enjoy! 'james % (James Crippen) % %%% Bad Languages % «Language often obscures truth. More than is ordinarily realized, our eyes are blinded to the facts […] by tricks of the tongue. When one uses the simple monosyllable “France” one thinks of France as a unit, an entity. When to avoid awkward repetition we use a personal pronoun in referring to a country — when for example we say “France sent her troops to conquer Tunis” — we impute not only unity but personality to the country. The very words conceal the facts and make international relations a glamorous drama in which personalized nations are the actors, and all too easily we forget the flesh-and-blood men and women who are the true actors. How different it would be if we had no such word as “France,” and had to say instead — thirty-eight million men, women and children of very diversified interests and beliefs, inhabiting 218,000 square miles of territory! Then we should more accurately describe the Tunis expedition in some such way as this: “A few of these thirty-eight million persons sent thirty thousand others to conquer Tunis.” This way of putting the fact immediately suggests a question, or rather a series of questions. Who are the “few”? Why did they send the thirty thousand to Tunis? And why did these obey?» — Parker T. Moon, Imperialism and World Politics % http://fare.livejournal.com/125541.html % Though Parker T. Moon died in 1936, the oldest reference to this paragraph % found by Google Books is in p. 18 of “Economic imperialism: a book of readings” % by Kenneth Ewart Boulding, University of Michigan Press, 1972 - 338 pages % «Le language souvent obscurcit la vérité. Plus que l’on ne réalise d’ordinaire, les faits sont cachés à nos yeux […] par des astuces de la langue. Quand on emploie la simple monosyllable “France”, on envisage la France comme une unité, une entité. Quand pour éviter une répétition maladroite on utilise un pronom personnel pour faire référence à un pays — quand par exemple on dit “La France a envoyé son armée pour conquérir Tunis” — on attribute non seulement une unité mais une personnalité au pays. Les mots mêmes dissimulent les faits et font des relations internationales un drame plein de glamour dans lequel les nations personalisées sont les acteurs, et on oublie bien trop facilement les hommes et les femmes de chair et de sang qui sont les véritables acteurs. Comme les choses seraient différentes si nous ne possédions aucun mot tel que “France”, et qu’au lieu nous devions dire — trente-huit million d’hommes, de femmes et d’enfants aux intérêts et aux croyances diverses, habitant un territoire de cinq cent cinquante mille kilomètres carrés! Alors nous devrions décrire de façon plus fidèle l’expédition de Tunis de la façon suivante: “Une poignée de ces trente huit millions de personnes en a envoyée trente mille autres pour conquérir Tunis.” Cette façon de poser les faits suggère immédiatement une question, ou plutôt une série de questions. Qui est cette “poignée”? Pourquoi ont-ils envoyé les trente mille à Tunis? Et pourquoi ceux-ci ont-ils obéi?» — Parker T. Moon % % These are from http://www.cs.rice.edu/~matthias/quotes.html “The last good thing written in C was Franz Schubert’s Symphony number 9.” — Erwin Dieterich % “Being really good at C++ is like being really good at using rocks to sharpen sticks.” — Thant Tessman % “When your hammer is C++, everything begins to look like a thumb.” — Steve Hoflich on comp.lang.c++ % “If you think C++ is not overly complicated, just what is a protected abstract virtual base pure virtual private destructor, and when was the last time you needed one?” — Tom Cargil, C++ Journal. % “I made up the term ‘object-oriented’, and I can tell you I didn’t have C++ in mind.” — Alan Kay, OOPSLA '97 % “Artificial intelligence is what we don’t know how to do yet.” — Alan Kay % “[Lisp is the] greatest single programming language ever designed.” — Alan Kay % “An operating system is a collection of things that don’t fit into a language. There shouldn’t be one.” — Dan Ingalls, ‘Design Principles Behind Smalltalk’ % https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/smalltalk.html % “If Java had true garbage collection, most programs would delete themselves upon execution.” — Robert Sewell % “Java is a DSL for taking large XML files and converting them to stack traces.” % Bulat Shakirzyanov @avalanche123 % %%% UNIX % «Some people, when confronted with a Unix problem, think “I know, I’ll use sed.” Now they have two problems.» — Jamie Zawinski % “The problem with Unix ever becoming a widely popular desktop operating system is referred to as the ‘guru in the box’ problem. To get and keep Unix running smoothly you need a captive guru on site and there just aren’t enough gurus to put in the shipping boxes.” — Brian Kernighan % %%% MICROS~1 losedoze % “Failure is not an option. It comes bundled with your Microsoft product.” — Ferenc Mantfeld % “Nobody will ever need more than 640k RAM!” — Bill Gates, 1981 “Windows 95 requires at least 8 MB RAM.” — Bill Gates, 1996 “Nobody will ever need Windows 95.” — logical conclusion % “Supporting Windows is like buying a puppy. The dog only cost $100, but we spent another $500 cleaning the carpet.” — Marc Dodge, OPEN COMPUTING, December 1994. % “Prendre en charge MS-Windows c’est un peu comme acheter un petit animal de compagnie. Le chien coûte seulement 500 francs, mais il faut ensuite en dépenser 2500 pour nettoyer le tapis.” — Marc Dodge, “Open Computing”, Décembre 1994 % Le client : “— Allô ? J’emploie MS-Windows !” Support technique : “— Oui ?” “- Mais cela ne fonctionne pas.” “- Vous l’avez déjà dit.” % “Windows 95 has a new feature. There is now a single function key which, when pressed, will produce a general protection fault. In previous versions of Windows, in order to produce a GPF, you had to run an application.” % % Sorklin (Verf@Hotmail.Com) http://www.i2.i-2000.com/~sorklin % on Slashdot 99-11-11 14:45 FWT ; I added "or unstated". *EULA: By reading or responding to this message you agree that all my stated or unstated opinions are correct.* “EULA” — patent pending. % %% This one from /. a modified one in ./fare NOTE: By reading this post, you have agreed to run around the room which you are currently in, flapping your arms, and squawking like a chicken. % “The main difference between a computer salesman and a used car salesman is that the used car salesman can probably drive and knows when he’s lying.” - Peter da Silva % %%% Free Software % “There are two kinds of problems with a tool: either it should do a thing and doesn’t, or it shouldn’t do a thing yet does.” — Michael Raskin % “There are two kinds of problems with a tool: either it should do a thing and doesn’t, or it shouldn’t do a thing yet does. The first kind seems just a limitation, you can address or tolerate it. The other one feels like the tool is your enemy.” — Michael Raskin % “A word for the epoch of free software and universal publishing: voluntocracy, n. 1. governance by those who do the work. 2. the volunteers who do the work.” — Aubrey Jaffer, http://swissnet.ai.mit.edu/~jaffer/ % “Does anybody else find irony in the fact that Bill Gates says he’s trying to write a stable OS, and Linus claims he’s trying to take over the world?” % “Quand je donne un objet, je n’en dispose plus. Mais quand je donne une information, j’en dispose toujours.” % “Trying to make bits uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet. The sooner people accept this, and build business models that take this into account, the sooner people will start making money again.” — Bruce Schneier % http://cryptome.org/futile-cp.htm % “If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.” —Thomas Jefferson % “On apprend au parent à ne pas s’accrocher à son enfant adulte, à le laisser vivre sa vie. Quel livre montrera au développeur de logiciel à laisser sa création évoluer grâce aux autres ?” — B. Lang % % From http://lpf.ai.mit.edu/Patents/quotes.html “The advantages ... [of not having patents] in the machine industry generally, lie less in the free use of developments themselves, than in the free scope for engineers in general. With great complicated machinery, individual, perhaps not very essential, parts can be patented, thus preventing a complete and perhaps much more valuable construction and forcing better engineers to an exacting study of all such little patents.” — Bureau der Kaufmannischen Gesellschaft Zurich, 1886. % “Watt refused applications for licenses to make engines under his patent: he discouraged experiments by Murdoch with locomotive models; he was hostile to the use of steam at high pressure; and the authority he wielded was such as to clog engineering enterprise for more than a generation. If his monopoly had been allowed to expire in 1783 England might have had railways earlier. If a similar privilege had been extended to Arkwright — if, indeed, his wide patents had not been annulled in 1781-5 — it is at least possible that a dead hand might have rested on the cotton industry also, and that forces tending to raise the standard of life of the poor would have been stifled.” — Ashton T.S., An Economic History of England: The 18th Century. % “In the electronics industry, patents are of no value whatsoever in spurring research and development.” — vice-president of Intel Corporation, Business Week, 11 May 1981. % «Property in ideas is an insoluble contradiction. [He who complains of “theft” of his idea] complains that something has been stolen which he still possesses, and he wants back something which, if given to him a thousand times, would add nothing to his possession.» — H. Rentzsch, Geistiges Eigenthum, 1866. % “For pretty much every writer, the big problem isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity.” — Tim O’Reilly, as cited by Cory Doctorow % http://craphound.com/littlebrother/about/ % http://libertarianpapers.org/index.php/about/ % “If it isn’t source, it isn’t software.” — NASA % If only the whole world thought this way but welcome to real life. You know, ever since I started the GNU project, 15 years ago, people have been telling me to accept “real life”; to accept the way the world is, instead of trying to change it. Well, I never listened to them, and that’s why we now have a free operating system. Because I did not accept the way the world WAS as the only “real life” forever. I guess that’s enough response. — Richard Stallman, on linux-kernel@vger.rutgers.edu % %%% War % “Can anything be more ridiculous than that a man should have the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of the sea, and because his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have none with him.” — Blaise Pascal % « Se peut-il rien de plus plaisant qu’un homme ait droit de me tuer parce qu’il demeure au-delà de l’eau et que son prince a querelle contre le mien, quoique je n’en aie aucune avec lui ? » — Blaise Pascal % “I divide my officers into four groups, the intelligent, the stupid, the lazy and the hardworking. Each officer usually possesses two of these qualities. The hardworking and intelligent are fit for general duties. The lazy and stupid make up about 80% of all armies have use in routine menial tasks. The intelligent and lazy are fit for positions of highest command for they will invariably find the most efficient ways to complete a given task. Finally, the hardworking and stupid officers are a menace and must be disposed of immediately for they will create only mischief.” — High Army Command General Kurt Von Hammerstein-Equord % “— Well, how do they start a war?” “— Well, one country offends another.” “— How could one country offend another? You mean, there’s a mountain over in Germany that gets mad at a field over in France?” — All Quiet on the Western Front (1930 film) % “Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.” — Golda Meir % “La paix viendra quand les arabes aimeront leurs enfants davantage qu’ils ne nous haïssent.” — Golda Meir % “Women’s Liberation is just a lot of foolishness. It’s the men who are discriminated against. They can’t bear children. And no one’s likely to do anything about that.” — Golda Meir % “When peace comes, we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons.” — Golda Meir % “Quand la paix viendra, nous pardonnerons peut-être avec le temps aux arabes d’avoir tué nos enfants, mais il nous sera plus difficile de leur pardonner de nous avoir forcé à tuer leurs enfants.” — Golda Meir % “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it destroys itself from within.” — Will Durant % quoted by Apocalypto % “Spare us your pity, _alien_. You gush about your connection with nature, your primal wisdom, but what has it brought you? Where are your marvels of engineering? Your voyages of discovery? Your great insight into the nature of the universe? Even at our basest, when we dressed as you do, dwelt as you do, hunted as you do, lived as you do, we did more than merely _survive_. We built wonders. We made great journeys. We forged epics. You have not. You speak so proudly of the plugs dangling from your skulls, little realizing that they are but strings and you puppets. What little you have accomplished you attribute to the wisdom of your goddess, who is nothing but the voices of your dead echoing for all eternity. She moors you to the past, serving as a leash that keeps you as little better than apes, sad parodies of civilization that lack that special spark to become something more. We have come to your world in search of resources. Whether your actions drive us back or we take what we want and move on, the outcome is the same. We will depart from your wretched planet, leaving you behind. And in a thousand years, you will not have changed from this contact with another world. You will remain in your trees, hunting your prey, communing with your goddess, until your sun burns out and your world dies. And above your tomb, the stars will belong to us.” % Imagined speech of the Space Marine to the Avatar "Na'vi" savages, by "Tacitus" % https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=sa7rmohv1hmgymf4xdu8cait&page=27 % “Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing things historians usually record; while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks. Historians are pessimists because they ignore the banks of the river.” — Will Durant % (1885–1981) % “War does not determine who is right — only who is left.” — Bertrand Russell % «During the Bikini operations, a discussion arose as to what weapons would be used in the next war–atom bombs, germs, rockets. “I don’t know what weapons will be used in the next war,” a young Army lieutenant interrupted, “but in the war after the next one, surer than hell they’ll be using bows and arrows and spears.”» — Joe Laitin in Frontpage, 1946 % “Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.” ― George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), “Man and Superman” % “The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.” ― George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) % “Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.” — George Bernard Shaw % “Make your own rules or be slave to another man’s.” — William Blake % % These and many quotes on http://www.fortliberty.org/quotes/quotes-war.shtml % “If once you have paid him the Dane-geld / You never get rid of the Dane.” — Rudyard Kipling % “Si une fois tu paies tribut au racket, jamais tu ne seras débarrassé du racketteur.” % “Every country has an army, either its own or a foreign one.” % From a German Bundeswehr ad, as cited in http://www.aicgs.org/analysis/c/bind030306.aspx % “I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.” — John Adams in letter to Abigail Adams, Post May 12, 1780 % “If you love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen.” — Samuel Adams (1722–1803), “Speech in Philadelphia” (1776) % “War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.” — John Stuart Mill % %%% Education vs Academia % “The plain fact is that education is itself a form of propaganda - a deliberate scheme to outfit the pupil, not with the capacity to weigh ideas, but with a simple appetite for gulping ideas ready-made. The aim is to make ‘good’ citizens, which is to say, docile and uninquisitive citizens.” — H.L. Mencken % (1880–1956) % “School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.” — Ivan Illich (1926–2002), ‘Deschooling Society’ (1971) % “And that’s why education — real education — is such a threat to any regime. If the state loses its grip over your mind, it loses the key to its very survival.” — Lew Rockwell % “The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.” — Hannah Arendt % (1906–1975), ‘Totalitarianism’ (1968) % “When training beats education, civilization dies.” — C. S. Lewis % (1898–1963) % “Governments want efficient technicians, not human beings, because human beings become dangerous to governments – and to organized religions as well. That is why governments and religious organizations seek to control education.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti % (1895–1986), ‘Education and the Significance of Life’ % “Governments don’t want a population capable of critical thinking. They want obedient workers, people just smart enough to run the machines and just dumb enough to passively accept their situation.” — George Carlin, paraphrased % (1937–2008) % “The obedient always think of themselves as virtuous rather than cowardly.” — George Carlin % “Do y’all remember, before the Internet, that people thought the cause of stupidity was the lack of information? Yeah. It wasn’t that.” % https://twitter.com/bamafangrl/status/1155293759929835520 % “The best teachers are those who show you where to look, but don’t tell you what to see.” — Alexandra K. Trenfor % “A teacher is never a giver of truth - he is a guide, a pointer to the truth that each student must find for himself. A good teacher is merely a catalyst.” — Bruce Lee (1940–1973) % “When a wise man points at the moon the imbecile examines the finger.” — Confucius (551–479 BC) % “If your plan is for one year, plant rice. If your plan is for ten years, plant trees. If your plan is for one hundred years, educate children.” — the Guanzi % “We cannot train our babies not to need us. Whether it’s the middle of the day or the middle of the night, their needs are real and valid, including the need for a simple human touch. A ‘trained’ baby may give up on his needs being met, but the need is still there, just not the trust.” ― L. R. Knost % “Now, to tell a child to believe in God is nonsense, utter nonsense — not that God does not exist, but because the child has not yet felt the thirst, the desire, the longing. He is not yet ready to go in search of the truth, the ultimate truth of life. He is not yet mature enough to inquire into the reality of existence. That love affair has to happen someday, but it can happen only if no belief is imposed upon him. If he is converted before the thirst has arisen to explore and to know, then his whole life he will live in a phony way; he will live in a pseudo way. Yes, he will talk about God because he has been told that God is. He has been told authoritatively, and he has been told by people who were very powerful in his childhood — his parents, his priests, his teachers. He has been told by people, and he had to accept it; it was a question of his survival. He could not say no to his parents because without them he would not be able to live at all. It was too risky to say no; he had to say yes. But his yes can’t be true. How can it be true? He is saying yes only as a political device, to survive. You have not turned him into a religious person, you have made him a diplomat, you have created a politician.” — Osho, ‘Intimacy’ (2001) % “Nobody is superior, nobody is inferior, but nobody is equal either. People are are simply unique, incomparable. You are you, I am I.” — Osho % “When a parent forces parental responsibilities on a child, family roles become indistinct, distorted, or reversed. A child who is compelled to become his own parent, or even become a parent to his own parent, has no one to emulate, learn from, and look up to. Without a parental role model at this critical state of emotional development, a child’s personal identity is set adrift in a hostile sea of confusion.” — Susan Forward, ‘Toxic Parents’ % «As I began to love myself I found that anguish and emotional suffering are only warning signs that I was living against my own truth. Today, I know, this is “AUTHENTICITY”. As I began to love myself I understood how much it can offend somebody if I try to force my desires on this person, even though I knew the time was not right and the person was not ready for it, and even though this person was me. Today I call it “RESPECT”. As I began to love myself I stopped craving for a different life, and I could see that everything that surrounded me was inviting me to grow. Today I call it “MATURITY”. As I began to love myself I understood that at any circumstance, I am in the right place at the right time, and everything happens at the exactly right moment. So I could be calm. Today I call it “SELF-CONFIDENCE”. As I began to love myself I quit stealing my own time, and I stopped designing huge projects for the future. Today, I only do what brings me joy and happiness, things I love to do and that make my heart cheer, and I do them in my own way and in my own rhythm. Today I call it “SIMPLICITY”. As I began to love myself I freed myself of anything that is no good for my health – food, people, things, situations, and everything that drew me down and away from myself. At first I called this attitude a healthy egoism. Today I know it is “LOVE OF ONESELF”. As I began to love myself I quit trying to always be right, and ever since I was wrong less of the time. Today I discovered that is “MODESTY”. As I began to love myself I refused to go on living in the past and worrying about the future. Now, I only live for the moment, where everything is happening. Today I live each day, day by day, and I call it “FULFILLMENT”. As I began to love myself I recognized that my mind can disturb me and it can make me sick. But as I connected it to my heart, my mind became a valuable ally. Today I call this connection “WISDOM OF THE HEART”. We no longer need to fear arguments, confrontations or any kind of problems with ourselves or others. Even stars collide, and out of their crashing new worlds are born. Today I know “THAT IS LIFE”!» % Actually, a re-translation (from Portuguese-BR) of a text from the book % "When I Loved Myself Enough" by Kim & Alison McMillen (2001). % Misattributed to Charles Chaplin (1889–1977) % http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/charlie-chaplin % “Happiness is a journey, not a destination; happiness is to be found along the way not at the end of the road, for then the journey is over and it’s too late. The time for happiness is today not tomorrow.” — Paul H. Dunn % (in 20 Simple Tools for Happiness) % “Compulsory apologies mostly train children to say things they don’t mean — that is, to lie.” ― Alfie Kohn, ‘Unconditional Parenting’ % “You know your children are growing up when they stop asking you where they came from and refuse to tell you where they’re going.” % “By the time a man realises that his father was right, he has a son who thinks he’s wrong.” % “Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.” — Thomas Sowell % “While it is true that you learn with age, the down side is that what you learn is often what a damn fool you were before.” — Thomas Sowell % “When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.” — Thomas Sowell % «People who pride themselves on their “complexity” and deride others for being “simplistic” should realize that the truth is often not very complicated. What gets complex is evading the truth.» — Thomas Sowell (1930–) % “The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.” — Thomas Sowell % “I’ve never understood why it is ‘greed’ to want to keep the money you’ve earned but not greed to want to take somebody else’s money.” — Thomas Sowell % “No matter how disastrously some policy has turned out, anyone who criticizes it can expect to hear: But what would you replace it with? When you put out a fire, what do you replace it with?” — Thomas Sowell % “It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medication somehow think that we can afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, medication and a government bureaucracy to administer it.” — Thomas Sowell % “Nobody is equal to anybody. Even the same man is not equal to himself on different days.” — Thomas Sowell % “No one will really understand politics until they understand that politicians are not trying to solve our problems. They are trying to solve their own problems - of which getting elected and re-elected are number one and number two.” — Thomas Sowell % “Consider this: the first hole ever dug on the moon by a man-made machine is now done. It is the most expensive hole in the history of the human race. Now, what does that mean? How do we know whether this is one of man’s noblest achievements or if it is a game being played by a small group of lunatics for their own amusement — at our expense?” — Neil Postman, “Teaching as a Subversive Activity” % see http://fare.livejournal.com/26432.html % “Considérez ceci: le premier trou jamais creusé sur la lune par une machine d’origine humaine est maintenant une réalité. C’est le trou le plus cher de l’histoire de l’humanité. Et quel est le sens de tout ça? Comment savons-nous si c’est l’une des réalisations les plus nobles de l’homme ou si c’est un vilain tour joué par un petit groupe de lunatiques pour leur propre amusement — à notre dépens?” — Neil Postman, “Teaching as a Subversive Activity” % see http://fare.livejournal.com/26432.html % “Ce qui se pense bien s’énonce clairement et les mots pour le dire arrivent aisément.” — Boileau % “Those who write clearly have readers; those who write obscurely have commentators.” — Albert Camus % “Ceux qui écrivent clairement ont des lecteurs ; ceux qui écrivent obscurément ont des commentateurs.” — Albert Camus % “Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representative who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions.” % “It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.” — Albert Einstein % «When a pamphlet was published entitled “100 Authors Against Einstein”, Einstein retorted “If I were wrong, one would be enough.”» % “You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him find it for himself.” — attributed to Galileo Galilei % cited by Dale Carnegie in "How to Win Friends and Influence People", p. 124 % “I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.” — Galileo % “Be wiser than other people if you can; but do not tell them so.” — Chesterfield % cited by Dale Carnegie in "How to Win Friends and Influence People", p. 124 % “Here lies the body of William Jay, Who died maintaining his right of way — He was right, dead right as he sped along, But he’s just as dead as if he were wrong.” % cited from the Boston /Transcript/ by Dale Carnegie % in "How to Win Friends and Influence People", p. 118 % “If you argue and rankle and contradict, you may achieve a victory sometimes; but it will be an empty victory because you will never get your opponent’s good will.” — Benjamin Franklin % cited by Dale Carnegie in "How to Win Friends and Influence People", p. 118 % “Being a graduate student is like becoming all of the Seven Dwarves. In the beginning you’re Dopey and Bashful. In the middle, you are usually sick (Sneezy), tired (Sleepy), and irritable (Grumpy). But at the end, they call you Doc, and then you’re Happy.” — Ronald T. Azuma, http://www.cs.unc.edu/~azuma/hitch4.html % «When I was asked to make this address I wondered what I had to say to you boys who are graduating. And I think I have one thing to say. If you wish to be useful, never take a course that will silence you. Refuse to learn anything that implies collusion, whether it be a clerkship or a curacy, a legal fee or a post in a university. Retain the power of speech no matter what other power you may lose. If you can take this course, and in so far as you take it, you will bless this country. In so far as you depart from this course, you become dampers, mutes, and hooded executioners. As a practical matter, a mere failure to speak out upon occassions where no statement is asked or expect from you, and when the utterance of an uncalled for suspicion is odious, will often hold you to a concurrence in palpable iniquity. Try to raise a voice that will be heard from here to Albany and watch what comes forward to shut off the sound. It is not a German sergeant, nor a Russian officer of the precinct. It is a note from a friend of your father’s, offering you a place at his office. This is your warning from the secret police. Why, if you any of young gentleman have a mind to make himself heard a mile off, you must make a bonfire of your reputations, and a close enemy of most men who would wish you well. I have seen ten years of young men who rush out into the world with their messages, and when they find how deaf the world is, they think they must save their strength and wait. They believe that after a while they will be able to get up on some little eminence from which they can make themselves heard. “In a few years,” reasons one of them, “I shall have gained a standing, and then I shall use my powers for good.” Next year comes and with it a strange discovery. The man has lost his horizon of thought, his ambition has evaporated; he has nothing to say. I give you this one rule of conduct. Do what you will, but speak out always. Be shunned, be hated, be ridiculed, be scared, be in doubt, but don’t be gagged. The time of trial is always. Now is the appointed time.» — John J. Chapman, Commencement Address to the Graduating Class of Hobart College, 1900 % http://goingware.com/reputation/ as exerpted from the ClueTrain Manifesto % http://www.cluetrain.com/ % “If you make people think they’re thinking, they’ll love you; but if you really make them think, they’ll hate you.” — Don Marquis % “Si tu fais les gens penser qu’ils pensent, ils t’aimeront; mais si tu les fais vraiment penser, ils te haïront.” — Don Marquis % «A student comes to a young professor’s office hours. She glances down the hall, closes his door, kneels pleadingly. “I would do anything to pass this exam.” She leans closer to him, flips back her hair, gazes meaningfully into his eyes. “I mean…” she whispers, “…I would do… anything!!!” He returns her gaze. “Anything???” “Yes,… Anything!!!” His voice turns to a whisper. “Would you… study???”» — scene from “The Eiger Sanction”, starring Clint Eastwood. % De Georgio: “Harry hates everybody. Limeys, Micks, Hebes, Fat Dagos, Niggers, Honkies, Chinks, you name it.” Gonzales: “How does he feel about Mexicans?” De Georgio: “Ask him.” Harry Callahan: “Especially Spics.” — scene from “Dirty Harry” % “I don’t like food, I love it. And if I don’t love it, I don’t swallow.” — Anton Ego in “Ratatouille” % %%% SPAM % “Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it.” — Stephen Leacock. % DO NOT SEND JUNK E-MAIL: “By US Code Title 47, Sec.227(a)(2)(B), a computer/modem/printer meets the definition of a telephone fax machine. By Sec.227(b)(1)(C), it is unlawful to send any unsolicited advertisement to such equipment. By Sec.227(b)(3)(C), a violation of the aforementioned Section is punishable by action to recover actual monetary loss, or $500, whichever is greater, for each violation.” % Pursuant to US Code Title 47, Section 227, unsolicited commercial E-mail sent to this address is subject to a $500 archival fee per copy. Sending such E-mail after any receipt of this notice implies acceptance of these terms. A copy of USC Title 47, Section 227 may be found online at http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/47/227.html % “Nobody expects the SPAMISH INQUISITION!” % Hi! I’m a signature virus. Copy me into your sig file and help me spread! % Antivirus alert: file .signature infected by signature virus. Hi! I’m a signature virus. Copy me into your sig file and help me spread! % %%% Silly % “Two young men are being inducted in a posh gentlemen’s club. While an officer explains them the rules of the club, they overhear a nearby members’ conversation, in which one member shouts ‘24!’ which makes the other conversants chuckle. Later another member exclaims ‘53!’ causing chortles, and the further conversation is interspersed with additional called out numbers triggering hilarity. - ‘What is so humorous about those numbers?’ enquires the first young man. - ‘Our club’ the officer explains ‘shares so many reoccurring jokes as part of its culture, that we have started assigning them numbers. For instance joke #24 is about a priest, a rabbi and an imam walking into a bar, whereas #53 is about a dog licking its balls.’ - ‘Ah,’ says the first young man, ‘let me try.’ And so he hollers ‘13!’, but is only met with disapproving gazes. ‘Why did no one laugh?’ he wonders. - ‘And what made you think this racist joke would be funny to utter in this context?’ reproves the officer. - ‘My turn’ states the second young man, then screams ‘101!’ at which point the entire club bursts out into an irrepressible roar. - ‘Why is everyone laughing now?’ whines the first young man. The officer has trouble holding his belly yet eventually responds: - ‘Wow, none of us had ever heard that one before.’” % Five Syllables here / Seven more syllables there / Are you happy now?? % haiku by a 4th grader % “All those who believe in psycho kinesis, raise my hand.” — Steven Wright % “82.7% of all statistics are made up on the spot.” — Steven Wright % “If at first you don’t succeed, skydiving is not for you.” — Steven Wright % “If Barbie is so popular, why do you have to buy her friends?” — Steven Wright % “What happens if you get scared half to death twice?” — Steven Wright % “To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is research.” — Steven Wright % “If at first you don’t succeed, skydiving is not for you.” — Steven Wright % “Il y a des temps où l’on ne doit dépenser le mépris qu’avec parcimonie, à cause du grand nombre de nécessiteux.” — François-René de Chateaubriand % /"\ ASCII Ribbon Campaign \ / X Against HTML / \ in e-mail & news % (Taken from a .sig on the modperl mailing list) % “There are three types of people in the world; those who can count, and those who can’t.” % “There are only 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary, and those who don’t.” % http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts/frustrations/5aa9/ % “Il y a 10 sortes de personnes dans le monde: ceux qui comprennent la numération binaire, et ceux qui ne la comprennent pas.” % “There are two types of people in the world: People who think there are two kinds of people, and people who don’t.” % % “There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.” — Phil Karlton % “There are two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.” % http://martinfowler.com/bliki/TwoHardThings.html % “Documentation is worth it just to be able to answer all your mail with ‘RTFM’.” — Alan Cox % “When my time on earth is completed, I want to go quietly in my sleep, like my grandfather ... not screaming in terror, like his passengers.” % “Two wrongs don’t make a right — but three lefts do.” % “The party of the first part shall be known in this contract as the party of the first part.” — Groucho Marx % “If you find it hard to laugh at yourself, I would be happy to do it for you.” ― Groucho Marx % “Anyone who says he can see through women is missing a lot.” — Groucho Marx % “I find television very educating: Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.” — Groucho Marx % “I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.” — Groucho % “Je refuse de faire partie d’un club qui m’accepterait pour membre.” — Groucho % “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them... well, I have others.” ― Groucho Marx % “Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first woman she meets and then teams up with three complete strangers to kill again.” — TV listing for the Wizard of Oz in the Marin Independent Journal % “When you’ve seen one nuclear war, you’ve seen them all.” % “It is better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool, than to open it and remove all doubt.” — Pierre Desproges % “Il vaut mieux se taire et passer pour un con plutôt que de l’ouvrir et de ne laisser aucun doute.” — Pierre Desproges % “[L’ennemi] est sot: il croit que c’est nous l’ennemi, alors que c’est lui!” — Pierre Desproges % “[The enemy] is stupid: he thinks the enemy is us, even though it's him!” — Pierre Desproges % “The ancients stole all our ideas from us.” — Mark Twain % “In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French; I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their language.” — Mark Twain % “The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.” — Mark Twain % “Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan ‘Press On’ has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.” — Calvin Coolidge % “If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat?” — Mark Twain % Here in America we have the MELTING POT theorem, “The scum rises to the top and those on the bottom get burned.” % \|/ ____ \|/ ~@-/ oO \-@~ /_( \__/ )_\ \__U_/ % “Les portefeuilles imperméables sont faits pour garder l’argent liquide.” % “A new poll indicates that if the presidential election were held tomorrow nobody would vote, because they think the election is in November.” — Dennis Miller % “Toutes choses sont dites déjà, mais comme personne n’écoute, il faut toujours recommencer.” — A. Gide “pas possible ! il connaissait déjà l’Usenet !” — Nat “Loi de Lieberman : Tout le monde ment, mais cela importe peu car personne n’écoute.” % Optimiste : « ce verre à moitié plein » Pessimiste : « il est à moitié vide » Réaliste : « avant de me prononcer j’aimerais savoir ce qu’il contient » Ingénieur : « il est deux fois trop gros » % “Cet oligophrénarche (du grec oligos, rare, peu nombreux, peu abondant, phrêne, intelligence, cerveau, et arkhon, chef. Donc, un oligophrénarche est un chef à l’intelligence peu marquée) passablement konopsoproctotrype (du grec konops moucheron, proctos, anus et trypao, je fore, je perce) et carrément latérocalcéograde (du latin lateralis, à côté, calceus, chaussure, et gradi, marcher. Donc un latérocalcéograde est un type qui marche à côté de ses pompes.), atteint de surcroît d’une grave hypertrichose palmaire (du grec hyper, très important, trichos, poil, cheveu. Donc, l’hypertrichose palmaire est le fait d’avoir un grand poil dans la main), n’avait vraiment pas inventé le butyrotome (du grec bouturos, beurre, tomé, coupure, par extension ‘qui coupe’. Donc le butyrotome est le fil à couper le beurre) malgré sa tendance à la protostichophilie (du grec proto, premier, stichos, rang, ligne, et philie, inclination. Donc, la protostichophilie est la propension à se mettre au premier plan. Est sans doute plus connue, la protostichophobie, maladie des élèves qui ne se mettent jamais au premier rang de la classe).” — Michel Dubesset % femme.tar.gz (super programme, mais pas de documentation disponible) % “La plupart des gens ont un travail qu’ils détestent mais grâce auquel ils gagnent un argent dont ils n’ont pas besoin, sinon pour impressionner d’autres gens ... qu’ils n’apprécient guère.” % A flea and a fly in a flue were imprisoned, so what could they do? Said the fly: "let us flee!". Said the flea: "let us fly!". So they flew thru a flaw in the flue... % “En théorie il n’y a pas de différence entre la théorie et la pratique, en pratique si.” — E. Chantreau % %%% Engineering % “George Pólya’s Inventor’s Paradox: The more ambitious plan may have more chances of success.” % “Don’t ask me to fix your computer. I’m a software engineer; I break computers.” — Mark Pauley % “Engineering is not the art of constructing. It is rather the art of not constructing: or, it is the art of doing well with one dollar what any bungler can do with two.” — Arthur Mellen Wellington % “For the short term, focus on the largest coefficient. For the long term, focus on the largest exponent.” — ‏@AnalysisFact % https://twitter.com/AnalysisFact/status/708011191885496320 % %%% Experimental Sciences (Physics, Biology, etc) % The public has a distorted view of science because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries. — Freeman Dyson % On Children by Kahlil Gibran Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, And though they are with you yet they belong not to you. You may give them your love but not your thoughts, For they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams. You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday. You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth. The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far. Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness; For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable. % All models are wrong, but some are useful. -- George Edward Pelham Box % “I thought I was pretty cool until I realized that plants can eat the sun and poop out air.” — Jim Bugg % “He wa’n’t no common dog, he wa’n’t no mongrel; he was a composite. A composite dog is a dog that is made up of all the valuable qualities that’s in the dog breed — kind of a syndicate; and a mongrel is made up of all riffraff that’s left over.” — Mark Twain % “Taxonomy is the death of science.” — A. N. Whitehead % “One of the problems faced by all gifted persons is learning to focus their efforts for prolonged periods of time. Since so much comes easily to them, they may never acquire the self-discipline necessary to use their gifts to the fullest.” % http://www.prometheussociety.org/articles/Outsiders.html % “Gilb’s Law: Anything you need to quantify can be measured in some way that is superior to not measuring at all.” % — Tom Gilb, cited by TDM in "Peopleware", with the addendum: % Gilb’s Law doesn’t promise you that measurement will be free or even cheap, % and it may not be perfect — just better than nothing. % “Every scientific man in order to preserve his reputation has to say he dislikes metaphysics. What he means is he dislikes having his metaphysics criticized.” — A.N. Whitehead % “There is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination.” — Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea % “Il n’y a pas de science exempte de philosophie; il n’y a que de la science dont le bagage philosophique est adopté sans examen.” — Daniel C. Dennett % “And have you ever had the thought that flying is wasted on birds, since few if any of them seem capable of *appreciating* the deliciousness of their activity?” — Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (1991), p. 62 % “En mathématiques, les dénominations sont arbitraires. Libre à chacun d’appeler éléphant un opérateur auto-adjoint, et trompe une décomposition spectrale. On peut alors démontrer un théorème suivant lequel tout éléphant a une trompe. Mais on n’a pas le droit de laisser croire que ce résultat aurait quoi que ce soit à voir avec de gros animaux gris.” — Sussmann % Cité par Ivar Ekeland, cité par George Lanes. % p. 123 de Ekeland, I. (1984), Le calcul, l’imprévu % (Les figures du temps de Kepler à Thom), Seuil, Paris, 169 p. % “Si seulement les théoriciens savaient ce qui est derrière une mesure expérimentale et si les observateurs savaient ce qui est derrière un calcul théorique, ils se prendraient mutuellement beaucoup moins au sérieux.” — Fritz Zwicky % astrophysicien cité par JP Petit % http://www.jp-petit.com/Divers/Paranormal/Paranormal1.htm % “*Let theory guide your observations*, but till your reputation is well established, be sparing in publishing theory. It makes persons doubt your observations.” — Charles Darwin to a young botanist % Bragg’s principle: “Everything in the future is a wave, everything in the past is a particle.” % «The young specialist in English Lit… lectured me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the Universe at last, and in every century they were proved to be wrong. It follows that the one thing we can say about our modern ‘knowledge’ is that it is wrong. … My answer to him was, “… when people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.”» — Isaac Asimov % “Science is like sex: sometimes something useful comes out, but that is not the reason we are doing it.” — Richard Feynman % “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” — Ernst Haeckel % “Crash programs fail because they are based on the theory that, with nine women pregnant, you can get a baby a month.” — Wernher Von Braun, when asked by the US government why tossing scientists at the ‘space race’ was not helping. % “Evolution competitively selects stable cooperative patterns.” % “L’évolution sélectionne compétitivement des motifs coopératifs stables.” % “A hen is just the egg’s way of making another egg.” — Samuel Butler, 1872 “People are DNA’s way of making more DNA.” — Edward O. Wilson, 1975 % “The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.” - E. O. Wilson % “The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.” — Stephen Pinker % or Steven Wright? % «[T]he “evolution stops at the neck” reflex. They’re willing to accept that everything else about humans has evolved through evolution but the thing that is most important in explaining your personhood, namely your mind, somehow evolution doesn’t apply to it.» — Gad Saad % «In his book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, Daniel Dennett refers to evolutionary principles as “universal acid” in order to emphasize their all-encompassing explanatory power. One might equally employ the same metaphor to express the power and reach of the economic perspective, which I see as fundamentally identical to the evolutionary worldview.» — Geerat J. Vermeij, in Nature: An economic history % “Reality must take precedence over public relations, for Mother Nature cannot be fooled.” — R.P. Feynman % “The Feynman problem solving Algorithm 1) Write down the problem 2) Think real hard 3) Write down the answer” Murray Gell-mann in the NY Times % «Il ne suffit pas de dire: “je me suis trompé”; il faut dire comment on s’est trompé.» — Claude Bernard «It isn’t enough to say: “I was mistaken”; one must say how one was mistaken.» — Claude Bernard % “To make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.” — Carl Sagan % “One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” ― Carl Sagan % in The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark % “The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.” — Albert Einstein % %%% Mathematics % % From: http://math.furman.edu/~mwoodard/mquot.html “Gauss, when asked how soon he expected to reach certain mathematical conclusions, replied that he had reached them long ago, all he was worrying about was how to reach them!” [Karl F. Gauss (1777-1855), German mathematician] % “Mathematics is the Queen of Science but she isn’t very Pure; she keeps having babies by handsome young upstarts and various frog princes.” — Donald Kingsbury (In “psychohistorical crisis”, 2001) % “Mathematicians are like lovers. Grant a mathematician the least principle, and he will draw from it a consequence which you must also grant him, and from this consequence another.” — Bernard Le Bouyer de Fontenelle % “Vous ne sçauriez accorder si peu de chose à un Amant, que bientôt après il ne faille lui en accorder davantage, & à la fin cela va loin. De même, accordez à un Mathématicien le moindre principe, il va vous en tirer une conséquence, qu’il faudra que vous lui accordiez aussi, & de cette conséquence, encore une autre; & malgré vous-même, il vous mène si loin, qu’à peine le pouvez-vous croire.” — Bernard Le Bouyer de Fontenelle % “Mathematics is as little a science as grammar is a language.” — Ernst Mayr % “Young man, in mathematics you don’t understand things, you just get used to them.” — John von Neumann (1903-1957) % “To speak algebraically, Mr. M. is execrable, but Mr. G. is (x+1)ecrable.” — Edgar Alan Poe % “On the Gaussian curve: Experimentalists think that it is a mathematical theorem while the mathematicians believe it to be an experimental fact.” — Jules Henri Poincaré (1854-1912) [French mathematician] % “Douter de tout ou tout croire, ce sont deux solutions également commodes, qui l’une et l’autre nous dispensent de réfléchir. (To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection.)” — Henri Poincaré, La Science et l’Hypothèse (1901) % “Wir Mathematiker sind alle ein bisschen meschugge.” (We mathematicans are all a bit crazy.) — Lev Landau % % The above Math quotes found on http://www.xs4all.nl/~jcdverha/scijokes/1_5.html % via Gavin Peters % %%% Love % I think the reward for conformity is that everyone likes you except yourself. — Rita Mae Brown % “If he writes her a few sonnets, he loves her. If he writes her 300 sonnets, he loves sonnet.” % Attributed to “my english professor” by some meme % «On sait la boutade de cette jolie marquise du XVIIIe siècle à qui certain soupirant faisait une cour pressante : “ Vous aurez beau faire, Monsieur, disait celle-ci, vous n’aurez jamais mon cœur ! — Je ne visais pas si haut, Madame ”, répondit le galant.» — Hector Talvart % "La Femme, cette Inconnue", 1943 % “People think being alone makes you lonely, but I don’t think that’s true. Being surrounded by the wrong people is the loneliest thing in the world.” ― Kim Culbertson, “The Liberation of Max McTrue” % “I used to think the worst thing in life was to end up all alone, it’s not. The worst thing in life is to end up with people that make you feel alone.” — Robin Williams % “Un mariage est soit une corne d’abondance, soit une abondance de cornes.” — Frédéric Dard % “Ce n’est pas s’unir a une femme qu’un homme redoute en pensant à se marier; c’est à se séparer de toutes les autres.” % “Sexless marriages basically force the partner that wants sex into three outcomes (1) Misery (2) Cheating or (3) Leaving.” — Athol Kay % http://bit.ly/d1w7Xd % “Before you get married, discuss bills, parenting styles, credit, debt, religion, how to deal with family, what belief will be instilled in your children, childhood traumas, sexual expectations, partner expectations, financial expectations, family health history, mental health history, bucket list, dream home, careers and education, political views and whatever else comes to mind. Love is not enough.” % “Just as men both want many women and want to truly love a woman, women want both a man who is appealing to many women and to be truly special to a man.” — Obsidian Files % “Un seul être vous manque et tout est dépeuplé.” — Lamartine. “Un seul être vous manque et tout est repeuplé.” — Jean Giraudoux. % “A pretty face is not a passport; it’s a visa and it runs out fast.” % “Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. THAT’S relativity.” — Albert Einstein % % From Dan Clore’s “Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love.” — Charlie Brown % % http://www.limunltd.com/numismatica/trivia/money-quotes.html “I believe that sex is one of the most beautiful, natural, wholesome things that money can buy.” — Steve Martin % “Good girls are bad girls that never get caught.” % “The main reason Santa is so jolly is because he knows where all the bad girls live.” % “Panties: not best thing on earth, but next to it.” % After sex, I continue the autopsy and remind myself a moment of weakness doesn’t make me a bad veteranarian. % «The software engineering field is staffed primarily by men; the ratio of male to female software engineers is on the order of 15 to 1. This makes it pretty easy for women to find potential mates among their peers. However, software types have a well-earned reputation for being a little strange. While discussing the prospect of working in the software industry, one woman commented to another: “The odds are good, but the goods are odd.”» % http://www.freeq.com/users/gypsy/humor/oodGoods.txt % Also in RHF. Also well-known joke for Alaskans. % % Conversely (adapted from http://www.wpi.edu/~egirard/main.html) “Finding geek girl mates is like finding a parking space at the mall, all the good ones are taken, and the rest are handicapped.” % % http://www.thehumorarchives.com/humor/0000435.html % %%% Death % “All mushrooms are edible, but some are edible only once.” — Lithuanian Proverb % % All men have an emotion to kill; when they strongly dislike some one they involuntarily wish he was dead. % “I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction.” — Clarence Darrow % The Story of My Life, 1932 % http://www.thewire.com/national/2011/05/mark-twain-didnt-say-thing-about-obituaries/37279/ % (often misattributed in a slightly different form to Mark Twain) % https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/05/05/darrow-obituary/ % “Non Omnis Moriar” (Not Everything In Me Will Die) — Dr. José P. Rizal % “That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even Death may die.” — Abdul Alhazred, Necronomicon % “Death is only a milestone — albeit one that is dropped on you from a very great height” — Terry Pratchett. % “…inside every old person is a young person wondering what happened.” - Terry Pratchett % %%% Procrastination % “Marriage is hard. Divorce is hard. Choose your hard. Obesity is hard. Being fit is hard. Choose your hard. Being in debt is hard. Being financially disciplined is hard. Choose your hard. Communication is hard. Not communicating is hard. Choose your hard. Life will never be easy. It will always be hard. But we can choose our hard. Pick wisely.” % “A man who procrastinates in his choosing will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance.” — Hunter S Thompson % “If you could kick the person in the pants responsible for most of your trouble, you wouldn’t sit for a month.” — Theodore Roosevelt % “Procrastination is great. It gives me a lot more time to do things that I’m never going to do.” % Raptor on Slashdot % “I’m not a procrastinator, I’m temporally challenged.” % TCaptain #115352 on Slashdot % “There is no reason ever to have the same thought twice, unless you like having that thought.” — David Allen, “Getting Things Done” % “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.” — Douglas Adams % “Those who are afraid to take the next step will have wasted their entire previous journey.” — Baron von Richthofen % %%% Conspiracy % There will be no "collapse" the way some of these people think of it. It's not going to be like the movie "Dawn of the Dead" or whatever where one day suddenly shit hits the fan and prices skyrocket and everyone begins to riot and the SS comes marching down the street to kill everyone. There will be no "happening". It's far more insidious than that. Read the poem "The Hollow Men" by TS ELiot and you'll understand. You'll just notice that every day simple things will become a little more expensive. Everyone's homes and apartments will start to get smaller. your work hours will get longer, but your pay will decrease. You'll see family and friends less, and find that in time you care less about them. Every day you'll find yourself lowering your standards for everything: work, food, relationships, etc. Job security will no longer exist as a concept. You'll notice houses and apartments shrinking. People will start hanging on clothing longer and longer. Less people will get married, even less will have children. People will engross themselves in technological distractions and fantasy while never truly experiencing the real world. Whatever dream people used to have about what their lives were going to be will become for them a distant memory. The only thing left for them will be the reality of their debt and their poverty. And every minute of every day they will be told: "You are stupid, ugly and weak, but together we are free, prosperous and safe." That is the collapse. The reduction of the American man into a feudal serf, incapable of feeling love or hate, incapable of seeing the pitiful nature of his situation for what it is or recognizing his own self worth. % https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9413510 % https://imgur.com/pol-on-collapse-DtpRs3r % “Why is there only one Monopolies Commission?” — Lord Sutch % “Pourquoi n’y a-t-il qu’un seul Conseil de la Concurrence?” — Lord Sutch % % From Michael K. Johnson ’s signature: “Ever wonder why the SAME PEOPLE make up ALL the conspiracy theories?” % “Corporations are legal fictions created by the State to shield executives from liability… It’s like if I had a little hand-puppet, and I went to rob a bank, and the hand-puppet held the little gun and told people to hand over all the money, and then the hand-puppet grabbed the money and ran out, and then I got caught and I handed the hand-puppet over the police and then the police tried the hand-puppet, put the hand-puppet in jail, and I get to keep all the money.” — Stefan Molyneux % “Whether you succeed or fail, you’re gonna die anyway. And the worst thing that you want thrown on top of you is six feet of dirt plus regrets.” — Stefan Molyneux (FDR 2487, http://youtu.be/cIhY3FUbcy0?t=45m26s) % “Conspiracy theories are a genre of science fiction in which most organizations are secretly run by competent people pursuing definite goals.” — Byrne Hobart % %%% Language and Semantics, Words and Meanings % “If a man wants to pretend he's a woman it's up to him. But if a man wants us to pretend he's a woman it's up to us.” % “The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering.” — Tom Waits % “You can’t live in the present forever” — Tom Waits % “If you wish to examine a granfalloon, just remove the skin of a toy balloon.” — Bokonon, in Kurt Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle” % “An honestly mistaken man, when confronted by truth, either ceases to be mistaken, or ceases to be honest.” % “If you call a tail a leg, how many legs has a dog? Five? No! Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.” — Abraham Lincoln, explaining the difference between lexical scoping and dynamic scoping % “Poetry is what gets lost in translation.” — Robert Frost % “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” — Robert Frost % “Naming is two-way: a strong name changes the meaning of a thing, and a strong thing changes the meaning of a name.” — Harrison Ainsworth (@hxa7241) % %%% Psychology % “If you’re 18 and think you’re the opposite sex, you have a mental illness. If you’re 8 and think you’re the opposite sex, your mother has a mental illness.” — Charlie Kirk % “Resentment is like swallowing poison and expecting the other person to die.” % https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/08/19/resentment/ % “The sheep will spend its entire life fearing the wolf, only to be eaten by the shepherd.” — African Proverb % People will call it “holding grudges.” I call it “I saw who you are, and I’m not unseeing it.” % “You ever plow a field? To plant quinoa or sorghum or whatever the hell it is you eat. You kill everything on the ground and under it. You kill every snake, every frog, every mouse, mole, vole, worm, quail… You kill them all. So, I guess the only real question is: How cute does an animal have to be before you care if it dies to feed you?” — John Dutton, Yellowstone % “If you don’t control your mind, someone else will.” — John Allston % “Don’t worry about what people think. They don’t do it very often.” — Rebel Circus % “Amara’s Law: We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” % “Lord Acton said we should judge talent at its best and character at its worst. For example, if you write one great book and ten bad ones, you still count as a great writer—or at least, a better writer than someone who wrote eleven that were merely good. Whereas if you’re a quiet, law-abiding citizen most of the time but occasionally cut someone up and bury them in your backyard, you’re a bad guy.” — Paul Graham, "The Power of the Marginal" % “The universe isn’t made of atoms, it’s made of stories.” — Muriel Rukeyser % “[…] couples choose each other with an unerring instinct for finding the very person who will exactly match their own level of unconscious anxieties and mirror their own dysfunctions, and who will trigger for them all their unresolved emotional pain.” — Gabor Maté, “Scattered: …” % “Men stumble over the truth from time to time, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing happened.” — Winston Churchill % “Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.” % *NOT* Winston Churchill https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/dc-sports-bog/wp/2014/10/24/rgiii-and-winston-churchill/ % “Destroy the free market, and you create a black market” — Churchill % https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1947/mar/12/economic-situation % “I freed a thousand slaves. I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves.” — Harriet Tubman % “The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.” — A. A. Milne % “Until you heal the wounds of your past, you will continue to bleed. You can bandage the bleeding with food, with alcohol, with drugs, with work, with cigarettes, with sex, but eventually, it will all ooze through and stain your life. You must find the strength to open the wounds, stick your hands inside, pull out the core of the pain that is holding you in your past, the memories, and make peace with them.” ― Iyanla Vanzant (1953–) % “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.” % “Worry is a misuse of imagination.” % “The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does. They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.” — Aldous Huxley, ‘Brave New World’ (1931) % (1894–1963) % “Willful ignorance in the presence of Knowledge is the measure of a bad person.” — Mark Passio, http://bit.ly/natural-law-seminar % 2:15:00 in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57UBuxnicOA... % “The world is a comedy to those that think; a tragedy to those that feel.” — Horatio Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford (1717–1797) % “My dad encouraged us to fail. Growing up, he would ask us what we failed at that week. If we didn’t have something, he would be disappointed. It changed my mindset at an early age that failure is not the outcome, failure is not trying. Don’t be afraid to fail.” — Sara Blakely % Two Wolves An old Cherokee was teaching his grandson about life. “A fight is going on inside me,” he said to the boy. “It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil - he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego. The other is good - he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. This same fight is going on inside you - and inside every other person, too.” The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf will win?” The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.” % Oldest Google Books find: 1999-12-15: http://www.msdssearch.com/FoodForThought.htm % An ending morale is a judeo-christian thing: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Who_wrote_Two_Wolves_words_of_an_old_Cherokee_Indian % “Two natures beat within my breast The one is foul, the one is blessed The one I love, the one I hate. The one I feed will dominate.” ― anonymous, quoted by Tara Leigh Cobble, Crowded Skies: Letters To Manhattan, 2008 % “Selfishness is not living your life as you wish to live it. Selfishness is wanting others to live their lives as you wish them to.” — Oscar Wilde % “Be yourself, everybody else is taken.” — Oscar Wilde % “The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of an expanding bureaucracy.” — Oscar Wilde % “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” — Carl Jung (1875–1961) % “There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own Soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.” — Carl Jung (1875–1961) % ‘Alchemical Studies’ (1967) % “Thinking is difficult, that’s why most people judge.” — Carl Jung % NdF: Judging is the rational thing most of the time (rational irrationality). % problem is some people *only* judge, or judge when they should be thinking. % “When you are an old man, and you sit in your bedroom slippers lookin’ back into the past, the things you will regret most are not the things you did that you ought not to have done, but the things you didn’t do that you ought to have done.” — Cosmo Hamilton % “You don’t ‘have’ a soul, you are a soul. You ‘have’ a body.” - C.S. Lewis % “The descent to hell is easy and those who begin by worshipping power, soon worship evil.” — C. S. Lewis, “The Allegory of Love” % “I mostri esistono, ma sono troppo pochi per essere davvero pericolosi. Sono più pericolosi gli uomini comuni, i funzionari pronti a credere e obbedire senza discutere.” — Primo Levi % “Les monstres existent, mais ils sont trop peu nombreux pour être vraiment dangereux. Sont plus dangereux les hommes ordinaires, les fonctionnaires prêts à croire et à obéir sans discuter.” — Primo Levi % “Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to obey without asking questions.” — Primo Levi % “Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is *he* who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by *answering for* his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible. Thus, logotherapy sees in responsibleness the very essence of human existence.” — Viktor Frankl, “Man’s Search for Meaning” % “Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!” — Viktor Frankl, “Man’s Search for Meaning” % “The true opposite of obedience is not disobedience but independence. The true opposite of order is not disorder but freedom. The true opposite of control is not chaos but self-control.” — Jay Griffiths on parenting, http://bit.ly/11rlrOE % via Jan Krepelka % http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2013/may/04/leave-them-kids-alone-griffiths % “The obedient always think of themselves as virtuous rather than cowardly.” — Edward O. Wilson % “When you are young you are afraid people will steal your ideas; when you are old you are afraid they won’t.” — David D. Friedman % “Don’t expect coherence from a loosely-defined group of people. Even individuals have trouble with coherence. Argue issues. Change incentives.” % “It’s not ignorance that does so much damage; it’s knowing so darned much that ain’t so.” — Josh Billings % “It’s better to know nothing than to know what ain’t so.” — Josh Billings % “It ain’t what a man don’t know that makes him a fool; it’s the things he knows that ain’t so.” — Josh Billings % “There is never a better measure of what a person is than what he does when he’s absolutely free to choose.” — William M. Bulger % “Resentment is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die.” — Malachy McCourt % “The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.” — Mark Twain % “Religion was invented when the first con man met the first fool.” — Mark Twain % “Women can form a friendship with a man very well; but to preserve it — to that end a slight physical antipathy must probably help.” — Nietzsche, HAH % “Of all evil I deem you capable: Therefore I want good from you. Verily, I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws.” — Nietzsche % “In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.” — Nietzsche % “The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.” — Carl Jung % “La rencontre entre deux personalités est comme le contact entre deux substances chimiques: s’il y a une réaction, les deux sont transformées.” — Carl Jung % “The State has no intention of promoting mutual understanding and the relationship of man to man; it strives, rather, for atomization, for the psychic isolation of the individual. The more unrelated individuals are, the more consolidated the State becomes, and vice versa.” — Carl Jung % (1875–1961), ‘The Undiscovered Self’ % “Ma femme et moi avons clairement défini qui est le chef. Je prends toutes les décisions importantes. Je décide quelle est la position de la famille sur la reconnaissance de la Chine Communiste, combien de B-52 il faut pour l’armée et quoi faire à propos de la dette fédérale. Je lui laisse les petites décisions quotidiennes, comme savoir où nous allons vivre, à quelle école vont les enfants et qui nous invitons à dîner.” — Auteur Inconnu, États-Unis, années 1950. % “My wife and I have a clear understanding. I make all the important decisions. I decide what the family position is on the recognition of Red China, how many wings of B-52s the Air Force needs, and what to do about the federal debt. She makes the more routine decisions; where we live, what schools the kids go to, and who we invite to dinner.” % — Unknown author, USA, around 1960 % http://www.backlash.com/content/gender/1996/7-jul96/memsahib.html % %Never try to reason the prejudice out of a man. It wasn’t reasoned into him, %and cannot be reasoned out. — Sydney Smith % “It is useless to endeavour to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.” — Jonathan Swift (summarized) % Paraphrase or summary in "The Economist" April 12th 1856, Volume XIV p. 392, % of an idea attributed to "Dean Swift". % “To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.” — Thomas Paine % “Before you heal anyone, ask him if he is willing to give up the things that made him sick.” — Hippocrates % “Entre ce que je pense, ce que je veux dire, ce que je crois dire, ce que je dis, ce que vous voulez entendre, ce que vous entendez, ce que vous croyez comprendre, ce que vous voulez comprendre, et ce que vous comprenez, il y a au moins neuf possibilités de ne pas s’entendre” % trouvé sur http://perso.wanadoo.fr/patrick.madrolle/economie/e-mail.htm % “Between what I think, what I try to say, what I think I say, what I actually say, what you want to hear, what you hear, what you think you understand, what you want to understand and what you do understand, there are at least nine ways to not understand each other.” % “A cuddle a day keeps the shrink away” % as reported by Janine Bharucha % “Think you can, or think you can’t — either way, you’ll be right.” — Henry Ford % “You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.” — Eric Hoffer % “It has often been said that power corrupts. But it is perhaps equally important to realize that weakness, too, corrupts. Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many. Hatred, malice, rudeness, intolerance, and suspicion are the faults of weakness. The resentment of the weak does not spring from any injustice done to them but from their sense of inadequacy and impotence. We cannot win the weak by sharing our wealth with them. They feel our generosity as oppression.” - Eric Hoffer % “You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions.” — Naguib Mahfouz % “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” — Eleanor Roosevelt “But you’re only fooling yourself if you can’t recognize your superiors.” — #f % but you’d be a fool to withhold that from your superiors. — Despair, Inc. % http://despair.com/collections/retired/products/intimidation % “You wouldn’t worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do.” ― Eleanor Roosevelt % %%% About the Turing Test % “A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision.” — IBM, 1979 % “man, n: a computer that can pass the Turing test.” — Corey Sweeney % “Si vous pouviez poser une seule question à un ordinateur au cours du test de Turing, qu’est-ce que vous demanderiez?” — Douglas Hofstadter, Ma Thémagie % % Below is a retranslation from french to english; original version sought. “If you could ask a unique question to a computer during a Turing test, what would you ask?” — Douglas Hofstadter, Metamagical Themas % “No, I’m not interested in developing a powerful brain. All I’m after is just a mediocre brain, something like the president of American Telephone and Telegraph Company.” — Alan Turing on the possibilities of a thinking machine, 1943. % “Le risque est que si, un jour, les machines deviennent intelligentes, nous ne serons peut-être pas équipés mentalement pour nous en apercevoir.” — Tirésias, in J.-P. Petit, “À quoi rêvent les robots?” % “The real danger is that one day machines *will* become intelligent, but we’ll lack the mental equipment to notice.” — Tiresias, in J.-P. Petit, “Run, Robot, Run” % %%% Religion % “There is no polite way to suggest to someone that they have devoted their life to a folly.” — Daniel C. Dennett % “Knowledge is something which you can use. Belief is something which uses you.” ― Idries Shah % “Every great truth begins as heresy and ends as superstition.” — Thomas Henry Huxley % “The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.” — Douglas Adams, “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe” % “God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture.” — Richard Dawkins % “Suggesting I hate people with religion because I hate religion is like suggesting I hate people with cancer because I hate cancer.” — Ricky Gervais % “Ignorance might be bliss for the ignorant, but for the rest of us, it’s a fucking pain in the ass.” — Ricky Gervais % “When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti (1901–1986) % “Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.” — Buddha (Siddhartha Gautama), 4th century BC % “The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful.” — Edward Gibbon % (The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 1776, Vol. I, Ch. II). % “I make it a point never to argue with people for whose opinion I have no respect.” ― Edward Gibbon % «When Caesar saw Brutus among his attackers, Plutarch writes, ‘he covered his head with his toga and let himself fall.’ Suetonius adds that, according to some reports, he said in Greek: ‘Kai su, teknon’ (which Shakespeare turned into the Latin ‘Et tu, Brute?’). It literally means ‘You too, child,’ but what Caesar may have intended by the words isn’t clear. Tempest cites ‘an important article’ by James Russell (1980) ‘that has often been overlooked’. Russell points out that the words kai su often appear on curse tablets, and suggests that Caesar’s putative last words were not ‘the emotional parting declaration of a betrayed man to one he had treated like a son’ but more along the lines of ‘See you in hell, punk.’» — Thomas Jones % "See you in hell, punk", London Review of Books Vol. 40 No. 23, 6 December 2018 https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v40/n23/thomas-jones/see-you-in-hell-punk % “Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.” — Marcus Aurelius % The opinion of 10,000 men is of no value if none of them know anything about the subject. — Marcus Aurelius % «To most Christians, the Bible is like a software license. Nobody actually reads it. They just scroll to the bottom and click “I agree.”» % “Government, at its best, is slow and dumb. At its worst, it is quick and deadly.” — Matt Kibbe % “Morality is doing what’s right regardless of what you’re told. Religion is doing what you’re told regardless of what’s right.” % “Don’t do things that you know are morally wrong. Not because someone is watching, but because you are. Self-esteem is just the reputation that you have with yourself.” - @naval % “Desire is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.” - @naval % “Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain.” — Friedrich von Schiller % «In a culturally confident age, the British in India were faced with the practice of “suttee” — the tradition of burning widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands. General Sir Charles Napier was impeccably multicultural: “You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.”» % “If atheism is a religion, then not collecting stamps is a hobby.” % Seen on /. as the .sig of user #90044 % “Ô Seigneur, s’il y a un Seigneur, sauvez mon âme, si j’ai une âme.” — Ernest Renan, Prière d’un sceptique % “La bêtise humaine est la seule chose au monde qui peut donner une bonne approximation de l’infini.” — E. Renan % “Atheism is a non-prophet organization.” % “If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.” — Albert Einstein % “I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.” — Frank Lloyd Wright % % A Grammar of Consent: The Existence of God in Christian Tradition % by Aidan Nichols, O.P. (Edinburgh, T&T Clark, 1991) ISBN 0 567 09591 6: % THE heart of the Christian faith is its understanding of God. % I remember E.O. James, the well-known Professor of the Philosophy % of Religion in the University of London, telling us, his students, % how on one occasion, when travelling by train, he found himself seated % opposite a man who, noting his clerical collar, said, disdainfully, % ‘I suppose you believe in God!’ James replied, ‘Well, it all depends - “You tell me what you mean by God, and I’ll tell you whether I believe in him or not!” — E. O. James % «Dites-moi ce que vous entendez par “Dieu” et je vous dirai si j’y crois.» — E.O. James % “Dieu est le nom que les hommes ont donné à leur ignorance.” — Max Nordau % % From http://www.hedning.no/hedning/arkiv/cookies/ % (reviewed till [Calvin&Hobbes]) “Archeologists near mount Sinai have discovered what is believed to be a missing page from the Bible and is believed to read ‘To my darling Candy. All characters portrayed within this book are fictitous and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental’.” % “Theists think all gods but theirs are false. Atheists simply don’t make an exception for the last one.” % “I contend we are both atheists, I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.” — Stephen F Roberts % http://freelink.wildlink.com/quote_history.php % “I’m a polyatheist — there are many gods I don’t believe in.” — Dan Fouts % «Q. Why does “philosophy of consciousness/nature of reality” seem to interest you so much? A. Take away consciousness and reality and there’s not much left.» — Greg Egan, interview in Eidolon 15 % http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/10/rationality-quo.html % “Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned.” % “Philosophie: questions sans réponses possibles. Religion: réponses sans questions possibles.” % Science flies men to the moon, religion flies men into buildings. — Victor Stenger % % You’ve got answerable questions? We’ve got questionable answers! % “If the Bible proves that God exists then comic books prove the existence of Superman.” — seen on #Atheism IRC % “Out of convicted rapists, 57% admitted to reading pornography. 95% admitted to reading the Bible.” % “If god doesn’t like the way I live, Let him tell me, not you.” — As seen on a button % “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. That unalterable rule applies both to God and man.” — John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton (Lord Acton) in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton, April 5,1887 % “And remember, where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control. History has proven that.” ― Lord Acton (1834–1902) % “To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.” — Isaac Asimov % “Pray: To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.” — Ambrose Bierce % “Conservative, n.: A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.” — Ambrose Bierce % “America is a corpse being consumed by maggots. Liberals are rooting for the maggots. Conservatives are rooting for the corpse.” % “Envy, though not the greatest sin, is the only one that gives the sinner no pleasure at all, not even fake and temporary satisfaction.” — Peter Kreeft (1992) % “Envy was once considered to be one of the seven deadly sins before it became one of the most admired virtues under its new name social justice.” — Thomas Sowell % “The man who prays is the one who thinks that god has arranged matters all wrong, but who also thinks that he can instruct god how to put them right.” — Christopher Hitchens % “Be… suspicious… of all those who employ the term ‘we’ or ‘us’ without your permission. This is [a] form of surreptitious conscription… Always ask who this ‘we’ is; as often as not it’s an attempt to smuggle tribalism through the customs.” — Christopher Hitchens % Letters to a Young Contrarian % “I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.” — Frederick Douglass % «The Atheist does not say “there is no god”, but he says “I do not know what you mean by god; I am without the idea of god; the word god is to me a sound conveying no clear or distinct affirmation. I do not deny god, because I cannot deny that of which I have no conception and the conception of which by its affirmer is so imperfect that he is unable to define it to me.”» — Charles Bradlaugh, ‘National Review’, Nov. 25, 1883 % “To explain the unknown by the known is a logical procedure; to explain the known by the unknown is a form of theological lunacy.” — David Brooks, “The Necessity of Atheism” % “It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses or majority, merely because the majority is the majority. Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people.” — Giordano Bruno (1548-burned at the stake, 1600) % “Those who will not reason, are bigots, those who cannot, are fools, and those who dare not, are slaves.” — George Gordon Noel Byron (1788-1824), [Lord Byron] % “A slave is one who waits for someone else to free him.” — Ezra Pound % “The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools.” - Thucydides % %%% Tautologies % “A half-truth is a whole lie.” — old Yiddish proverb % “May you live all the days of your life.” — Jonathan Swift % “What you do today will cost you a day of your life.” % “What is mind? No matter! What is matter? Never mind!” — Bertrand Russell’s Grand Mother, In Karl Popper, The Unended Quest % %%% Gödel sentences and meta-sentences about self-contradiction. % “I’d kill for a Nobel Peace Prize.” — Steven Wright % “It is paradoxical, yet true, to say, that the more we know, the more ignorant we become in the absolute sense, for it is only through enlightenment that we become conscious of our limitations. Precisely one of the most gratifying results of intellectual evolution is the continuous opening up of new and greater prospects.” — Nikola Tesla % «A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is “merely relative,” is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.» — Roger Scruton % “When one realises one is asleep, at that moment one is already half-awake.” ― Pyotr Uspensky % “It is only when we realize that life is taking us nowhere that it begins to have meaning.” ― Pyotr Uspensky % “God laughs at men who deplore the effects whose causes they cherish.” — Bossuet % “Dieu se rit des hommes qui déplorent les effets dont ils chérissent les causes.” — Bossuet % “Reasons for existence are usually provided for things that don’t exist; they would be wasted on things which do.” — Saul Gorn % http://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1522&context=cis_reports % “When it comes to giving, some men stop at nothing.” — Saul Gorn % “To distinguish the real from the unreal, one must experience both.” — Saul Gorn % “Superstition brings bad luck.” — Saul Gorn % Google Books found this 1985 Technical Report: % http://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1522&context=cis_reports % “La superstition porte malheur.” — Saul Gorn % “No matter where you go, there you are.” % “Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.” — Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid % “Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be.” % “The War on Terrorism is missing the point: what we need is a War on War!” — Kennita Watson % “A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.” — WarGames % “Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.” — Jonathan Swift % “Comment prétendons-nous qu’un autre puisse garder notre secret si nous ne pouvons le garder nous-même.” — La Rochefoucauld “How can we claim that someone else will keep our secret if we ourselves cannot (in telling them).” — La Rochefoucauld % “Invent a clever saying, and your name shall live forever.” — Anonymous % In a comp.lang.lisp message by Coby Beck 2003-04-15 % “Invente un aphorisme éclairant, et ton nom sera immortel.” — Anonyme % “Be inconsistent — but don’t do it all the time.” — Unknown % “Obscenity is the crutch of inarticulate motherfuckers.” % “— Question authority!” “— Yeah, says who?” % “— Rejetez l’autorité!” “— Ah oui, selon qui?” % “Ever stop thinking and forget to start again?” % “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” (Who shall watch the watchmen themselves?) — Juvenal, Satires, VI, 347 % “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” (Qui gardera les gardiens eux-mêmes?) — Juvenal, Satires, VI, 347 % “The secret of survival is: Always expect the unexpected.” — Dr. Who % %% The following are from %% http://www.internetbumperstickers.com/declare.html % “I have not yet begun to procrastinate.” % “I’d give my right arm to be ambidextrous.” % “I’ll start exercising as soon as I’m into shape.” % “A president worth voting for wouldn’t run for office.” % “Un président qui vaudrait qu’on vote pour lui ne se présenterait jamais comme candidat.” % %%% Bumper Sticker % “Work harder! Millions on welfare depend on you.” % “Travaille plus dur! Des millions d’oisifs comptent sur toi.” % “Insanity is hereditary — you get it from your kids.” % “Do NOT question authority — they don’t know either.” % “Question authority… but raise your hand first.” % %%% Getting Things Done % “L’homme ne peut se transformer sans souffrances, car il est à la fois le sculpteur et le marbre.” — Alexis Carrel % “Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor.” — Alexis Carrel % “Time is really the only capital that any human being has and the thing that he can least afford to waste or lose.” — Thomas A. Edison (1847–1931) % «Someone once called me “just a dreamer” That offended me, the “just” part. Being a dreamer is hard work. It really gets hard when you start believing in your dreams.» — Doug Engelbart % “Failing to plan is planning to fail.” % “Plans are Nothing. Planning is Everything.” — Dwight D. Eisenhower % %%% Management % “Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.” — Peter Drucker % “Eric Schmidt rule of management: always assume that the other person is as intelligent as you are.” % “Director is a misnomer. You’re a hoper. You put all these people together and you hope it all works out.” — Frank Oz, director of “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” % “Respect cannot be demanded, only commanded.” % %%% Other % “Did you know that it's actually possible for you to say, ‘I don’t know enough about this to have an opinion’?” % tweeted by the Richard Feynman account—is it a quote? % “In the cockpit of the future, the crew consists of a pilot and a dog. The pilot is there to feed the dog, and the dog is there to bite the pilot in case he tries to touch anything.” % “Associate yourself with people of good quality, for it is better to be alone than in bad company.” ― Booker T. Washington (1856–1915) % “In the age of the Internet ignorance is a choice.” % “When people make you feel unwanted, don’t leave to make them feel sad or guilty — they won’t. Leave because you no longer have a reason to stay.” % “Je vous souhaite des rêves à n’en plus finir et l’envie furieuse d’en réaliser quelques uns. Je vous souhaite d’aimer ce qu’il faut aimer et d’oublier ce qu’il faut oublier. Je vous souhaite des passions, je vous souhaite des silences. Je vous souhaite des chants d’oiseaux au réveil et des rires d’enfants. Je vous souhaite de résister à l’enlisement, à l’indifférence, aux vertus négatives de notre époque. Je vous souhaite surtout d’être vous.” — Jacques Brel % “Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.” % “Any sufficiently advanced neglect is indistinguishable from malice.” % — Deb Chachra % “If there’s a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” — Toni Morrison [same with software, —♯f] % “Once upon a time, there was a person whose life was so good there was no story to tell about it.” — Foer % “Be humble, for you are made of earth. Be noble, for you are made of stars.” — Serbian proverb % “Soit humble, car tu es fait de poussière. Soit noble, car tu es fait d’étoiles.” — proverbe Serbe % “Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.” — Dr. Seuss % “A nazi deathcamp survivor defined truth as follows: believing it does not increase your chance of dying.” % From http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/12/matthew-yglesias-anatomy-of.html#6355653101703866037 % “The least deviation from truth will be multiplied later.” — Aristotle % “Skill without imagination is craftsmanship. Imagination without skill is contemporary art.” — Tom Stoppard % “Amateurs talk strategy. Professionals talk logistics.” — Robert Hilliard Barrow % Robert Hilliard Barrow (1922-2008), in a 1979 interview. % % http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/h/henry_ford.html “Failure is the opportunity to begin again, more intelligently.” — Henry Ford, who had two flops before founding Ford Motor Co. % “If I had asked people what they wanted, they’d have said faster horses.” — Henry Ford % “Capital punishment is as fundamentally wrong as a cure for crime as charity is wrong as a cure for poverty.” — Henry Ford % “If money is your hope for independence you will never have it. The only real security that a man will have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience, and ability.” — Henry Ford % “If you think you can do a thing or think you can’t do a thing, you’re right.” — Henry Ford % “It has been my observation that most people get ahead during the time that others waste.” — Henry Ford % “It is not the employer who pays the wages. Employers only handle the money. It is the customer who pays the wages.” — Henry Ford % “Ce n’est pas l’employeur qui paie les salaires. L’employeur se contente de faire passer l’argent. C’est le client qui paie les salaires.” — Henry Ford % “Life is a series of experiences, each one of which makes us bigger, even though sometimes it is hard to realize this. For the world was built to develop character, and we must learn that the setbacks and grieves which we endure help us in our marching onward.” — Henry Ford % “Money doesn’t change men, it merely unmasks them. If a man is naturally selfish or arrogant or greedy, the money brings that out, that’s all.” — Henry Ford % “L’argent de change pas les hommes, il se contente de les démasquer. Si un homme est naturellement égoïste, arrogant ou cupide, l’argent le fera ressortir, c’est tout.” — Henry Ford % “Money is like an arm or leg — use it or lose it.” — Henry Ford % “My best friend is the one who brings out the best in me.” — Henry Ford % “Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs.” — Henry Ford % “Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal.” — Henry Ford % “One of the greatest discoveries a man makes, one of his great surprises, is to find he can do what he was afraid he couldn’t do.” — Henry Ford % “Quality means doing it right when no one is looking.” — Henry Ford % “Quality means doing it right when no one is looking.” — Henry Ford “Morality means doing the right thing when no one is looking.” — Jan Krepelka % “The competitor to be feared is one who never bothers about you at all, but goes on making his own business better all the time.” — Henry Ford % “The man who will use his skill and constructive imagination to see how much he can give for a dollar, instead of how little he can give for a dollar, is bound to succeed.” — Henry Ford % “L’homme qui utilise ses talents et son imagination constructive pour voir combien il peut donner en échange d’un dollar, plutôt que combien il peut ne pas donner en échange d’un dollar, réussira à coup sûr.” — Henry Ford % «The question “Who ought to be boss?” is like as “Who ought to be the tenor in the quartet?” Obviously, the man who can sing tenor.» — Henry Ford % «La question “Qui devrait être le patron?” est la même que “Qui devrait être le ténor dans le quatuor?” Évidemment, celui qui peut chanter ténor.» — Henry Ford % “There are two fools in this world. One is the millionaire who thinks that by hoarding money he can somehow accumulate real power, and the other is the penniless reformer who thinks that if only he can take the money from one class and give it to another, all the world’s ills will be cured.” — Henry Ford % “There is joy in work. There is no happiness except in the realization that we have accomplished something.” — Henry Ford % “There is one rule for the industrialist and that is: Make the best quality of goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible.” — Henry Ford % “Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason why so few engage in it.” — Henry Ford % “Time and money spent in helping men to do more for themselves is far better than mere giving.” — Henry Ford % “We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s dam is the history we make today.” — Henry Ford % “Wealth, like happiness, is never attained when sought after directly. It comes as a by-product of providing a useful service.” — Henry Ford % “When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it.” — Henry Ford % “You will find men who want to be carried on the shoulders of others, who think that the world owes them a living. They don’t seem to see that we must all lift together and pull together.” — Henry Ford % “Any man who thinks he can be happy and prosperous by letting the Government take care of him, better take a closer look at the American Indian.” — Henry Ford % Il y a trois méthodes traditionnellement pour ruiner une affaire qui marche: les femmes, le jeu et les technocrates. Les femmes, c’est le plus marrant, le jeu, le plus rapide… Le technocrate, c’est le plus sûr. — Michel Audiard. % “Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get.” — Dale Carnegie % “Some cause happiness wherever they go. Others whenever they go.” % “The only way to have a friend is to be one.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson “Le seul moyen d’avoir un ami est d’en être un.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson % “People do not seem to realize that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) % “Doing well is the result of doing good. That’s what capitalism is all about.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) % “I walked a mile with Pleasure, / She chattered all the way; But left me none the wiser, / For all she had to say. // I walked a mile with Sorrow / And ne’er a word said she; But, oh, the things I learned from her / When Sorrow walked with me!” — Robert Browning Hamilton % “Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose honest arrogance and have seen no occasion to change.” — Frank LLoyd Wright % “That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.” — George Santayana % “Que la vie vaille d’être vécue est la plus nécessaire des hypothèses, et, si on refuse de la supposer, la plus impossible des conclusions.” — George Santayana % “Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it” % — George Santayana, misquoted % “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” — George Santayana % George Santayana (1863-1952), Reason in Common Sense, The Life of Reason, Vol.1 % “The Keyboard is mightier than the Death Ray…” % http://www.alhproducts.com/alhintro.html % “Of all the things I’ve lost in life, I miss my mind the most…” — Ozzy Ozbourne % “He was a great patriot, a humanitarian, a loyal friend; provided, of course, he really is dead.” % (mis)attributed to Voltaire % Trial, Volume 27, p. 81 % Public Affairs & Education Committee of the American Trial Lawyers Association, 1991 % “If you want to know who controls you, look at who you are not allowed to criticize.” — misattributed to Voltaire, really by Kevin Strom % Kevin Strom, white nationalist % “Certainement, qui est en droit de vous rendre absurde est en droit de vous rendre injuste.” “Certainly, who is able to make you believe absurdities is able to make you condone injustice.” — Voltaire, Questions sur les miracles (1765) % “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” — Evelyn Beatrice Hall % http://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/06/01/defend-say/ % “If you’re a quiet, law-abiding citizen most of the time but occasionally cut someone up and bury them in your backyard, you’re a bad guy.” — Paul Graham, “The Power of the Marginal” % “L’intellectuel est si souvent imbécile que nous devrions toujours le tenir pour tel jusqu’à ce qu’il nous ait prouvé le contraire.” — Georges Bernanos % “Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.” — Arthur C. Clarke % %%% Sex % “À l’égard de celui qui vous prend votre femme, il n’est de pire vengeance que de la lui laisser.” — Sacha Guitry %