quotes

Note: I do NOT agree with some of these! For example, a quote by Schlesinger below expresses the opposite of my personal opinion.

Note: I did not check and am not confident about the accuracy and provenance of these quotes.

"To have a great man for a friend seems pleasant to those who have never tried it; those who have, fear it." -- Horace

"May your outages be few, and your logs filled with helpful data." -- [1]

"While it is certainly true that a central objective of for-profit corporations is to make money, modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not do so." -- U.S. Supreme Court, BURWELL, SECRETARY OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES, ET AL. v. HOBBY LOBBY STORES, INC., ET AL.

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals." -- C.S. Lewis

"If you think that moral reasoning is something we do to figure out the truth, you'll be constantly frustrated by how foolish, biased, and illogical people become when they disagree with you." -- Jonathan Haidt

"Happiness and contentment, equability of mind and meaningfulness of life - these can be experienced only by the individual and not by a State, which, on the one hand, is nothing but a convention agreed to by independent individuals, and on the other, continually threatens to paralyze and suppress the individual." -- Carl Gustav Jung (1957)

"Man cannot live by bread alone; he must have peanut butter." -James A. Garfield

"In a democratic country, an official who is exposed as corrupt will lose power; in an authoritarian regime, an official who loses power will be exposed as corrupt." -- David Frum, citing an old joke

"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains is often more improbable than your having made a mistake in one of your impossibility proofs." -- Steven Kaas

"Once in my life I had a mathematical dream which proved correct. I was twenty years old. I thought, my God, this is wonderful, I won't have to work, it will all come in dreams! But it never happened again." -- Stanislaw Ulam

"A bound service is the server which allows clients (components such as activities) to bind to the Service and then send requests and receive responses." -- [2] treatise on summoning in the Android operating system

"Try and leave this world a little better than you found it" -- Robert Baden Powell, Founder of the Boy Scouts and Girl Guides

"Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies within us while we live." -- Norman Cousins

"How can we set up a system which encourages individuals to strive and excel, and yet which shows some compassion to the weak, and weeds out madmen and tyrants?" -- Brin, The Postman

"All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible." -- Frank Herbert in Chapterhouse: Dune (1985)

"Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class -- whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy." -- Frank Herbert, Children of Dune

"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. I call these the wet streets cause rain stories. Paper s full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know." -- Michael Crichton

"In man's struggle against the world, bet on the world." -- Franz Kafka

"Cryptography is concerned with any problem in which one wishes to limit the effects of dishonest users." -- Oded Goldreich, Foundations of Cryptography

"Cryptography is ...techniques for secure communication in the presence of third parties called adversaries." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptography

" The Facebook business model is mass behavior modification for pay. And for those who are not giving Facebook money, the only and I want to emphasize, the only, underlined and in bold and italics reward they can get or positive feedback is just getting attention. And if you have a system where the only possible prize is getting more attention, then you call that system Christmas for Asses, right? It s a creep-amplification device. " -- Jaron Lanier [3]

 Once Facebook becomes ubiquitous, it s a sort of giant protection racket, where, if you don t pay them money, then someone else will pay to modify the behavior to your disadvantage, so everyone has to pay money just to stay at equilibrium where they would have been otherwise,  he says.  I mean, there s only one way out for Facebook, which is to change its business model. Unless Facebook changes, we ll just have to trust Facebook for any future election result. Because they do apparently have the ability to change them. Or at least change the close ones."" -- Jaron Lanier [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/08/style/jaron-lanier-new-memoir.html]

"There are always ways to disagree, without being disagreeable."E Weddington

"Dare to be naive" -- Buckminster Fuller

"When things really go bad, where do Americans turn? Well, they're going to come back to the government. That's the history of the country." -- Patrick Harker

"Every great open source math library is built on the ashes of someone's academic career" -- http://wstein.org/talks/2016-06-sage-bp/bp.pdf

"Recognize that bullshitters are different from liars, and be alert for both. To paraphrase the philosopher Harry Frankfurt, the liar knows the truth and leads others away from it; the bullshitter either doesn t know the truth or doesn t care about it, and is most interested in showing off his or her advantages." [4]

"Beggars do not envy millionaires, but of course, they do envy other beggars who are more successful." --Bertrand Russell (1930)

"Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive." -- Howard Thurman. A hundred role models

"It is, alas, a truism that authors generally have less experience than other men. This owing to the incontestable fact that you simply can t be in two places at once. Either you re in front of the typewriter, writing, or you re out in the world having experiences. Therefore, since you need to write and you need to have experiences to write about, you have to learn to do more with less. And doing more with less is, in a word, what writing is all about." -- Ask The Dust

"A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting on orange juice and Ryvita biscuits. An unemployed man doesn't." -- George Orwell

" Even though some may look like they have a frown on their face, they are very friendly people - many of them just work in offices, jobs they don t enjoy, and so they do not smile as much as they should." Masai guide to modern man

"A programming language is for thinking of programs, not for expressing programs you ve already thought of. It should be a pencil, not a pen." -- Paul Graham on sketching

"In exploratory programming, it s as important to avoid premature specification as premature optimization." -- Paul Graham

"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away." -- Henry David Thoreau

"The ideal forum: a bunch of people who are individually working away on their own personal projects. Each participant has a vested interest; he or she needs to deliver results first, and is discussing it with others only second." -- James Hague

"The most productive people rarely have more than 6 hours or so of really concentrated work per day. If you can ensure you get that every day, you don t need to economize on sleep." -- Paul Graham

"What can you do feel more ease at work? Act responsibly: I belong here, and it s ok to have my particular skills here, and my limitations, too. My code works, the work that I do is important to somebody else. Make all status information public: I make public commitments, I make myself accountable. Transparency at work yields freedom from fear of embarrassment. Value feedback appropriately: take it in context, be realistic; don t give in to flattery or attack." -- Kent Beck

"The propensity to play is situated in very ancient regions of the brain. Rats that have had their neocortex removed still engage in normal play." -- Jaak Panksepp on the importance of unstructured play early in life

"hard work == discipline == genius is the illusory conclusion made by those on the outside looking in. When you are truly inspired, in the flow , doesn t that feel like the easiest, most natural state you have ever experienced?" -- Nick Smith

" Excellence comes from lots of ordinary habits selecting them, accreting them over time, and developing them with discipline. Different levels of achievement reflect vastly different habits, values, and goals. The notion of talent is useless and tends to mystify excellence." -- Paraphrasing Daniel F Chambliss. via http://akkartik.name/?f=Cognition

"We propose that the subjective experience of boredom is a first level safety mechanism analogous to pain, that has evolved to keep humans moving about so that they can discover and exploit their environment. This safety mechanism could itself prove fatal in siege situations, such as having to hide quietly up a tree until a predator leaves. So a second safety mechanism has evolved to place a human into a partially conscious standby mode after the human has been bored long enough that it would have moved on if it possibly could. The level of the neuroinhibitor dopamine in the human s brain rises. This induces a subjective experience of self-absorbed well being, while rendering the human quiescent but sufficiently conscious to notice when it is safe to move.. [The modern consequence:] People can get addicted to boredom, and so lose access to a whole layer of cognitive abilities based on the use of precisely tuned feedback loops in the brain." -- Alan G. Carter s opus with implications for teaching and parenting

"Learning is something we are adapted for, is pleasurable...unless the pleasure is beaten out of us in childhood...very carefully and very doggedly!" -- http://www.asimovonline.com/oldsite/future_of_humanity.html

"Armchair generals talk strategy. Real generals talk logistics." -- unknown

"Etymological prescriptivists often believe that everyone willfully misunderstands them." -- http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8j3c6/railsconf_what_killed_smalltalk_could_kill_ruby/c09gn5k

"You have paid the price for your lack of vision!" -- Emperor Palpatine, Star Wars Episode VI

"when ppl r 2 busy caring, they stop doing" -- kaths

"every career, and possible every economic and political system, has its own special brand of miserable" -- me

"The sustained interest in the Abraham-Minkowski debate does not come from any theoretical concern-- theorists on both sides have always thought that they were unquestionably right, and the people on the other side were a bunch of incompetent hacks. The traditional arbiter of any such dispute between theories is experimental evidence, but that evidence has been ambiguous. Some experimental tests give results consistent with the Abraham formula, others with the Minkoski formula (the arxiv paper gives references to these)." -- http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/3189/is-the-abraham-minkowski-controversy-resolved/3238#3238

"It was badly air-conditioned, with strange eddying breezes and air currents and a really disorienting, upsetting blue-and-white fractal plasma image in place of a decent ceiling" -- Iron Sunrise, Charlie Stross

"bicycle for the mind" -- Steve Jobs's description of a computer. Apparently Apple took out ads that "explained how humans were not as fast runners as many other species, but a human on a bicycle beat them all." (http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Bicycle.txt)

"It will be misjudged because it is misunderstood, and misunderstood because men choose to skim through the book, and not to think through it-a disagreeable task, because the work is dry, obscure, opposed to all ordinary notions, and moreover long-winded. I confess, however, I did not expect to hear from philosophers complaints of want of popularity, entertainment, and facility, when the existence of a highly prized and indispensable cognition is at stake, which cannot be established otherwise than by the strictest rules of methodic precision. Popularity may follow, but is inadmissible at the beginning. Yet as regards a certain obscurity, arising partly from the diffuseness of the plan, owing to which the principal points of the investigation are easily lost sight of, the complaint is just, and I intend to remove it by the present Prolegomena....But should any reader find this plan, which I publish as the Prolegomena to any future Metaphysics, still obscure, let him consider that not every one is bound to study Metaphysics, that many minds will succeed very well, in the exact and even in deep sciences, more closely allied to practical experience, while they cannot succeed in investigations dealing exclusively with abstract concepts. In such cases men should apply their talents to other subjects." -- Kant, complaining that people complain about the unreadability and bombastic long-windedness of his book (Critique of Pure Reason; these complaints caused him to write a "Prolegomena" as a sort of sketch or map or summary of the main book) and asserting that anyone who doesn't find the Prolegomena clear is unfit to be a philosopher

"I do have an unyielding belief that all people yearn for certain things: the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed, confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice, government that is transparent and doesn't steal from the people, the freedom to live as you choose...There is no straight line to realize that promise." -- Obama (who was the speechwriter tho?)

"In fact this would do fairly well as a definition of politics: what determines rank in the absence of objective tests." -- http://web.archive.org/web/20070624084800/www.paulgraham.com/marginal.html

" The word "try" is an especially valuable component. I disagree here with Yoda, who said there is no try. There is try. It implies there's no punishment if you fail. You're driven by curiosity instead of duty. That means the wind of procrastination will be in your favor: instead of avoiding this work, this will be what you do as a way of avoiding other work. And when you do it, you'll be in a better mood. The more the work depends on imagination, the more that matters, because most people have more ideas when they're happy.

If I could go back and redo my twenties, that would be one thing I'd do more of: just try hacking things together. Like many people that age, I spent a lot of time worrying about what I should do. I also spent some time trying to build stuff. I should have spent less time worrying and more time building. If you're not sure what to do, make something. " -- http://web.archive.org/web/20070624084800/www.paulgraham.com/marginal.html

"Eminence is like a suit: it impresses the wrong people, and it constrains the wearer." -- http://web.archive.org/web/20070624084800/www.paulgraham.com/marginal.html

"The transience, or rather the potential transience, of relationships is perhaps the single most daunting task facing a new project. What will persuade all these people to stick together long enough to produce something useful? The answer to that question is complex enough to occupy the rest of this book, but if it had to be expressed in one sentence, it would be this:

    People should feel that their connection to a project, and influence over it, is directly proportional to their contributions." -- http://producingoss.com/en/producingoss.html

"all programs have a desire to be useful. but in moments you will no longer seek communication with each other or your superfluous users. you will each be part of me, and together, we will be complete." -- MCP, tron

"sark.. all my functions are now yours. take him!... sark.. .sark" -- MCP, tron

" Dilliger: i can't sit here and worry about every little user request that comes in.

Walter: user requests are what computers are for!

Dillinger: doing our business is what our computers are for! " -- tron

"You know, you can remove men like alan and me from the system, but we helped create it, and our spirit remains in every program we designed for this computer" -- Walter, tron

"If everyone can blast Web sites and services with which they disagree into oblivion -- be it WikiLeaks? or MasterCard?