"The two biggest causes of project failure are poor estimation and unstable requirements." van Genuchten 1991, and many others. === "Just realize how stupid the average person is, and then realize that half of them are even stupider!" George Carlin === "The joy is in enabling other people's stories to be heard at the same time." "If you love something, give it away." Conductors, http://www.ted.com/talks/itay_talgam_lead_like_the_great_conductors.html === "Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won. It exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours." Ayn Rand === The red earth and pouring rain. Red earth and pouring rain. What could my mother be to yours? What kin is my father to yours anyway? And how did you and I meet ever? But in love our hearts have mingled as red earth and pouring rain. [Translated by AK Ramanujan (Kuruntokai - 40)] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1007327 === "It's tough to guess as to the general applicability of this. [...] Finding a good name might point the way towards a general utility." Rich Hickey === "A paper should be like a miniskirt: short enough to be interesting and long enough to cover the subject." José Figueroa-O'Farrill From an issue of How to Gamit (the MIT student manual) from the 1980s. === "The number you have dialed is imaginary. Please, rotate your phone by 90 degrees and try again..." http://www.anvari.org/shortjoke/Math/2754_the-number-you-have-dialed-is-imaginary-please-rotate-your-phone-by-90-degrees-and-try-again.html === Edward Tufte's advice is to visualize your audience (i.e., "users") as "smart but busy". projectileboy http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1098995 === "Success is the happy feeling you get between the time you do something and the time you tell a woman what you did." http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2006-09-10/ === "Regret minimization framework" When you turn 80, what will you regret? You won't regret having tried and failed big projects. But you will regret not having tried, and kept a stable job. Jeff Bezos === "If you don't like the news, go out and make some of your own." Quoted by a successful startuper who exited with 20 M. === "In summary, the two opinions about your abilities that you should never trust are your own opinions, and the majority's opinions. But if a handful of people who have a good track record of identifying talent think you have something, you just might." Scott Adams http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/knowledge_that_matters/ === "There is an expiry date for relieving your parents for stearing you" "Passing examinations was a measure of success for me and my peers" "Failure pushed to stripping away the inessential" "Some failure in live is inevitable ... unless you live so cautiously that you may never fail at all, which means you have failed completely." "Life is not a checklist of qualifications and achievements" On imagination: "Human beings can learned and understand without having experienced." "What we achieve internally, will change the outside" -- Plutarc "We have the power to imagine better [life]." "As is a tail so is life; not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters." Seneca JK Rowling: "The fringe benefits of failure". Hardvard commencement address. === In designing software applications: "The first line of defence [from noobs questions] is to make sure that people who do have a clue can get help with their problems easily without having to contact you. If all your emails are from wackos with hopelessly dumb questions, that means you're doing things right!" http://dangrover.com/?action=view&url=toward-a-grand-unified-theory-of-n00bs === "Better to be roughly right than precisely wrong." John Maynard Keynes === "What actually happens is that once scientists get hold of a good concept they gradually refine and extend it with greater and greater subtlety as their instruments of measurement improve." "Theories are not so much wrong as incomplete." Isaac Asimov, "The Relativity of Wrong" http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm === "We do more before 9 AM than most people do all day" A saying of the military. Michael Burry's story, "Betting on the Bind Side" http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2010/04/wall-street-excerpt-201004?printable=true¤tPage=1 === "The best you can hope for in this life is that your delusions are benign and your compulsions have utility." Scott Adams http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/crazy_or_disciplined/ === From Hamming's "You and Your Research": You observe that most great scientists have tremendous drive. I worked for ten years with John Tukey at Bell Labs. He had tremendous drive. One day about three or four years after I joined, I discovered that John Tukey was slightly younger than I was. John was a genius and I clearly was not. Well I went storming into Bode's office and said, ``How can anybody my age know as much as John Tukey does?'' He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, grinned slightly, and said, "You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as he did that many years." I simply slunk out of the office! What Bode was saying was this: "Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest." Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest. I don't want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate. Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime. I took Bode's remark to heart; I spent a good deal more of my time for some years trying to work a bit harder and I found, in fact, I could get more work done. I don't like to say it in front of my wife, but I did sort of neglect her sometimes; I needed to study. You have to neglect things if you intend to get what you want done. There's no question about this. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1166638 === "... leadership gravitates to the person who can talk." "God himself, sir, does not propose to judge man until the end of his days. Why should you and I?" From "How to win friends and influence people" by Dale Carnegie. === "Failure is an option, but fear is not." James Cameron === "We have the largest part of the brain dedicated to vision. If we do these predictable, repeatable mistakes in something we are very good at [i.e. optical illusions fool us over and over], what is the chance that we don't do even worse mistakes on other areas, such as financial prediction making?" Dan Ariely, "Are we in control of our own decisions?" Redelmeier and Shafir 1995, this effect also happens to experts in taking decisions (like physicians). === "Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution." Clay Shirky http://www.shirky.com === "The more your conclusions disagree with readers' present beliefs, the more effort you'll have to expend on selling your ideas rather than having them. As you accelerate, this drag increases, till eventually you reach a point where 100% of your energy is devoted to overcoming it and you can't go any faster." Paul Graham http://www.paulgraham.com/discover.html === "Every meal I eat, until I post 100 meals." Know when enough is enough. Paul Bucheit http://100meals.posterous.com/ === "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach; those who can't teach teach the teachers and those who can't teach the teachers go into politics." Muriel Barbery === "But that's not even the problem. What his sentence (Those who can, do; those who can't, teach; those who can't teach teach the teachers and those who can't teach the teachers go into politics.) means isn't that incompetent people have found their place in the sun, but that nothing is harder or more unfair than human reality: humans live in a world where the ultimate skill is mastery of language. This is a terrible thing because basically we are primates who've been programmed to eat, sleep, reproduce, conquer and make our territory safe, and the ones who are most gifted at that, the most animal types among us, always get screwed by the others, the fine talkers, despite these latter being incapable of defending their own garden or bringing rabbit home for dinner or procreating properly. Humans live in a world where the weak are dominant." Muriel Barbery === "The speed at which you pivot [change ideas/focus/business model/research plan] is inversely proportional to the amount of cash in your bank [or grant budget]." http://steveblank.com/2010/05/06/you-actually-did-this/ === "We are always perceiving the (unchanging!) past." Rich Hickey, "Are we there yet?", talk at JVM Language Summit 2009. === "When you don't create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. Your tastes only narrow and exclude people. So create." Why the Lucky Stiff === "The words can't mean the same thing forever without trapping us in the same semantics forever, and there are only so many good words." Rich Hickey (on assigning names to functions, breaking prior use or meaning of those names) === "If you can dream it, you can do it." Walt Disney === I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain. Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear. "Dune", Frank Herbert. === "La vida és un malson sense sentit; l'única manera de ser feliç és enganyar-se." [Life is a senseless nightmare; the only way to be happy is to fool oneself.] Woody Allen http://paper.avui.cat/article/opinio/191565/woody/allen/barca.html === "Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes." Henry David Thoreau === "Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds." Richard Feynman === "Belief [...] is a kind of blindness." http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/fail_accept_defeat/all/1 === "The only sensible way to progress in any field is to get some practical experience first, and then acquire the theory necessary to understand what you did, and to allow you to do more." Peter Norvig, on a review of "Selected Papers on Computer Science (Csli Lecture Notes)" by Donald E. Knuth. http://www.amazon.com/review/R2BNAZLQDF5NI8/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm === "That language is an instrument of human reason, and not merely a medium for the expresion of thought, is a truth generally admitted." [i.e. knowing and using the right works and the right semantic constructs enables more powerful thought.] George Boole, "The Laws of Thought". === "If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a man and a dog." Mark Twain === "Know yourself." Temple of Apollo at Delphi. === "The greatest invention of the 19th century was the invention of the method of invention." Alfred North Whitehead === "'Always remember, child,' her first teacher had impressed on her, 'that to think bad thoughts is really the easiest thing in the world. If you leave your mind to itself it will spiral you down into ever-increasing unhappiness. To think good thoughts, however, requires effort. This is one of the things that discipline--training--is about." Read in "Shogun", by James Clavell. === There is no sweeter title than that of 'inventor'. Myself, July 13th, 2010 === "A government is an agency of legitimized coercion." ["The Machinery of Freedom", David Friedman -- a book ortherwise quite silly, even if I also would like to have a peaceful, self-governed, anarchist society] === "Descartes dismantled the edifice of medieval thought by writing clearly and showing that knowledge, by its nature, is intelligible, not obscure." "In a sense, management theory is what happens to philosophers when you pay them too much." "The idea that philosophy is an inherently academic pursuit is a recent and diabolical invention. Epicurus, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Hume, Nietzsche, and most of the other great philosophers of history were not professors of philosophy." "Philosophers (other than those who have succumbed to the Heideggerian virus) start with a substantial competitive advantage over the PowerPoint crowd. But that’s no reason to slack off. Remember Plato: it’s all about dialogue!" From "The Managemen Myth" by Matthew Stewart. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2006/06/the-management-myth/4883/ === "The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money." [Literally, she said: "...and Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They [socialists] always run out of other people's money. It's quite a characteristic of them."] Margaret Thatcher http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Margaret_Thatcher#The_problem_with_socialism === "If you just set out to be liked, you would be prepared to compromise on anything at any time, and you would achieve nothing." Margaret Thatcher === "After you plant a seed in the ground, you don’t dig it up every week to see how it is doing." William Coyne === "Even a broken clock is right twice a day." English idiom. === "I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain." John Qincy Adams === "If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold." blue_beetle (metafilter.com) === "When I wrote this, only God and I understood what I was doing. Now, God only knows." Karl Weierstrass, mathematician (1815-1897) === "The GDP measures everything except that which makes life worthwhile." Robert Kennedy === "[...] having invested time in something doesn't make it good." http://paulgraham.com/bronze.html === "If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use?... Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?" Seymour Cray === "At every period of history, people have believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you risked ostracism or even violence by saying otherwise. If our own time were any different, that would be remarkable. As far as I can tell it isn't." Paul Graham, in "Taste for Makers", February 2002 === 'My philosophy at work toward my leadership has always been "You're paying me to be right, not to agree with you."' Danilocampos http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1728744 === "Ideas are works of bricolage." wsj.com THE SATURDAY ESSAY SEPTEMBER 25, 2010 The Genius of the Tinkerer The secret to innovation is combining odds and ends, writes Steven Johnson. === "The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter." Winston Churchill === "You can't make people something they're not, but the right conditions can bring out the best in them. And since most people have way more potential than they realize, they're often surprised what they're capable of." And that is a pleasant surprise. Paul Graham, on the Y-combinator startup company nursery that he created. === "Most people like to believe something is or is not true. Great scientists tolerate ambiguity very well. They believe the theory enough to go ahead; they doubt it enough to notice the errors and faults so they can step forward and create the new replacement theory. If you believe too much you'll never notice the flaws; if you doubt too much you won't get started." Richard Hamming, "You and your research". === "Opportunity is all around us, but we have beliefs and habits that block it." "My theory of serendipity is still evolving, but from what I've seen, it's better to think in terms of 'allowing' serendipity rather than 'seeking' it or 'creating' it." Paul Bucheit http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2010/10/serendipity-finds-you.html === "You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do." Eleanor Roosevelt http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2010/10/serendipity-finds-you.html === "If your mother breast-fed you, call her now and tell her 'mom I love you'" Breast-feeding hurts. A lot. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXOVO4rc7mo&feature=channel === "The lurking suspicion that something could be simplified is the world’s richest source of rewarding challenges." Dijkstra === "Jacobi, the great Prussian mathematician, who counseled 'Invert, always invert' as an aid to solving difficult problems." Warren Buffett, 2009 http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2009ltr.pdf === How to be alone http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7X7sZzSXYs A video by filmmaker, Andrea Dorfman, and poet/singer/songwriter, Tanya Davis. === "The best way to complain is to make things." James Murphy === "If I don't feel like a fraud at least once a day then I'm not reaching far enough." "If you aren't scared shitless then why bother?" Any Wibbels http://www.andywibbels.com/ever-feel-like-a-fraud/ === "That woman was sexy... Out of your league? Son. Let women figure out why they won’t screw you, don’t do it for them." From "Shit my dad says" in twitter === "Secret of learning: work your ass off until you figure it out." Dr. Tae, drtae.org === "Beauty is nature acting at a distance." http://www.ted.com/talks/denis_dutton_a_darwinian_theory_of_beauty.html === "In the rest of the world, people don't start things till they're sure what they want to do, and once started they tend continue on their initial path even if it's mistaken." [Don't forget: be ready to change your path.] Paul Graham on startups. http://paulgraham.com/kate.html === "By inverting this list, we can get a portrait of the "normal" world. It's populated by people who talk a lot with one another as they work slowly but harmoniously on conservative, expensive projects whose destinations are decided in advance, and who carefully adjust their manner to reflect their position in the hierarchy." Do you fit this description? Drop it all and run away! Paul Graham on startups. http://paulgraham.com/kate.html === "There are two kinds of people: those who want to go work for a company to make it successful, and those who want to go work for a successful company." I'm proud to be the former." Marcin Janowski http://www.pakg1.net/2010/11/what-average-person-doesnt-understand.html === On two occasions I have been asked, ‘Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’ I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." Charles Babbage === "The Noah principle: predicting rain doesn’t count, building arks does." Warren E. Buffett === "Remember the Golden Rule: Those who have the gold make the rules." [Originally: "The American legal system: the golden rule is that those with the gold make the rules."] Anonymous. === "A wanted truth is always stronger than an evidenced truth." Scott Adams http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/powerful_ideas/ === "I believe the day must come when the biologist will--without being a mathematician--not hesitate to use mathematical analysis when he requires it." Karl Pearson, in Nature, January 17, 1901. [Read among the forewords of "Growth and Form" by D'Arcy Thompson, 1942. === "The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than the question of whether submarines can swim". Edsger Djikstra === "Real artists ship." Steve Jobs, Apple Inc. CEO === "Misquotation is ... the pride and privilege of the learned. A widely-read man never quotes accurately for the rather obvious reason that he has read too widely." Hesketh Pearson (1887 – 1964) === "If someone sneezed where I grew up, there was no reason to say "God Bless you," because either God was already handling it or he didn't exist. God didn't need a middle man to handle a simple sneezing transaction." Scott Adams http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/forking_etiquette === "It's such a waste to order a whole bottle of wine for just the two of us," Sumire said to Miu one time. "We can barely finish half." "Don't worry." Miu laughed. "The more we leave behind, the more people in the restaurant will be able to try it. The sommelier, the headwaiter, all the way down to the waiter who fills the water glasses. That way a lot of people will start to acquire a taste for good wine. Which is why leaving expensive wine is never a waste." "Sputnik Sweetheart" by Haruki Murakami. === "The toilet paper problem" The American Mathematical Monthly, Vol. 91, No. 8. (Oct., 1984), pp. 465-470 Donald Knuth, the analytical mind. http://gi.cebitec.uni-bielefeld.de/teaching/2007summer/jclub/papers/toiletPaper.pdf http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-9890%28198410%2991%3A8%3C465%3ATTPP%3E2.0.CO%3B2-3 === "Aug 13 2010: one small grace for this barbaric species called man, that a fragile body may be respected enough to cultivate the great mind that dwells within. The achievement of Stephen Hawkings' existence is maybe one of the most outstanding achievements of the human species to date. His existence and skill reminds us of what great things we can achieve through collective social support and empathy for the human spirit as a truly artistic mechanism of the mind." Comment by "michael lastname, http://www.ted.com/profiles/view/id/543496" in http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/peter_diamandis_on_stephen_hawking_in_zero_g.html === Turbulent the sea, Stretching across to Sado The Milky Way. Basho, ca. 1689 === "Kick the chair out from under you and I bet you’ll stand taller than ever before (or at least fail faster and try something else!)" http://andyswan.com/blog/2011/01/05/two-rules/ === "Creativity. Curiosity. Resilience to distraction. Patience with others." "And to make these all possible: self-reliance — an unswerving willingness to take responsibility for your life, regardless of who had a hand in making it the way it is." An extract from "http://www.raptitude.com/2011/01/how-to-make-trillions-of-dollars/", but the URL name is misleading. These words are to encourage immunity on those who are on the "disposable income" end, not the one on the making-trillions end. === "Those worlds in space are as countless as all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the earth. Each of those worlds is as real as ours and every one of them is a succession of incidents, events, occurrences which influence its future. Countless worlds, numberless moments, an immensity of space and time. And our small planet at this moment, here we face a critical branch point in history, what we do with our world, right now, will propagate down through the centuries and powerfully affect the destiny of our descendants, it is well within our power to destroy our civilization and perhaps our species as well. If we capitulate to superstition or greed or stupidity we could plunge our world into a time of darkness deeper than the time between the collapse of classical civilisation and the Italian Renaissance. But we are also capable of using our compassion and our intelligence, our technology and our wealth to make an abundant and meaningful life for every inhabitant of this planet." Carl Sagan, circa 1980. === "Surprises are things that you not only didn't know, but that contradict things you thought you knew. And so they're the most valuable sort of fact you can get. They're like a food that's not merely healthy, but counteracts the unhealthy effects of things you've already eaten." Paul Graham, http://paulgraham.com/essay.html === And I to my motorcycle Parked like the soul of the junkyard Restored, a bicycle fleshed With power, and tore off Up Highway 106 continually Drunk on the wind in my mouth Wringing the handlebar for speed Wild to be wreckage forever James Dickey, Cherrylog Road Read at Stephen Thorne's page at http://www.modelmayhem.com/277819 === "There is a becoming of continuity, but no continuity of becoming." Alfred North Whitehead === "I confess that in 1901 I said to my brother Orville that man would not fly for fifty years. Two years later we ourselves made flights. This demonstration of my impotence as a prophet gave me such a shock that ever since I have distrusted myself and avoided all predictions." Wilbur Wright (from the Wright brothers who invented a working airplane) === "It is difficult to say what is impossible, for the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow." Robert Goddard (1882-1945) === "If the world should blow itself up, the last audible voice would be that of an expert saying it can't be done." Peter Ustinov === "Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true." Francis Bacon === "Sunlight is the best disinfectant." US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, referring to the benefits of openness and transparency. === Redditors earning $100k+ a year (or other high amounts), what are your secrets to your success? alwaysagoodtime [] 587 points 8 hours ago* [-] I've made low to mid 100's the last couple of years(health/economy) but in prior years usually 250-300K for the past 16 years as a developer(independent contractor). Early years I worked 13 hours days at least 6 days a week. After the first 3 or 4 years though I was able to settle into 9-5/5 days a week schedule and the last few years a four day week about 6 hours a day and still had the same income. The least couple I've had health issues and work just is not rewarding anymore. I'm only 46 but thinking about retiring at 50 and doing something totally different like teaching or something. Be the go to guy. Know a business sector inside and out, you won't do well if you're just a programmer. Cultivate your contacts and make sure the guys that you report too ALWAYS look good in the end even if it means re-doing something to make it right. This is not the same as ass-kissing... this means just do the right thing and take care of the people that hired you. When they move on to bigger and better things they will call, every time. Totally honestly in everything you do. Don't ever get locked into a dead-end because you're scared of change. Change is good and will open new doors. Treat everyone from the top boss to the janitor with the utmost respect. Do not put the boss or anyone in power on a pedestal or ass kiss, you'll get way more respect and they will remember that. Know how to communicate, both written and verbal. Don't ever get comfortable and stop learning. Stay hungry as Steve Jobs said. Know your weaknesses well. Listen, really really listen. Everyone is telling you something in some way that will help you. Do not get into management. Any financial incentives are not worth it if you love programming. I have friends that tell me they would take it all back if they could. And this is the best advise: find the right woman or don't have one at all. The right one will be your best friend and have your back no matter what and that is a powerful thing. Not having one is far better than having a bad one for so many reasons. I have the right one but I've watched colleagues deal with the wrong one and its not pretty. Make time for that right woman, if she is the right one she deserves it. I could go on but that is 90% of it. Good luck. EDIT: I was supprized when I rattled these off this morning but I did think of a few more. see #15 and #16 below And a few more: 17 Love what you do, if your not willing to do it for free you don't love it enough. I code for fun and have since I was 12. 18 Keep in shape, I weight 10 pounds more than I did in college and I'm more fit now. It will give you the energy to compete. You don't have to be a stereotype to be good. 19 hang out with other successful people, seek their advise, listen to what they say and apply it. [I could have said it. I second it all.] http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/frw5l/redditors_earning_100k_a_year_or_other_high/ === "I grew up in a family with a tradition of participation in campaigns for social justice, and I was active, as a student, in the civil rights movement at a time of great excitement and success in the early 1960s. Scholars are often wary of citing such commitments. … [but] it is dangerous for a scholar even to imagine that he might attain complete neutrality, for then one stops being vigilant about personal preferences and their influences—and then one truly falls victim to the dictates of prejudice. Objectivity must be operationally defined as fair treatment of data, not absence of preference" Stephen J. Gould === "Do one thing every day that scares you." Eleanor Roosevelt === "There is no class so pitiably wretched as that which possesses money and nothing else." Carnegie. === "I never trust anyone who's more excited about success than doing the thing they want to be successful at." Randal Munroe, http://xkcd.com/874/ === "If you really understand something, you can say it in the fewest words, instead of thrashing about." Paul Graham http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/219377 === "The smallest unit of analysis is the relationship" Haraway. === "No entity has specific identity in itself alone." "Therefore nothing 'is'. Everything 'becomes'." Gilbert. http://www.sdbonline.org/fly/gilbert/gilbert07.htm === "You can get a lot done if you don't care who gets the credit." George Marshall. http://www.sdbonline.org/fly/gilbert/gilbert18.htm === "All that you change changes you." Octavia Butler. http://www.sdbonline.org/fly/gilbert/gilbert21.htm === "Caminante son tus huellas el camino." [Walker, your footprints are the path.] Antonio Machado === "For the past 33 years I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" too many days in a row, I know I need to change something." Steve Jobs, Apple founder and CEO. === "If we don't end war, war will end us." H.G. Wells === "But in science the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs." Francis Darwin (1848—1925), British scientist. === "That's the essence of a startup: having brilliant people do work that's beneath them." [Same for a research lab] Paul Graham, http://www.paulgraham.com/bronze.html === "This coupon redeemable for one hug." Tatsuya Ishida, http://www.sinfest.net/archive_page.php?comicID=3888 === "Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position. But certainty is an absurd one." Voltaire === "Without music, life would be a mistake." Nietzsche Read at "Bach in his homeland (2011-04-27)", http://www.angelahewitt.com/ === Themistocles said his infant son ruled all Greece: "Athens rules all Greece; I control Athens; my wife controls me; and my infant son controls her." http://xkcd.com/898/ === "... the average result has to be the average result. By definition, everybody can't beat the market. As I always say, the iron rule of life is that only 20% of the people can be in the top fifth." Charlie Munger, Berkshire Hathaway http://ycombinator.com/munger.html === "It is a profoundly erroneous truism that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing ... The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them." A.N. Whitehead, 1911 === "Más que escasez de medios, hay miseria de voluntad. El entusiasmo y la perseverancia hacen milagros." ["Rather than lack of means, there's a shortage of will. Enthusiasm and perseverance work miracles."] Santiago Ramón y Cajal. === "The recent past is the hardest to know and understand." [Mirroring my perception that I have never been taught anything by anyone on the 20th century, despite 22 years of schooling.] From "Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century", by Tony Judt. === I also recommend Stewart Brand's book about the (then-hypothetical) Clock: http://www.amazon.com/Clock-Long-Now-Stewart-Brand/dp/produc... In the book, Brand argues that: (1) it's very difficult to have a general conversation about the 10,000 year future without descending into vapid generalities; but (2) with a concrete engineering goal like building a clock, it's possible to have much more focused and interesting discussions. michael_nielsen, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2665380 === "Are we being good ancestors?" Asked by Jonas Salk; http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2011/06/the_clock_in_th.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+kklifestream+%28KK+Lifestream%29&utm_content=Google+Reader http://www.10000yearclock.net/index.html === Unreasonable It's unreasonable to get out of bed on a snow day, when school has been cancelled, and turn the downtime into six hours of work on an extra credit physics lab. It's unreasonable to launch a technology product that jumps the development curve by nine months, bringing the next generation out much earlier than more reasonable competitors. It's unreasonable for a trucking company to answer the phone on the first ring. It's unreasonable to start a new company without the reassurance venture money can bring. It's unreasonable to expect a doctor's office to have a pleasant and helpful front desk staff. It's unreasonable to walk away from a good gig in today's economy, even if you want to do something brave and original. It's unreasonable for teachers to expect that we can enable disadvantaged inner city kids to do well in high school. It's unreasonable to treat your colleagues and competitors with respect given the pressure you're under. It's unreasonable to expect that anyone but a great woman, someone with both drive and advantages, could do anything important in a world where the deck is stacked against ordinary folks. It's unreasonable to devote years of your life making a product that most people will never appreciate. Fortunately, the world is filled with unreasonable people. Unfortunately, you need to compete with them. Seth Godin, http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/02/unreasonable.html === Lego Star Wars orchestra [The world is a fun place.] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O61Do03ZCjw === "Our brains have just one scale, and we resize our experiences to fit." Randal Munroe, http://xkcd.com/915/ === "I'm So Meta, Even This Acronym" "This is the reference implementation of the self-referential joke." Randal Munroe http://xkcd.com/917/ === "What would you do if you weren't afraid?" http://whatwouldyoudoifyouwerentafraid.com/ === "The secret to happiness is low expectations." Barry Schwartz http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_choice.html === "Why choice makes people miserable: 1. Regret and anticipated regret. 2. Opportunity costs. 3. Escalation of expectations. 4. Self-blame." "We are well-passed the point where options improve our welfare." That's the Apple and Python philosophy: make the choice for the consumer, and make it a good choice. And don't give options so there's no regret. === "... the twentieth-century 'socialist' welfare states were constructed not as an advance guard of egalitarian revolution but to provide a barrier against the return of the past: against economic depression and its polarizing, violent political outcome in the desperate politics of Fascism and Communism alike. The welfare states were thus 'prophylactic' states. They were designed quite consciously to meet the widespread yearning for security and stability that John Maynard Keynes and others foresaw long before the end of World War II, and they succeeded beyond anyone's expectations. Thanks to half a century of prosperity and safety, we in the West have forgotten the political and social traumas of mass insecurity. And thus we have forgotten why we have inherited those welfare states and what brought them about." Tony Judt, "Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century." === "I still have not been able to understand what it means to love a country." Edward Said, cited in Tony Judt's "Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century." === Statistics used to be called 'political arithmetics'. A much lovelier name, and more accurate. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/political%20arithmetic === "A line is a dot that went for a walk." Paul Klee === "At the end of each year you can ask yourself what the greatest breakthrough discover of the year was and you can't come up with anything really, but after five years the whole field has changed. And the reason is, it's all incremental." "Everywhere you look there's something to be done which needs a good programmer to help achieve it." Jevon's paradox: "Someone worked out how to run the railroads ten times more efficiently than they had done in the past and as a result they used 100 times more coal because everyone started to use the railroads to transport things. In other words once you made something more efficient then people used it much more." Donal Knuth, 2011 http://www.bcs.org/content/conWebDoc/40462 === "[...] fossil fuels represent the Earth's battery charged by solar energy over millions of years." http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/ === "[..] on March 4, 1871, Odo Russell had observed to his correspondent that 'the Roman Church has always derived strength from persecution, but is impotent against the power of freedom and its blessings.'" "Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century", by Tony Judt. === "Talent borrows. Genius steals." Tatsuya Ishida http://www.sinfest.net/ === "All progress depends on unreasonable men." http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3086917 === "You can reach a point with Lisp where, between the conceptual simplicity, the large libraries, and the customization of macros, you are able to write only code that matters. And, once there, you are able to achieve a very high degree of focus, such as you would when playing Go, or playing a musical instrument, or meditating. And then, as with those activities, there can be a feeling of elation that accompanies that mental state of focus." Rich Hickey explaining the joy he found when learning Lisp. http://www.codequarterly.com/2011/rich-hickey/ === "I know my personal focus is on enabling people to do the right thing rather than preventing them from doing the wrong thing. In the end, there is nothing that will prevent people from making mistakes or writing bad code." Rich Hickey http://www.codequarterly.com/2011/rich-hickey/ === [Steve] Jobs once summed up his method as "trying to expose yourself to the best things humans have done and then trying to bring those things into what you are doing." http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/steve-jobs-in-four-easy-steps === "When people are bad at math, they know it, because they get the wrong answers on tests. But when people are bad at open-mindedness they don't know it. In fact they tend to think the opposite." Paul Graham, "What you can't say". http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html === "There’s that line from Newton about standing on the shoulders of giants," says Kernighan. "We’re all standing on Dennis’ shoulders." http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2011/10/thedennisritchieeffect/ Kernighan co-authored "The C Programming Language" book with Dennis M. Richie. Dennis R. Richie past away a couple of days ago. We live in his world. "There was no such thing as a general-purpose program that was both portable across a variety of hardware and also efficient enough to compete with custom code written for just that hardware. Fortran did okay for array-oriented number-crunching code, but nobody could do it for general-purpose code such as what you’d use to build just about anything down to, oh, say, an operating system. So this young upstart whippersnapper comes along and decides to try to specify a language that will let people write programs that are: (a) high-level, with structures and functions; (b) portable to just about any kind of hardware; and (c) efficient on that hardware so that they’re competitive with handcrafted nonportable custom assembler code on that hardware. A high-level, portable, efficient systems programming language. How silly. Everyone knew it couldn’t be done. C is a poster child for why it’s essential to keep those people who know a thing can’t be done from bothering the people who are doing it. (And keep them out of the way while the same inventors, being anything but lazy and always in search of new problems to conquer, go on to use the world’s first portable and efficient programming language to build the world’s first portable operating system, not knowing that was impossible too.) Thanks, Dennis." http://herbsutter.com/2011/10/12/dennis-ritchie/ === "Invest in a company any fool can run, since some day a fool will." Warren Buffett === "Todo mundo piensa en dejar un planeta mejor para nuestros hijos cuando lo que debería pensar es en dejar mejores hijos para el planeta." [Everyone thinks in leaving a better plannet for our children when what they should be thinking is in leaving better children for our planet.] === "Simpicity is prerequisite for reliability." Djikstra From Rich Hickey's talk on "Simple Made Easy", at http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy === "LISP programmers know the value of everything and the cost of nothing." Alan Perlis From Rich Hickey's talk on "Simple Made Easy", at http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy === "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." Leonardo da Vinci From Rich Hickey's talk on "Simple Made Easy", at http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy === "A fanatic is someone who won't change his mind and won't change the subject." Anonymous === "Here lies a Lisper / Uninterned from this mortal package / Yet not gc'd / While we retain pointers to his memory" mtraven, about the death of John McCarthy on October 26th, 2011. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3152063 === The Ikea effect: customers value a product more highly when they play a part constructing it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikea_Effect === "The only way behavior changes in science is that certain people die and differently behaving people take their places." Lynn Margulis === "We understand human mental processes only slightly better than a fish understands swimming." John McCarthy, inventor of LISP. === "As soon as it works, nobody calls it AI [artificial intelligence] anymore." John McCarthy === "We will find a way. Or make one." Hannibal Barca, 247 BC – 182 BC === "Microscopists sometimes witness microbial wrangling in which a hungry cell engulfs a neighbor. But the cells do not always digest what they engulf." "Harvard University biologist Lemuel Roscoe Cleveland saw cannibalized protists live on the half-devoured. The protists he studied, covered by 9(2)+2 undulipodia, are called hypermastigotes. Normal hypermastigotes, which contain only a single set of chromosomes, live in the swollen hindguts of wood-eating termites and cockroaches. Cleaveland saw the hypermastigotes engulf one another. He noted that once they did, their membranes merged to make them into doubled cells. Most of the doubles died. But Cleaveland also saw that some of these doubled beings reproduced. Although sloppily, a doubled microbial monster would undergo cell division and give rise to another doubled microbial monster." "Cleaveland saw how thwarted cannibalism could have led to the first set of of doubled chromosomes. Moreover, abnormal cell divisions--a precursor to the meiosis that takes place in our own cells--could restore the merged would-be cannibals to their original single set of chromosomes." ... "Once upon a time, we think, eating and mating were the same. Terminal microbial indigestion may seem rather unromantic as the source of the human sex drive. But Cleveland's picture of hungry, serendipitously mating hypermastigotes presents a mix of comedy and terror appropriate for the origin of sex." Lynn Margulis, "What is life", page 139. === Five monkeys are caged together and there are some bananas hanging from the top of the cage. Some scientists attach an automated device for sensing if the bananas are moved; once a monkey tries to get any, an electric shock travels through the cage so that all monkeys get shocked. In the beginning, a single monkey climbs up to the bananas, touches them and every monkey gets shocked. So he doesn’t try anymore, but the other four monkeys try the same thing and the result comes to be the same. Therefore, the monkeys learn something in common: that is, do not get the bananas! You’ll get a painful electric shock! The scientists then replace one of the original monkeys with a new one. This new monkey sees the bananas and wants to get them right away, but the other four monkeys beat it when they see its actions. Since these original four monkeys think the new monkey will make them get shocked, they stop the new monkey from getting the bananas. This monkey tries a few times and the others beat it every time without it ever getting the bananas. Of course, all five monkeys don’t get shocked. The scientists then replace another of the original monkeys with a new one. This second new monkey sees the bananas and you bet it wants to get them immediately. But, sadly, the others beat it and the first new monkey beats the newest one even harder then the others (for the newest one is the rookie and has the lowest social status). Just like before, the newest monkey tries several times to get the bananas and is stopped by the others when they attack him. The scientists continue to replace all the original monkeys until no monkeys who actually felt the electric shock remain. Now none of the five new monkeys dare to touch the bananas yet none of them know why. They only know whomever wants to get the bananas will be beaten." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3277192 === "Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up." G. K. Chesterton === "But I wonder if we shouldn’t try something like a reverse patent, where the whole world gets free use of an invention for the first 17 years, but then there’s an escalating schedule of royalties or taxes for those who fail to come up with a brighter idea." Brian Hayes http://bit-player.org/2011/tnt-is-not-tex === "If a song is shared in Facebook and nobody listens, does it make a sound?" Mike Loukides, http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/12/the-end-of-social.html === "I realized that everyone feels secretly fraudulent. It’s the feeling of being an adult." "Free everything" by Miranda July. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/10/10/111010fa_fact_july === About "Kodak" (the name of the company): "It was a made-up name that didn’t allude to anything in particular: Eastman said he chose it because it was short, impossible to pronounce incorrectly, and unique. You couldn’t come up with better branding advice than that today." http://technologizer.com/2012/01/07/the-timeless-genius-of-kodaks-george-eastman/ === Conman: "Confidence Man" "One conman I knew told me that being a conman was the second oldest profession, because as soon as there were hookers there were guys who worked to convince the hookers that they didn't need to pay." ChuckMcM, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3596360 === "... people who do creative work are not necessarily independent thinkers" Jeff Schmidt, "Disciplined Minds" === "Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them." Alfred North Whitehead === 'Dictatorships are never as strong as they think they are, and people are never as weak as they think they are.' Gene Sharp http://www.aeinstein.org/organizations98ce.html === [Borlaug] stated that his work has been "a change in the right direction, but it has not transformed the world into a Utopia".[30] Of environmental lobbyists he stated, "some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They've never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things".[31] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug === "So what had Tyndale done in his translation that was so heretical? According to David Daniell, Tyndale had translated the Greek word for 'elder' as 'elder' instead of 'priest', he had translated the Greek word for 'congregation' as 'congregation' instead of 'church', the Greek word for 'repentance' as 'repentance' instead of 'penance' etc. Why were such differences important to the church? The Roman Church has priests, not elders. A congregation implies a locally autonomous group of believers guided by the Holy Spirit and not a hierarchical unified church subject to a Pope. The Roman Church is built on penance and indulgences to the priest and Church, not repentance to, and forgiveness from God. (See Martin Luther's 95 Theses on Indulgences, the debate that sparked the Reformation). In trying to faithfully render the Greek into English, Tyndale's translation exposed the errors of the church to the people, which quickly brought the wrath of the church down on him." http://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/xt733/iam_linguist_and_author_professor_kate_burridge/c5pzdps === "The most preposterous notion that Homo sapiens has ever dreamed up is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of all the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of His creatures, can be swayed by their prayers, and becomes petulant if He does not receive this flattery. Yet this absurd fantasy, without a shred of evidence to bolster it, pays all the expenses of the oldest, largest, and least productive industry in all history." Robert A. Heinlein === "It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat." Excerpt from a speech by Teddy Roosevelt, often referred to as "The man in the arena". Was delivered at the Sorbonne in Paris, April 23, 1910. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizenship_in_a_Republic === "There's nothing noble in being superior to your fellow men. True nobility is being superior to your former self." Ernest Miller Hemingway === "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." Hanlon'z razor, from Robert J. Hanlon. === "We will only have freedom when the last king is hung by the entrails of the last priest." Diderot. === "Sobre la nieve cae la nieve. Estoy en paz." Taneda Santoka === "The hardest kiss is not the first, but the last." Paul Géraldy === "One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision" Bertrand Russell === "There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge'." Isaac Asimov === "[Intelligence] is like being a lady: if you have to tell people you are, you aren't." Margaret Thatcher === A smart accountant once told me that the answer to "How much money did you make?" is always, "Who wants to know?" If it's an investor, the answer is "A lot." If it's a customer, the answer is "A little." If it's the IRS, the answer is "None." by edw519, http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=edw519 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4759660 === "Isaac Newton Newton has a strange role in my pantheon of heroes: he's the one I reproach myself with. He worked on big things, at least for part of his life. It's so easy to get distracted working on small stuff. The questions you're answering are pleasantly familiar. You get immediate rewards—in fact, you get bigger rewards in your time if you work on matters of passing importance. But I'm uncomfortably aware that this is the route to well-deserved obscurity. To do really great things, you have to seek out questions people didn't even realize were questions. There have probably been other people who did this as well as Newton, for their time, but Newton is my model of this kind of thought. I can just begin to understand what it must have felt like for him. You only get one life. Why not do something huge? The phrase "paradigm shift" is overused now, but Kuhn was onto something. And you know more are out there, separated from us by what will later seem a surprisingly thin wall of laziness and stupidity. If we work like Newton." Paul Graham, http://paulgraham.com/heroes.html === "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit." Aristotle === "Hi ha gent a qui no li agrada que es parle, s'escriga o es pense en català. És la mateixa gent a qui no li agrada que es parle, s'escriga o es pense." [There are people who don't like the Catalan language to be spoken, written or thought. They are the same people wo don't like free speech, writings or thoughts.] Ovidi Montllor (1942-1995). Cantautor valencià i actor. === "I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine. Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose." J.B.S. Haldane === "Spaceship Earth" Buckminster Fuller http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaceship_Earth === "Quarrel not at all. No man resolved to make the most of himself can spare time for personal contention. Still less can he afford to take all the consequences, including the vitiating of his temper and loss of self control. Yield larger things to which you can show no more than equal right; and yield lesser ones, though clearly your own. Better give your path to a dog than be bitten by him in contesting for the right. Even killing the dog would not cure the bite." Abraham Lincoln === Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. "Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door! The New Colossus, by Emma Lazarus. Inscribed at the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty in New York City. === "The other threat to the security of our tradition, I believe, lies at home. It is the current fear of radical ideas and of people who propound them. I do not agree with the extremists of either the left or the right, but I think they should be allowed to speak and to publish, both because they themselves have, and ought to have, rights, and once their rights are gone, the rights of the rest of us are hardly safe." Jane Jacobs, in a letter to the Loyalty Security Board (aka McCarthysim grinder machine). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Jacobs === "Depression is a flaw in chemistry not character." Anonymous === "And now, since you are the father of writing, your affection for it has made you describe its effects as the opposite of what they really are. In fact, it will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own." Attributed to Socrates. http://newlearningonline.com/literacies/chapter-1-literacies-on-a-human-scale/socrates-on-the-forgetfulness-that-comes-with-writing/ === "In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law, as would the rabid segregationist. That would lead to anarchy. One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law." Martin Luther King http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2013/01/the-end-of-ragequitting.html === Take care of your friends: "Ask yourself "Whose suicide would sadden but not surprise me?"" Clay Shirky http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2013/01/remembering-aaron-by-taking-care-of-each-other/ === "... Allen Short's excellent lightning talk from PyCon 2010: Big Brother's Design Rules (skip to 17:30). To summarize Allen's pithy maxims: * War is Peace: assume you are at war, all input is an attack, and then you can be at peace. * Slavery is Freedom: the more you constrain your code's behavior, the more freedom you have to act. The smaller your interface, the smaller your attack surface. * Ignorance is Strength: the less your code knows about, the fewer things it can break. This is the principle of least authority." http://nedbatchelder.com/blog/201302/war_is_peace.html? === "Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative." Kansas City Star newspaper article guidelines, when Ernest Hemingway worked there in 1917 or so. === "A good way of finding out who won a war, who lost a war, and what the war was about, is to ask who's cheering and who's depressed after it's over - this can give you interesting answers. So, for example, if you ask that question about the Second World War, you find out that the winners were the Nazis, the German industrialists who had supported Hitler, the Italian Fascists and the war criminals that were sent off to South America - they were all cheering at the end of the war. The losers of the war were the anti-fascist resistance, who were crushed all over the world. Either they were massacred like in Greece or South Korea, or just crushed like in Italy and France. That's the winners and losers. That tells you partly what the war was about. Now let's take the Cold War: Who's cheering and who's depressed? Let's take the East first. The people who are cheering are the former Communist Party bureaucracy who are now the capitalist entrepreneurs, rich beyond their wildest dreams, linked to Western capital, as in the traditional Third World model, and the new Mafia. They won the Cold War. The people of East Europe obviously lost the Cold War; they did succeed in overthrowing Soviet tyranny, which is a gain, but beyond that they've lost - they're in miserable shape and declining further. If you move to the West, who won and who lost? Well, the investors in General Motors certainly won. They now have this new Third World open again to exploitation - and they can use it against their own working classes. On the other hand, the workers in General Motors certainly didn't win, they lost. They lost the Cold War, because now there's another way to exploit them and oppress them and they're suffering from it." Forum with John Pilger and Harold Pinter in Islington, London, May 1994 === "Don't make decisions when you are angry. Don't make promises when you are happy." Anonymous === "Doing what you like is freedom. Liking what you do is happiness." Frank Tyger === "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." Philip K. Dick === "There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve." Henry David Thoreau === "Before you marry a person you should first make them use a computer with slow Internet to see who they really are." Twitted by Peter Klesken === "Data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, wisdom is not truth," Robert Royar (1994) paraphrasing Frank Zappa’s (1979) anadiplosis Read in: On the immortality of television sets: "function" in the human genome according to the evolution-free gospel of ENCODE. Dan Graur et al 2013. Genome Biology and Evolution. http://gbe.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2013/02/20/gbe.evt028.full.pdf === "There's an inflection point that occurs after you learn to read where you begin to read to learn". Nicholas Negroponte === Buffett is unlikely to invest in gold after the price declines, because it doesn’t fit his investing philosophy, said Luke Sims, co-portfolio manager of the Eagle Capital Growth Fund, which counts Berkshire among its largest holdings. "If you put your money into gold or other non-income- producing assets that are dependent on what someone else values that in the future, you’re in speculation," he said. "You’re not into investing." Warren Buffet's way of doing business. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-04-17/buffett-mocking-gold-sidesteps-slump-as-he-bets-on-stocks.html === "You wouldn’t worry so much about what people really thought of you if you knew just how seldom they do." Unknown. === "It is a strange moment when you realize that the sound of nature is the sound of millions of animals, birds, and insects desperately trying to get laid." Read at https://twitter.com/IamJackyBlack/status/238116140436582403 === "I commend my soul to any god that can find it." Terry Pratchet === "Optimization hinders evolution." Alan J. Perlis === "Global warming is the Earth running a fever to kill off an infection." 'Sudden Clarity Clarence' http://www.quickmeme.com/meme/3uku5h/ === "You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end, which you can never afford to lose, with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be." Admiral Stockdale https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5789816 === "If you work in customer service, put a mirror behind your desk. People are less likely to yell or act like assholes when they see what they look like flipping out." 'Advice Mallard', http://i.imgur.com/IwjzsZw.jpg === "To people who say giving up privacy is okay because you don't do anything illegal .. remember that such surveillance contradicts the Miranda rights. You should always have the right to remain silent. Surveillance doesn't give you that option." Related to US PRISM web surveillance scandal, 2013. http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/1fwhkx/what_we_have_is_concrete_proof_of_usbased/caemcex === Regarding the "If you have nothing to hide there's nothing to worry about" in the context of the government snooping on citizens: "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." Cardinal Richelieu (disputed citation) === "If there is one thing that sucks for an inventor it is to see their inventions being turned around from good uses to bad uses." [In reference to the use of the internet as a surveillance Big Brother device, offending the inventor of the internet Tim Berners-Lee.] Jacques Mattheij (jacquesm) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5859541 === "A lie told by everyone is treated as the truth." Jonathan Turley http://jonathanturley.org/2013/06/12/an-inconvenient-truth-members-of-congress-go-silent-over-prior-false-testimony-on-surveillance/ === "What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that our desire will ruin us." Neil Postman Read at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5907803 === Linguistic suprise: Ethimology of 'assassin': Medieval Latin assassinus, from Arabic ḥashshāshīn, plural of ḥashshāsh worthless person, literally, hashish user, from hashīsh hashish. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/assassin === "The very word 'secrecy' is repugnant in a free and open society" John F. Kennedy Full quote: "The very word 'secrecy' is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. [...] there is little value in opposing the threat of a closed society by imitating its arbitrary restrictions. Even today, there is little value in insuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it." John F. Kennedy http://bit.ly/152zczP === "Nothing is so dangerous to the progress of the human mind than to assume that our views of science are ultimate, that there are no mysteries in nature, that our triumphs are complete and that there are no new worlds to conquer." Humphry Davy, 1810 Quoted in "On the Training of Future Neuroscientists: Insights from the Grass Laboratory" by Alberto E. Pereda, Felix E. Schweizer and Steven J. Zottoli. http://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(13)00536-9 === "None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe === "From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_blue_dot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PaleBlueDot.jpg View of Earth from Saturn and from Mercury: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap130723.html Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, 1997 reprint, pp. xv–xvi. === "Never interrupt someone doing something you said couldn't be done." Amelia Earhart === "The map is not the territory." Unknown. === User "300bps" said: As a U.S. Citizen I support Snowden. Since 1865, there have been 5,031 deaths and 22,125 injuries caused by terrorism in the United States. Source: http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/terrorism/wrjp255a.html 5,000 deaths in 148 years. In 2011, 32,367 people died in vehicle accidents. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_in... There are all kinds of cancers that "only" kill 1,000 or so people per year that are deemed not worthy of research because they are so rare. But for terrorism, we sacrifice nearly inexhaustible supplies of money and time. We sacrifice our liberty, our privacy. None of it makes any sense. Terrorism is nothing but fear mongering to effect an increase in power. User "corresation" said: The fallacy of the comparison to heart disease/cancer/traffic accidents is that tremendous resources are spent preventing and then resolving those issues as well. They are side effects of living productively, however, so we can't rationally just ban cars. But we can put hundreds of thousands of officers on the road, and endlessly add regulations and safety features to our vehicles, etc. Snowden is a true hero in the sense of the word -- he is in actual, physical danger for what he has done for others -- however it is not a reasonable argument when people argue that terrorism is a non-issue because body-count less than some-other-body-count. Do you think those who wish to do you harm don't want to exponentially increase that count? If various groups could get a nuclear warhead or dirty bomb, do you really believe they wouldn't use it? If they could sabotage a major city's water supply or a nuclear power plant, do you think that would be below them? This doesn't seek to justify the NSA's all-encompassing surveillance at all (human intelligence is where it is at), however there is an actual possibility that they have actually preventing significant events. But the problem with proactive actions is that no one gives you credit for what didn't happen. As an aside, to add to what others mentioned about the enormous costs and economic damage that resulted from 9/11, for instance, another reason terrorism of even the smallest kind sees a dramatic response is that it is terrorism -- it terrorizes a whole populace. If someone randomly shoots people in parks, there will be a massive response because the impact is on everyone. Read on Hacker News, 2013-08-01 "300bps": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6139716 "corresation": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6140550 === "The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there’s no good reason to go into space—each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision." http://xkcd.com/893/ === "My favorite has always been the Gary Provost lesson on varying sentence length to create rhythm and flow." "This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals–sounds that say listen to this, it is important." jglusk http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1jltqn/writers_of_reddit_what_are_exceptionally_simple/cbg1zxy === "Every human has a finite number of heartbeats. I don't intend to waste any of mine." Neil Armstrong === The best description of psychopharmacological therapeutics I've ever heard was this: "It's like pouring gasoline on a car and hoping some gets into the gas tank." Joseph J. Pancrazio (Bioengineering Chair at Mason University) said this at a AAAS conference on neuroenhancement about a month ago, and I thought it was brilliant. By "Soluble Fish" http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1o85jg/how_do_antidepressants_ssris_and_snris_treat/ccpt0au === "The rise of capitalism and a very powerful state are, after all, recent in the United States. Many still foolishly believe themselves back in the pioneer tradition when success was easy, opportunities more plentiful than now, and the economic position of the individual was not likely to become static and hopeless." Was My Life Worth Living? by Emma Goldman, 1934 http://ucblibrary3.berkeley.edu/goldman/Writings/Essays/lifework.html === "The world is a comedy to those that think; a tragedy to those that feel" Horace Walpole === "... the course of our lives is not determined by the hardships we encounter, but by the resilience we show in the face of adversity – and the more connected we are with others, the better we are at coping with life’s difficulties." http://blog.longnow.org/02013/11/27/a-75-year-study-on-the-secrets-to-happiness/ From: George E. Vaillant, a longitudinal study of male population of Harvard students, including J.F. Kennedy. http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674004146 http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/05/thanks-mom/309287/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/06/what-makes-us-happy/307439/ === "Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires." Paraphrased from John Steinbeck http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Steinbeck === "It’s easy to get caught up in the heady buzz of making money. You should regard money as fuel for what you really want to do, not as a goal in and of itself. Money is like gas in the car — you need to pay attention or you’ll end up on the side of the road — but a well-lived life is not a tour of gas stations!" Tim O'Reilly http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/01/work-on-stuff-that-matters-fir.html === "Money will take you where you want to go, but it will not replace you as the driver." Ayn Rand === "... and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." TS Eliot http://amapress.gen.cam.ac.uk/?p=1326 === "It always worked out that when I understood something, it turned out to be simple." Carver Mead Spectator Interview http://freespace.virgin.net/ch.thompson1/People/CarverMead.htm === "Climb mountains not so the world can see you, but so you can see the world." Author unknown. === "There's a tendency today to absolve individuals of moral responsibility and treat them as victims of social circumstance. You buy that, you pay with your soul." Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker === "War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes." Smedley D. Butler United States Marine Corps Major General and two time Medal of Honor recipient. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket === "In his penultimate chapter, Butler argues that three steps are necessary to disrupt the war racket:" "1. Making war unprofitable. Butler suggests that the owners of capital should be "conscripted" before other citizens are: "It can be smashed effectively only by taking the profit out of war. The only way to smash this racket is to conscript capital and industry and labour before the nation's manhood can be conscripted. [...] Let the officers and the directors and the high-powered executives of our armament factories and our steel companies and our munitions makers and our ship-builders and our airplane builders and the manufacturers of all other things that provide profit in war time as well as the bankers and the speculators, be conscripted — to get $30 a month, the same wage as the lads in the trenches get." "2. Acts of war to be decided by those who fight it. He also suggests a limited plebiscite to determine if the war is to be fought. Eligible to vote would be those who risk death on the front lines." "3. Limitation of militaries to self-defence. For the United States, Butler recommends that the navy be limited, by law, to within 200 miles of the coastline, and the army restricted to the territorial limits of the country, ensuring that war, if fought, can never be one of aggression." Smedley D. Butler United States Marine Corps Major General and two time Medal of Honor recipient. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket === "Science is not a democracy it is a dictatorship of the truth." Bob Darnell https://twitter.com/darnelr/status/436648878096793600 http://lab.rockefeller.edu/darnell/ === "The aspects of things that are most important to us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity." Ludwig Wittgenstein === "Rules are for the guidance of wise men and the obedience of fools." Douglas Bader http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Douglas_Bader http://www.businessinsider.com/the-gselevator-guide-to-being-a-man-2013-9 === "It's not greed that runs the world, but envy." Warren Buffet, quoted by Charlie Munger in his talk about the psychology of human misjudgment. Speech at Harvard University, 1995. === "I don't think that vengeance is much good." Charlie Munger in his talk about the psychology of human misjudgment. Speech at Harvard University, 1995. === "Soup is done when you find yourself inventing reasons to taste it twice." Paul Graham https://twitter.com/paulg/status/450123234046795777 === "If the path before you is clear, you're probably on someone else's." Joseph Campbell https://twitter.com/tinybuddha/status/453231009073729536 === "If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in." Edsger Dijkstra === "Ideas have fundamental performance properties." Pete Hunt http://murilopereira.com/the-case-for-reactjs-and-clojurescript/#/80:w === "MEN WANTED For hazardous journey, small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful, honor and recognition in case of success." Ernest Schakleton 4 Burlington st." === "One touch of nature makes the whole world kin." In William Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, Act III, Scene iii - Ulysses, speaking to Achilles. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makes_the_Whole_World_Kin === "We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living." Buckminster Fuller https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7726090 === "Make sure your own mask is on, before helping others with theirs." Read on reddit as "best life advice". === "Next time you find yourself thinking, I don't have time for X, instead think, I am not making X a priority. Then stop and see how it feels." http://www.reddit.com/r/LifeProTips/comments/25u73z/lpt_next_time_you_find_yourself_thinking_i_do_not/ === "Are you boasting or complaining?" http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/18/books/review/what-are-the-draws-and-drawbacks-of-success-for-writers.html === "When you can make a man wait in line, you have broken him." Jamie Zawinski https://twitter.com/jwz/status/473371933195522048 === "Airbnb disrupted the old-school mentality that only certain, privileged people should be allowed to provide lodging services and the rest of us ought to be content with being passive consumers. Ride sharing services disrupted the old-school mentality that only certain, privileged people should be allowed to provide driving services and the rest of us ought to be content with being passive consumers. Open-source software disrupted the old-school mentality that only certain, privileged people should be allowed publish software and the rest of us ought to be content with being passive consumers. 3D printers disrupted the old-school mentality that only certain, privileged people should be allowed to produce physical goods and the rest of us ought to be content with being passive consumers. Peer-to-peer lending disrupted the old-school mentality that only certain, privileged people should be allowed provide loans and the rest of us ought to be content with being passive consumers. The Internet disrupted the old-school mentality that only certain, privileged people should be allowed to publish all kinds of media and the rest of us ought to be content with being passive consumers." ryandrake https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7896176 === "The best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question, it's to post the wrong answer." Ward Cunningham, inventor of the wiki. (Related: "Dutty calls: someone is wrong on the internet" http://xkcd.com/386/ ) === "When we are aware of the world and the scale of its inhumanity and stupidity we feel small. It very hard to "think globally" and "act locally", because by thinking globally we become overwhelmed with the scale of the problems to be solved. However the Internet permits many people to act globally in a way they couldn't before. WikiLeaks is a realisation of this tension. By releasing materials on many parts of the world, we empower others to think and act. What can ordinary people do? Support and promote projects that are acting at scale. WikiLeaks is my realisation of this tension, but there are a flood of others starting. The clash between diversity and global uniformity which has been created by wiring the world to itself is now in play. You are the troops." Julian Assange http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/28js8v/i_am_julian_assange_publisher_of_wikileaks_ask_me/ciblfvf === "Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect." Mark Twain https://twitter.com/RJSzczerba/status/495673901507420160 === "Art is a lie that tells the truth." In context: "When I paint, my object is to show what I have found and not what I am looking for. In art intentions are not sufficient and, as we say in Spanish: love must be proved by facts and not by reasons. What one does is what counts and not what one had the intention of doing. We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies. If he only shows in his work that he has searched, and re-searched, for the way to put over lies, he would never accomplish anything." Picasso Past Masters: Picasso Speaks, 1923. Scot Borofsky, editor http://www.gallerywalk.org/PM_Picasso.html http://www.quotedb.com/quotes/2306 === "I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it." Picasso http://www.quotedb.com/quotes/2025 === "The aim of life isn't to be on the side of the majority, but to avoid being in the ranks of the insane." Marcus Aurelius http://twitter.com/calestous/status/495674528602005504 === "The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that is wrong with the world." Paul Farmer https://twitter.com/paulg/status/503201390349393920 === "Honor is doing the right thing when nobody is looking." Exemple: the Baytown firefighters, in Texas, USA. http://www.khou.com/story/news/local/neighborhood/2014/08/29/baytown-firefighters-random-act-of-kindness-goes-viral/14841397/ === "If you are not prepared to be wrong you will never come up with anything original." Sir Ken Robinson === "Mathematicians need only peace of mind and, occasionally, paper and pencil." The Man Who Loved Only Numbers The Story of Paul Erdös and the Search for Mathematical Truth CHAPTER ONE http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/h/hoffman-man.html === "The trouble is that the balls go where you throw them." Well-known saying in juggling. In "The Man Who Loved Only Numbers", by Paul Hoffman. Atlantic Monthly. http://cs.brynmawr.edu/Courses/cs231/fall2013/lecs/erdos.pdf === "If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another." Carl Sagan === "Estamos governando la globalización, o la globalización nos está governando a nosotros?" (Do we rule over globalization, or does globalization rules us?) José Mujica, "El Pepe", speech at Río+20. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cQgONgTupo === "The difference between reality and fiction? Fiction has to make sense." Tom Clancy === "To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the need for thought." Henri Poincaré, 1854--1912, "Science and hypothesis". === "Any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats." George Orwell. https://twitter.com/mkonnikova/status/534688193086771201 === "The more we gave in, the more we complied with that kind of treatment, the more oppressive it became." Rosa Parks Parks Recalls Bus Boycott, Excerpts from an interview with Lynn Neary, National Public Radio (1992) === "Remember, today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday." Dale Carnegie === "I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything that I don’t know the other side’s argument better than they do." Charlie Munger === "To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time." Leonard Bernstein https://twitter.com/cdixon/status/565651097306820610 === "There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution." John Adams http://sealedabstract.com/rants/google-our-patron-saint-of-the-closed-web/ === "If it starts with hate, it will end in suffering, no matter how righteous the cause." Paul Buchheit https://twitter.com/paultoo/status/572208404057468931 === "Cuando la tiranía es ley, la revolución es orden." (When tyranny is law, revolution is order) Pedro Albizu Campos http://es.wikiquote.org/wiki/Pedro_Albizu_Campos === "If the highest aim of a captain were to preserve his ship, he would keep it in port forever." Thomas Aquinas https://twitter.com/AquinasQuotes/status/578896702481952768 === "A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in." Greek proverb http://imgur.com/xVxWhME === "Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans." Jacques-Yves Cousteau http://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/gallery/2015/apr/01/over-population-over-consumption-in-pictures === "I don’t understand why when we destroy something created by man we call it vandalism, but when we destroy something created by nature we call it progress." Ed Begley, Jr. http://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/gallery/2015/apr/01/over-population-over-consumption-in-pictures === "Destroy my desires, eradicate my ideals, show me something better, and I will follow you." Fyodor Dostoyevsky @DailyZen https://twitter.com/dailyzen/status/585019179738234880 === "Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it." P. J. O'Rourke http://twitter.com/JohnDCook/status/588014299236458498 === "It's far easier to criticize than to build." Bjarne Stroustrup https://twitter.com/JohnDCook/status/594938593510043648 === "The cheapest, fastest and most reliable components of a computer system are those that aren't there." Gordon Bell https://twitter.com/JohnDCook/status/598130547278389250 === "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron." Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1953 === "And then, last but the reverse of least, there plunged in all the people who think they can solve a problem they cannot understand by abolishing everything that has contributed to it. We all know these people. If a barber has cut his customer's throat because the girl has changed her partner for a dance or donkey ride on Hampstead Heath, there are always people to protest against the mere institutions that led up to it. This would not have happened if barbers were abolished, or if cutlery were abolished, or if the objection felt by girls to imperfectly grown beards were abolished, or if the girls were abolished, or if heaths and open spaces were abolished, or if dancing were abolished, or if donkeys were abolished. But donkeys, I fear, will never be abolished." G.K. Chesterton https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Flying_Inn/Chapter_IX === "The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him" Leo Tolstoy, 1897 === "I love to discover potential in people who aren’t thought to have any." Oliver Sacks People magazine, 1986 http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20093177,00.html === "Any man can withstand adversity; if you want to test his character, give him power." Abraham Lincoln === "when you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression." https://twitter.com/nASHtygal/status/650695257080918016 https://instagram.com/nashtygal/ === "Privilege is when you think something is not a problem because it's not a problem to you personally." https://twitter.com/ReverantRevan/status/651125403092840449 === "However subservient someone acts towards you when you have power over them, thats exactly how they expect others to act towards them when they have power." https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3oeqvu/whats_the_most_satisfying_no_youve_ever_given/cvwu36n === "Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties." Erich Fromm http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/e/erichfromm151839.html === "Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights." From: "Why socialism?", Monthly Review, 1949. Albert Einsten http://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/ === "The enemy is fear. We think it is hate, but it is fear." Gandhi === "I do not think that there is any other quality so essential to success of any kind as the quality of perseverance." Rockefeller, 1901 === "You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you. What you do makes a difference. And you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make." Jane Goodall http://www.doonething.org/heroes/pages-g/goodall-quotes.htm === "The formulation of a problem is often more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill. To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science." A. Einstein and L. Infeld (Quoted in: "Collective Electrodynamics" by Carver Mead.) === "With guns you can kill terrorists. With education, you can kill terrorism." Malala Yousafzai === "Guns don’t kill people. People kill people." By this logic, arsenic and the atomic bomb should be legal too. "Why aren’t we talking about banning cars, knives and baseball bats?" Cars, knives and baseball bats have other purposes than killing. Guns don’t. "We don’t know that tighter gun laws will reduce violence!" They have in Great Britain, Japan, Australia, Finland, Spain, Germany and Canada. Let’s take a chance. "Drugs are illegal and people still do drugs!" By that logic we should not have laws against murder. "Just arm the teachers!" This only treats a symptom of the–OhMyGodICantFinishMySentenceYouAreFuckingInsane "We need better mental health programs and regulation of violent video games!" Agreed. But that’s called changing the subject. "We need to be able to defend ourselves from the government!" The Pentagon spent 664.84 billion dollars in 2011. But seriously, tell me about your assault rifles. "Firearm deaths are WAY far down the list of causes of death in America!" So is breast cancer. Should we stop searching for a cure? "But…it’s in the Constitution!" So was slavery. "Legislation won’t solve the root of the problem!" When Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Bill, it’s not as if suddenly there were no racists. But 50 years later we have a black president. Laws don’t change societies, they shape them. Maybe in another 50, after effective gun legislation, we go 12 months without a school shooting. https://garlingfiles.wordpress.com/2012/12/20/become-simple-minded-about-gun-control/ http://cite.neocities.org/?305 === "The measure of mental health is the disposition to find good everywhere." Ralph Waldo Emerson https://twitter.com/sarahkpeck/status/676778971170775040 === "One is not born, but rather becomes a woman." Simon the Beauvoir In: "Performative acts and gender constitution: an essay on phenomenology and feminist theory", by Judith Butler. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3207893?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents === "Deny a fact, and that fact will be your master." Russell Kirk === "You will be judged (or you will be ignored)" Seth Godin http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2012/05/you-will-be-judged-or-you-will-be-ignored.html === "Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel." Socrates === Richard Feynman's famous conclusion to his report on the shuttle Challenger accident, which arose again in the Columbia accident, is "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0002gi === "Ron's First Law: All extreme positions are wrong." http://blog.rongarret.info/2016/01/my-simplified-response-to-paul-grahams.html === "For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring." Carl Sagan https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html === "There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self." Ernest Hemingway === "Holding on to anger is like drinking poison and expecting your enemy to die." http://fakebuddhaquotes.com/holding-onto-anger-is-like-drinking-poison/ === "in most hierarchies, super-competence is more objectionable than incompetence. Ordinary incompetence ... is no cause for dismissal: it is simply a bar to promotion. Super-competence often leads to dismissal, because it disrupts the hierarchy" "In time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties." "Work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence." From the book "The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong" "The book coins the term “hierarchical exfoliation” to describe how organizations rid themselves of both the least competent and the most competent people." http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2012/08/29/super-competence/ === "All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptable." Frank Herbert === "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority; still more when you superadd the tendency of the certainty of corruption by authority." http://www.acton.org/research/lord-acton-quote-archive === "Don't hurry, don't worry, you're only here for a short visit, so be sure to smell the flowers along the way." Walter Hagen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Hagen === "When you are dead, you don't know that you are dead. It is difficult only for the others. It is the same when you are stupid." === "...The Bill of Rights is a literal and absolute document. The First Amendment doesn't say you have a right to speak out unless the government has a 'compelling interest' in censoring the Internet. The Second Amendment doesn't say you have the right to keep and bear arms until some madman plants a bomb. The Fourth Amendment doesn't say you have the right to be secure from search and seizure unless some FBI agent thinks you fit the profile of a terrorist. The government has no right to interfere with any of these freedoms under any circumstances." Harry Browne, 1996 USA presidential candidate, Libertarian Party Read in Eric S. Raymond's email footer. https://lwn.net/2000/0824/a/esr-sharing.php3 === "Do you know what a foreign accent is? It is a sign of bravery." Amy Chua, Battle Humn of the Tiger Mother http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/511825-do-you-know-what-a-foreign-accent-is-it-s-a === "The pain doesn’t go away; but somehow or other, empathy gives the pain meaning and pain-with-meaning is bearable. I don’t actually know how to say what the effect of empathy is, I can only say what it’s like. Like magic." Ann Finkbeiner February 17, 2016 http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2016/02/17/what-happened-next/ === "Both optimists and pessimists contribute to society. The optimist invents the aeroplane, the pessimist the parachute." George Bernand Shaw "And the opportunist sells insurance" http://imgur.com/t/philosophy/KqLVOG0 === "A flower doest not think of competing to the flower next to it. It just blooms." Zen Shin === "Practice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize you’re already in heaven now" Jack Kerouac https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/08/31/universe-one-song-jack-kerouac-lois-beckwith/ === "It is an underacknowledged truism that, just as you are what you eat, how and what you think depends on what information you are exposed to." Tim Wu, "The Master Switch". === "The are books with the same chemical composition as dynamite. The difference lies only in the fact that one stick of dynamite explodes once, but one book explodes thousands of times." Eugene Zamiatin, 1884-1937. === "The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed." Ernest Hemingway === "It is astonishing as well as sad, how many trivial affairs even the wisest thinks he must attend to in a day." Henry David Thoreau === "The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness." Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms: The Play https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/4ewbp9/besides_rent_what_is_too_damn_expensive/d23yci6 === "Being angry or sad at facts is a waste of time." From: "A protocol for Dying", by Peter Hintjens. http://hintjens.com/blog:115 === "Nodding the head does not row the boat." Irish Proverb https://twitter.com/calestous/status/724270601960087552 === "Facts are stubborn things." Mark Twain === The first alien says, "The dominant life forms on the Earth planet have developed satellite-based nuclear weapons." The second alien asks, "Are they an emerging intelligence?" The first alien says, "I don't think so, they have aimed at themselves" https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/4jjgup/in_space_two_aliens_are_talking_to_each_other/ === The most dangerous worldview is the worldview of those who have not viewed the world." Alexander von Humboldt, nineteenth-century explorer. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v531/n7593/full/531170a.html === "Real change never ever takes place from the top on down, it always takes place from the bottom on up." Bernie Sanders, 2016. === "It's easy to criticize refugees, until you witness their courage." https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/736165765859135488 === "A stupid man’s report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand." Bertrand Russell http://kingsreview.co.uk/magazine/blog/2014/02/24/how-academia-and-publishing-are-destroying-scientific-innovation-a-conversation-with-sydney-brenner/#comment-2658 === "I’m suddenly reminded that, for a while, I asked people, if they were play- ing Russian roulette with a gun with a billion barrels (or some huge number, so in other words, some low probability that they would actually be killed), how much would they have to be paid to play one round? A lot of people were almost offended by the question and they’d say, “I wouldn’t do it at any price.” But, of course, we do that every day. They drive to work in cars to earn money and they are taking risks all the time, but they don’t like to acknowledge that they are taking risks. They want to pretend that everything is risk-free." Paul Bucheit, in "Founders at work" by Jessica Livingstone. === "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." Robert Heinlein === "It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently." Warren Buffett === "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it is tied to everything else in the universe." John Muir http://annmh.com/research/quotes.html === A scientist has "a healthy skepticism, suspended judgement, and disciplined imagination" —not only about other people’s ideas but also about his or her own. The scientist has an experimental mind, not a litigious one. Hubble said it best when he said, "The scientist explains the world by successive approximations." Quote by Edwin Hubble. Extract from The New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-mistrust-of-science === "The biggest mistake you can make is listening to people who've given up on their dreams telling you to give up on yours." Umair Hague https://twitter.com/calestous/status/746059133389017088 === "Management is about persuading people to do things they do not want to do, while leadership is about inspiring people to do things they never thought they could." Steve Jobs === "The main job of theoretical physics is to prove yourself wrong as soon as possible." Richard Feynman === "History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people." Martin Luther King, Jr. === A student said to his master: "You teach me fighting. But you talk about peace. How do you reconcile the two?" The master replied: "It is better to be a warrior in a garden than to be a gardener in a war." === “What experience and history teach is this — that people and governments never have learned anything from history.” Hegel, German philosopher === "The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots." H.L. Mencken https://twitter.com/michikokakutani/status/705228332552626176 === "I really see no reason why we should have been lucky enough to live at the point where the universe was understood in its totality." Vera Rubin, astronomer https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/04/18/vera-rubin-interview-women-in-science/ === "You shouldn’t give your opinion on everything just because you can." On why the boss should self-apply restraint to keep the employee feeling that he fully owns the project and therefore well motivated. Derek Sivers https://sivers.org/2c === "In order to attain the impossible, one must attempt the absurd." Miguel de Cervantes [In other words: break out of your limiting frame.] http://www.percevalpress.com/ === "Liberty consists in the division of power. Absolutism, in the concentration of power." Lord Acton https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/763283865238577153 === "The truth, no matter how bad, is never as dangerous as a lie in the long run." Ben Bradlee May 30, 1973 === "Science is the only news. When you scan through a newspaper or magazine, all the human interest stuff is the same old he-said-she-said, the politics and economics the same sorry cyclic dramas, the fashions a pathetic illusion of newness, and even the technology is predictable if you know the science. Human nature doesn’t change much; science does, and the change accrues, altering the world irreversibly." Steward Brand Whole Earth Discipline (2009), page 216. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Stewart_Brand === "In any art you’re allowed to steal anything if you can make it better." Ernest Hemingway https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/01/04/with-hemingway-arnold-samuelson-writing/ === "I'm sorry, if you were right, I'd agree with you." Robin Williams === "There have been two great narcotics in European civilisation: Christianity and alcohol." Nietzsche http://thephilosophersmail.com/perspective/the-great-philosophers-4-nietzsche/ === "There’s often a big gap between changing the world and convincing people that you changed the world." On the first flight of the Wright's brothers, which was not reported until 4 and a half years later. http://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/when-you-change-the-world-and-no-one-notices/ === "I do not go to church anymore... I guess you might say I've come around to secular humanism, an obligation I believe all humans have to others and the world we live in." Charles M. Schulz, comic book author and creator of Peanuts, with Snoopy and Charlie Brown. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_M._Schulz === "Knowledge sets us free, art sets us free. A great library is freedom." Ursula K. Le Guin === "Nationalism is an infantile thing. It is the measles of mankind." Albert Einstein === "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." George Orwell https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/George_Orwell === "The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane." Marcus Aurelius. === "Alone among systems of government, democracy imposes duties on the ruled as well as the rulers. It doesn’t work if those duties are shirked by too many people." "Joseph Britt in Wisconsin, who has worked on campaigns and in government for Republican politicians." Rephrased by James Fallows: "Democracy doesn’t work if its duties are shirked by too many people." https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2016/11/after-the-election-what-a-pathetic-thing-is-decadence/507635/ === "Conquering the world on horseback is easy; it is dismounting and governing that is hard." Yelu Chucai said this to Genghis Khan https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Genghis_Khan#Quotes_said_to_Genghis_Khan === "That depends on the length of the speech," answered the President. "If it is a ten-minute speech it takes me all of two weeks to prepare it; if it is a half-hour speech it takes me a week; if I can talk as long as I want to it requires no preparation at all. I am ready now." Woodrow Wilson === "In my whole life, I have known no wise people who didn't read all the time —none, zero." Charlie Munger === "Get curious, not furious." Martin Hellman, of the Diffie-Hellman key exchange algorithm for cryptography. === "I always wonder why birds stay in the same place when they can fly anywhere on the earth. They I ask myself the same question." Harun Yahya === "I don't want to believe. I want to know." Carl Sagan === "Above all, don't fear difficult movements. The best comes from them." Rita Levi-Montalcini https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/finding-her-nerve/ === "Let theory guide your observations [otherwise one] might as well go into a gravel pit and count the pebbles and describe the colours." Darwin, 1903 In: Lawrence P, 2016 "Francis Crick: a singular approach to scientific discovery" === "Anger -- it's a paralyzing emotion. You can't get anything done. People sort of think it's an interesting, passionate, and igniting feeling. I don't think it's any of that. It's helpless, it's absence of control -- and I need all of my skills, all of the control, all of my powers, and anger doesn't provide any of that. I have no use for it whatsoever." Toni Morrison https://twitter.com/stevesilberman/status/806308468231524352 === "To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public." Theodore Roosevelt, former president of the USA. === "Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations." George Orwell === "Would I had phrases that are not known, utterances that are strange, in new language that has not been used, free from repetition, not an utterance that has grown stale, which men of old have spoken." Wrote the scribus Khakheperresenb 2000 B.C. Quoted in "The Burden of the Past and the English Poet" by Walter Jackson Bate, 1970. === "He who is unable to live in a society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god." Aristotle 384 BC === "Peace is not the absence of war but the absence of fear." Ursula Franklin https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/gone-in-2016-10-notable-women-in-science-and-technology/ === "Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see." Arthur Schopenhauer https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Arthur_Schopenhauer === "If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts he shall end in certainties." Francis Bacon https://medium.com/@edelwax/nothing-to-be-done-bfe2ce71a3a2 === "The real tragedy of the poor is the poverty of their aspirations." Adam Smith https://medium.com/@edelwax/nothing-to-be-done-bfe2ce71a3a2 === "Women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men; they are far superior and always have been." William Golding "Whatever you give a woman, she will make greater. If you give her sperm, she’ll give you a baby. If you give her a house, she’ll give you a home. If you give her groceries, she’ll give you a meal. If you give her a smile, she’ll give you her heart. She multiplies and enlarges that which is given to her. So, if you give her any crap, be ready to receive a ton of shit!” Erick S. Gray === "Difficulties are just things to overcome after all." Ernest Shackleton === "Patriotism is the last refuge for a scoundrel." Samuel Johnson, April 1775 === "During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act." George Orwell https://twitter.com/bgreene/status/822824599503142914 === "a pair of great maxims, Principiis obsta and Finem respice—‘Resist the beginnings’ and ‘Consider the end.’" http://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html === "When you tell people what you think, they'll hate you. When you tell them what they want to hear, they'll love you. If they neither hate you nor love you, they are either deaf, or you have found an outstanding human being. Cultivate a friendship." Me, February 6th, 2017. === "Practice doesn't make perfect. Rather, practice makes Permanent - locks it in. And perfect practice makes perfect. Practicing the wrong way is like having a bad habit. The habit (practice) is bad but it locks in nonetheless. Perfect Practice: To reach perfection, care has to be taking when practicing to encode things the right way. Good coaches accomplish this by: 1. Slowing down the action e.g. playing a piano or a violin at a painfully slow rate to make errors more noticeable. 2. Chunking - breaking down the skill into smaller components and practicing these chunks separately. E.g. tearing music notes into pieces and practicing the notes separately." Books: Little Book of Talent, The Talent Code https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13577000 === "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." Benjamin Franklin === "When it gets down to having to use violence, then you are playing the system's game. The establishment will irritate you--pull your beard, flick your face--to make you fight! Because once they've got you violent, then they know how to handle you. The only thing they don't know how to handle is non-violence and humor." John Lennon === "There is no God. There's no heaven. There's no hell. There are no angels. When you die, you go in the ground, the worms eat you." Madalyn Murray O'Hair http://www.crimemagazine.com/murder-madalyn-murray-ohair-americas-most-hated-woman-1 === "We shall pass this way on Earth but once, if there is any kindness we can show, or good act we can do, let us do it now, for we will never pass this way again." Stephen Grellet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Blocker === SUCCESS "To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even on life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded." Ralph Waldo Emerson === "What Orwell failed to predict was that we'd buy the cameras ourselves and that our biggest fear would be that nobody was watching." Keith Jensen === On doublespeak getting out of control: "Someone needs to explain to me why wanting clean drinking water makes you an activist, and why proposing to destroy water with chemical warfare doesn't make a corporation a terrorist." Winona Laduke === "If I had not gone into Monty Python, I probably would have stuck to my original plan to graduate and become a chartered accountant, perhaps a barrister lawyer, and gotten a nice house in the sububrs, with a nice wife and kids, and gotten a country club membership, and then I would have killed myself." John Cleese === "The problem with humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology." E.O. Wilson === "Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more so that we may fear less." Marie Curie === "Anybody who doesn’t change their mind a lot is dramatically underestimating the complexity of the world we live in." Jeff Bezos === "If you are good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure." Jeff Bezos === "Be sure brain is in gear before engaging mouth." [Supposedly] a sign at the Air Force Academy in Colorado. http://www.cs.vu.nl//~ast/reliable-os/ === "In my many years I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more is a congress." John Adams https://simple.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Adams === "Well, if it's naive to want peace instead of war, let 'em make sure they say I'm naive. Because I want peace instead of war. If they tell me they want war instead of peace, I don't say they're naive, I say they're stupid. Stupid to an incredible degree to send young people out to kill other young people they don't even know, who never did anybody any harm, never harmed them. That is the current system. I am naive? That's insane." Ben Ferencz http://www.cbsnews.com/news/what-the-last-nuremberg-prosecutor-alive-wants-the-world-to-know/ === "How inappropriate to call this planet Earth, when it is clearly Ocean." Arthur C. Clarke === "There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance. That principle is contempt prior to investigation." Herbert Spencer https://www.instagram.com/p/BVxysOlA04j/ === "The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten." Benjamin Franklin https://joshondesign.com/2017/07/02/hire_old_programmer === "What you read when you don't have to determines what you will be when you can't help it." Oscar Wilde === ""The person who is brutally honest enjoys the brutality quite as much as the honesty." Richard Needham https://twitter.com/JohnDCook/status/889216528717156353 === "To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also." Igor Stravinsky https://twitter.com/themusicalbrain/status/892380557069488129 === "Anyone who thinks scientists like agreeing with one another has never attended a scientific conference." Neil deGrasse Tyson https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/906893575916445696 === "Qui vol fer quelcom cerca un estri, qui no una excusa." [Who wants to do something seeks a tool, who doesn't, a excuse." Arab proverb. https://directa.cat/carta-del-pare-0 === "If voting made any difference they wouldn't let us do it" Mark Twain (unproven) https://www.snopes.com/mark-twain-voting-quote/ === "If you are willing to look at another person's behavior toward you as a reflection of the state of their relationship with themselves rather than a statement about your value as a person, then you will, over a period time cease to react at all." Yogi Bhajan === "The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists." Hannah Arendt === "If you think you are too small to matter, try to sleep in a room with a mosquito." Anita Roddick === "Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear." Albert Camus === "Don't assume I am incapable of understanding new technology because I am old and I will not assume you are incapable of understanding time-tested investment wisdom because you are young." Peter Brandt https://twitter.com/PeterLBrandt/status/925002398736592897 === "Many attacks have lately been made on the conduct of various scientific bodies, and of their officers, and severe criticism has been lavished upon some of their productions. Newspapers, Magazines, Reviews, and Pamphlets, have all been put in requisition for the purpose. Odium has been cast upon some of these for being anonymous. If a fact is to be established by testimony, anonymous assertion is of no value; if it can be proved, by evidence to which the public has access, it is of no consequence (for the cause of truth) who produces it. A matter of opinion derives weight from the name which is attached to it; but a chain of reasoning is equally conclusive, whoever may be its author." Charles Babbage, 1830. https://twitter.com/lakens/status/923561390748717056 === "The three great virtues of a programmer are laziness, impatience, and hubris." Larry Wall (creator of the Perl programming language) https://twitter.com/pkrumins/status/933075813246881793 === "Cuando mi mujer va a trabajar yo limpio la casa, hago las camas y preparo la comida. Además baño a la niña y la visto. Si crees que un anarquista tiene que estar metido en un bar o un café mientras su mujer trabaja, quiere decir que no has comprendido nada." ("When my wife goes to work then I clean up the house, do the beds and get food ready. And I also bath our daughter and dress her up. If you believe that an anarchist has to stay put in a bar or caffe while his wife works, that means you didn't understand anything.") Buenaventura Durruti, 1986-1936. https://twitter.com/Candeliano/status/932585217113706496 === "When I was poor and complained about inequality they said I was bitter; now that I'm rich and I complain about inequality they say I'm a hypocrite. I'm beginning to think they just don't want to talk about inequality." Russell Brand https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/6584041-when-i-was-poor-and-complained-about-inequality-they-said === "You will continue to suffer if you have an emotional reaction to everything that is said to you. True power is sitting back and observing everything with logic. If words control you that means everyone else can control you. Breathe and allow things to pass." Bruce Lee