Quotations

" Don't use quotations. Tell me what you know." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

" The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit." - W. Somerset Maugham

" I believe there is no source of deception in the investigation of nature which can compare with a fixed belief that certain kinds of phenomena are impossible." - William James

" Round about the accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort of dust-cloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and irregular and seldom met with, which it always proves more easy to ignore than to attend to... Anyone will renovate his science who will steadily look after the irregular phenomena, and when science is renewed, its new formulas often have more of the voice of the exceptions in them than of what were supposed to be the rules." - William James

" There is nothing so absurd that it cannot be believed as truth if repeated often enough." - William James

" Genius in truth means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way" - William James

" ...By far the most usual way of handling phenomena so novel that they would make for a serious rearrangement of our preconceptions is to ignore them altogether, or to abuse those who bear witness for them." - William James

" A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices." - William James

" It is through science that we prove, but through intuition that we discover." - Henri Poincare

" Doubt everything or believe everything: these are two equally convenient strategies. With either we dispense with the need for reflection." - Henri Poincare

" It is not uncommon for engineers to accept the reality of phenomena that are not yet understood, as it is very common for physicists to disbelieve the reality of phenomena that seem to contradict contemporary beliefs of physics" - H. Bauer

" It's like religion. Heresy [in science] is thought of as a bad thing, whereas it should be just the opposite." - Dr. Thomas Gold

" A man with a new idea is a crank until he succeeds." - Mark Twain

"If the man doesn't believe as we do, we say he is a crank, and that settles it. I mean, it does nowadays, because now we can't burn him." - Mark Twain

" When the human race has once acquired a superstition, nothing short of death is ever likely to remove it." - Mark Twain

" Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't." - Mark Twain

" Name the greatest of all the inventors. Accident." - Mark Twain

" The altar cloth of one eon is the doormat of the next." - Mark Twain

" The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out the conservative adopts them." - Mark Twain

" You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus." - Mark Twain

" What is there that confers the noblest delight? What is that which swells a man's breast with pride above that which any other experience can bring to him? Discovery! To know that you are walking where none others have walked..." - Mark Twain

" The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also." - Mark Twain

" Modern science should indeed arouse in all of us a humility before the immensity of the unexplored and a tolerance for crazy hypotheses." - Martin Gardner

" Almost all really new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced." - Alfred North Whitehead

" There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em." - Louis Armstrong

" All great truths begin as blasphemies." - George Bernard Shaw

" If we watch ourselves honestly we shall often find that we have begun to argue against a new idea even before it has been completely stated." - Wilfred Trotter

"Be not astonished at new ideas; for it is well known to you that a thing does not therefore cease to be true because it is not accepted by many." - Baruch Spinoza

" 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

" Only a fool of a scientist would dismiss the evidence and reports in front of him and substitute his own beliefs in their place." - Paul Kurtz

" The creative person pays close attention to what appears discordant and contradictory... and is challenged by such irregularities." - F. Barron

" The voyage of discovery lies not in seeking new horizons, but in seeing with new eyes." - Marcel Proust

" If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?" - Albert Einstein

" When I examined myself and my methods of thought, I came to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge." - Albert Einstein

" No matter how we may single out a complex from nature...its theoretical treatment will never prove to be ultimately conclusive... I believe that this process of deepening of theory has no limits." - Albert Einstein

" One thing I have learned in a long life: that all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike - and yet it is the most precious thing we have." - Albert Einstein

" The skeptic will say, 'It may well be true that this system of equations is reasonable from a logical standpoint, but this does not prove that it corresponds to nature.' You are right, dear skeptic. Experience alone can decide on truth." - Albert Einstein

" The man who cannot occasionally imagine events and conditions of existence that are contrary to the causal principle as he knows it will never enrich his science by the addition of a new idea." - Max Planck

" If what we regard as real depends on our theory, how can we make reality the basis of our philosophy? ...But we cannot distinguish what is real about the universe without a theory...it makes no sense to ask if it corresponds to reality, because we do not know what reality is independent of a theory." - Stephen Hawking

" What we need is not the will to believe but the will to find out." - Bertrand Russell

" They are ill discoverers that think there is no land when they see nothing but sea." - Francis Bacon

" The universe is wider than our views of it." - Henry David Thoreau

" Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world." - Arthur Schopenhauer

" Who never walks save where he sees men's tracks makes no discoveries." - J.G. Holland

" In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual." - Galileo Galilei

" It is as fatal as it is cowardly to blink facts because they are not to our taste." - John Tyndall

" A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds." - Emerson

" Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." - Sir Martin Rees

" Advances are made by answering questions. Discoveries are made by questioning answers." - Bernhard Haisch

" The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question." -Stephen Jay Gould

" In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

" A danger sign of the lapse from true skepticism in to dogmatism is an inability to respect those who disagree" - Dr. Leonard George

" If I want to stop a research program I can always do it by getting a few experts to sit in on the subject, because they know right away that it was a fool thing to try in the first place." - Charles Kettering, GM

" Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality." - Carl Sagan

" If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you. You become a crotchety old person convinced that nonsense is ruling the world. - There is, of course, much data to support you. But every now and then, a new idea turns out to be on the mark, valid and wonderful. If you are too much in the habit of being skeptical about everything, you are going to miss or resent it, and either way you will be standing in the way of understanding and progress." - Carl Sagan

" There are many hypotheses in science which are wrong. That's perfectly all right; they're the aperture to finding out what's right." - Carl Sagan

" In philosophical discussion, the merest hint of dogmatic certainty as to finality of statement is an exhibition of folly." - Whitehead

" There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance - that principle is contempt prior to investigation." - Herbert Spencer

" It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts." - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

" Now, my suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose... I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of, in any philosophy" - J.B.S. Haldane

" The farther the experiment is from theory, the closer it is to the Nobel Prize." - Joliet-Curie

" As long as we do science, some things will always remain unexplained." - Fritjof Capra

" The philosophies of one age have become the absurdities of the next, and the foolishness of yesterday has become the wisdom of tomorrow." - Sir William Osler

" Nothing is too wonderful to be true if it be consistent with the laws of nature." - Michael Faraday

"If it happens, it must be possible." - Anonymous

" I have steadily endeavored to keep my mind free so as to give up any hypothesis, however much beloved - and I cannot resist forming one on every subject, as soon as the facts are shown to be opposed to it." - Charles Darwin

" I love fools' experiments, I am always making them." - Darwin

" It is a fool's prerogative to utter truths that no one else will speak." - Shakespeare

" The whole of science consists of data that, at one time or another, were inexplicable." - B. O'Regan

" The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' - I found it! but 'That's funny...'" - Isaac Asimov

" Sit down before facts like a child, and be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses Nature leads, or you shall learn nothing." - T.H. Huxley

" Let the mind be enlarged... to the grandeur of the mysteries, and not the mysteries contracted to the narrowness of the mind" - Francis Bacon

" Man's mind stretched to a new idea never goes back to its original dimension." - Oliver Wendell Holmes

" The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." - F. Scott Fitzgerald

" I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong." - Richard Feynman

" The high-minded man must care more for the truth than for what people think." - Aristotle

" Science... is part and parcel of our knowledge and obscures our insight only when it holds that the understanding given by it is the only kind there is." - C.G. Jung

" The person who thinks there can be any real conflict between science and religion must be either very young in science or very ignorant of religion." - Joseph Henry

" Biologists can be just as sensitive to heresy as theologians." - H.G. Wells

" Science advances funeral by funeral." - Anonymous

" For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert." - Anonymous

" Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are that good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats." - Howard Aiken

" If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; but if you really make them think they'll hate you." - Don Marquis

" All that I know is that I know nothing, and I barely know that." - Socrates

" The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote.... Our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals." - Albert A. Michelson, speech given in 1894 at the dedication of Ryerson Physics Lab, Univ. of Chicago,

" Such startling announcements as these should be deprecated as being unworthy of science and mischievous to its true progress." - Sir William Siemens, 1880, on Edison's announcement of a successful light bulb.

" We are probably nearing the limit of all we can know about astronomy." - Simon Newcomb, astronomer, 1888

" Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible." - Lord Kelvin, president, Royal Society, 1895.

" There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement" - Lord Kelvin, 1895

" Flight by machines heavier than air is unpractical and insignificant, if not utterly impossible." - Simon Newcomb, 1902.

" The demonstration that no possible combination of known substances, known forms of machinery, and known forms of force can be united in a practicable machine by which men shall fly for long distances through the air, seems to the writer as complete as it is possible for the demonstration of any physical fact to be." - astronomer Simon Newcomb, 1906

" Space travel is utter bilge!" - Sir Richard Van Der Riet Wolley

" Space travel is bunk" - Sir Harold Spencer Jones, Astronomer Royal of Britain, 1957

"I never forget a face, but in your case I'll be glad to make an exception." - Groucho Marx

"It is best not to swap horses while crossing the river." - Abraham Lincoln

"When a man wants to murder a tiger, he calls it sport: when the tiger wants to murder him, he calls it ferocity. The distinction between crime and justice is no greater." - George Bernard Shaw

"640 Kilobytes of computer memory ought to be enough for anybody." - Bill Gates - probably untrue

"Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self." - Cyril Connolly

"All that is necessary for the forces of evil to take root in the world is for enough good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke

"I no longer wish to belong to the kind of club that accepts people like me as members" - Groucho Marx

"If a woman has to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant's life, she will choose to save the infant's life without even considering if there are men on base." - Dave Barry

"Justice will only be achieved when those who are not injured by crime feel as indignant as those who are. - attributed to King Solomon

"Drawing on my fine command of language, I said nothing." - Mark Twain

"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

"Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence." - Hanlon's Razor

"Failure is not falling down; it�s not getting back up again." - Mary Pickford

"Great spirits often meet violent opposition with mediocre minds" - Albert Einstein

"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Voltaire

"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." - Albert Einstein

"As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance." - John Wheeler

"No pessimist ever discovered the secret of the stars, or sailed to uncharted land, or opened a new doorway for the human spirit." - Helen Keller

"If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe." - Carl Sagan

"As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain. As far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality." - Albert Einstein.

"The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, and familiar things new." - Samuel Johnson

"This man I thought had been a Lord among wits; but, I find, he is only a wit among Lords!" - Samuel Johnson

" Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest." - Mark Twain

"Endeavor to live so that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry." - Mark Twain

"Buy land - they've stopped making it." - Mark Twain

"Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret." - Ambrose Bierce

"Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow. It empties today of its strength." - Corrie TenBoom

"Half of the troubles of this life can be traced to saying yes too quickly and not saying no soon enough." - Josh Billings

"If you're not very clever you should be conciliatory." - Benjamin Disraeli

"Watch out where the doggies go, and don't you eat that yellow snow" - Frank Zappa

"Never eat more at one sitting than you can lift." - Miss Piggy

"A smart man covers his ass, a wise man leaves his pants on" - C.D. Bailey

"Do not hit at all if it can be avoided, but never hit softly." - Theodore Roosevelt

"There are very few problems that cannot be solved by orders ending with 'or die.'" - Alistair J.R. Young

"Live simply so that others may simply live... Mahatma Gandhi

"Keep your face to the sunshine and you will not see the shadows." - Helen Keller

"For attractive lips, speak words of kindness" - Audrey Hepburn

"There are only two industries that refer to their customers as users." Edward Tufte

"The most important service rendered by the press and the magazines is that of educating people to approach printed matter with distrust." - Samuel Butler

"In the interests of clarity, it seemed necessary to constantly remind myself to pay not the slightest attention to the elegance of the presentation; I adhered conscientiously to the rule of the brilliant theoretician, Ludwig Boltzmann, to leave elegance to tailors and shoemakers." - Albert Einstein

"Software suppliers are trying to make their software packages more user-friendly. Their best approach, so far, has been to take all the old brochures, and stamp the words, user-friendly on the cover." - Bill Gates

"A memorandum isn't written to inform the receiver, but to protect the writer." - Dean Acheson

"Obvious is the most dangerous word in mathematics." - Eric Temple Bell

"Logic: n. The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding." - Ambrose Bierce

"I don't mind that you think slowly but I do mind that you are publishing faster than you think." - Wolfgang Pauli

"Reading computer manuals without the hardware is as frustrating as reading sex manuals without the software." - Arthur C. Clarke

"This report, by its very length, defends itself against the risk of being read." Winston Churchill

"

"Voluminous documentation is part of the problem, not part of the solution." - Tom DeMarco

"Put it before them briefly so they will read it, clearly so they will appreciate it, picturesquely so they will remember it, and above all, accurately so they will be guided by its light." Joseph Pulitzer

"Documentation is the castor oil of programming." - Gerald Weinberg

"Not all comments are bad. But they are generally deodorant; they cover up mistakes in the code." - Christian Sepulveda

"The chief merit of language is clearness, and we all know that nothing detracts so much from this as do unfamiliar terms." - Galen

"Rule 1 of writing software for nontechnical users is this: if they have to read documentation to use it you designed it wrong." - Eric Raymond

"There is nothing in the programming field more despicable than an undocumented program." - Ed Yourdon

"If the code and the comments disagree, then both are probably wrong." - Norm Schryer

"If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant. If what is said is not what is meant, then what ought to be done remains undone." - Kong Fu Zi/Confucius

"Obviously, comments are not a style at OSF, so trying to decode what the hell is going on resembles sifting through the ash at Waco." - Martin Brunecky

"The ill and unfit choice of words wonderfully obstructs the understanding." - Francis Bacon

"I'd sit there and first I'd look through the comments, pick through the security holes, and then I'd see what the developer did to fix it because they'd always leave it well commented - thank you very much - and then I'd work back and figure out how I could write exploit code to exploit their vulnerabilities." - Kevin Mitnick

"I've never met a human being who would want to read 17,000 pages of documentation, and if there was, I'd kill him to get him out of the gene pool." - Joseph Costello

"I guess it's better to have too much information than too little. It makes the manufacturer feel good, keeps writers employed, and makes attorneys work a little harder. Besides, it gives me something to read as I'm eating those chewy white peanuts that came with my new computer." - Dave Glardon

"Documentation is like sex; when it's good, it's very, very good, and when it's bad, it's better than nothing." - Dick Brandon

"Report-writing, like motor-car driving and love-making, is one of those activities which almost every Englishman thinks he can do well without instruction. The results are, of course, usually abominable." - Tom Margerson

As the fading light of a dying day filtered through the window blinds, Roger stood over his victim with a smoking .45, surprised at the serenity that filled him after pumping six slugs into the bloodless tyrant that mocked him day after day, and then he shuffled out of the office with one last look back at the shattered computer terminal lying there like a silicon armadillo left to rot on the information superhighway." - Larry Brill

"Here are terms to beware of: fool-proof or idiot-proof - oh, you mean you think your customers are fools or idiots?; user-friendly - which usually means to hold users by the hand and force them to do things one step at a time, in prescribed order, whether they like it or not; and intuitive - which in actuality means so automatic it is not conscious, but those who use the term forget that almost everything we call intuitive, such as walking or using a pencil took years of practice." - Don Norman

"Lister's Law: People under time pressure don't think faster." - Timothy Lister

"Ninety-ninety Law: The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time." - Tom Cargill

"When you say: I wrote a program that crashed Windows, people just stare at you blankly and say: Hey, I got those with the system - for free." - Linus Torvalds

"Voodoo Programming: Things programmers do that they know shouldn't work but they try anyway, and which sometimes actually work, such as recompiling everything." - Karl Lehenbauer

"In his errors a man is true to type. Observe the errors and you will know the man." - Kong Fu Zi, aka Confucius

"The invalid assumption that correlation implies cause is probably among the two or three most serious and common errors of human reasoning." - Stephen Jay Gould

"People get annoyed when you try to debug them." - Larry Wall

"It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong." - Richard Feynman

"The sum of the bugginess in a system can be far greater than the bugs in the individual products that comprise it, and often exponentially." - Chad Dickerson

"The road to truth is long, and lined the entire way with annoying bastards." - Alexander Jablokov

"Truth is a good dog; but always beware of barking too close to the heels of an error, lest you get your brains kicked out." - Samuel T Coleridge

"When trouble is solved before it forms, who calls that clever? " - Sun Tzu

"The gods too are fond of a joke." - Aristotle

I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives." - Leo Tolstoy

"If you have ever seen the movie Night of the Living Dead, you have a rough idea how modern corporations and organizations operate, with projects and proposals that everybody thought were killed constantly rising from their graves to stagger back into meetings and eat the brains of the living." - Dave Barry

"Police-mentality planners design workplaces the way they would prisons: optimized for containment at minimal cost." - Tom DeMarco

"Cubicles have become such an icon of nasty workplaces that it's shocking that the companies who manufacture them still have the chutzpah to pretend that they're efficient, productive, and pleasant." - Joel Spolsky

"Whenever you hear the phrase mean and lean, replace it with what it really connotes: failing and frightened." - Tom DeMarco

"Never underestimate the power of very stupid people in large groups." - John Kenneth Galbraith

"All good work is done in defiance of management." - Bob Woodward

"Deprived of meaningful work, men and women lose their reason for existence; they go stark, raving mad." - Fyodor Dostoevski

"Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets for the work force asking for zero defects and new levels of productivity. Such exhortations only create adversarial relationships, as the bulk of the causes of low quality and low productivity belong to the system and thus lie beyond the power of the work force." - W Edwards Deming

"Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn't have to do it himself." - A H Weiler

"As regards intellectual work, it remains a fact, indeed, that great decisions in the realms of thought and momentous discoveries and solutions of problems are only possible to an individual working in solitude." - Sigmund Freud

"In some schools they have abolished failing grades and they'll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer. This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life." - Bill Gates

"A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it." - Rabindranath Tagore

"To understand that cleverness can lead to stupidity is to be close to the ways of Heaven." - Huang Binhong

"I don't see the logic of rejecting data just because they seem incredible." - Fred Hoyle

"If you torture data sufficiently, it will confess to almost anything." - Fred Menger

"Numbers do not lie, but they have the propensity to tell the truth with intent to deceive." - Eric Temple Bell

"There are 10 kinds of people in this world: those who can deal in binary and those who can't." - Frank Clarke

"Errors using inadequate data are much less than those using no data at all." - Charles Babbage

"Data is a lot like humans: It is born. Matures. Gets married to other data, divorced. Gets old. One thing that it doesn't do is die. It has to be killed." - Arthur Miller

"All information is imperfect. We have to treat it with humility." - Jacob Bronowski

"Since the invention of the microprocessor, the cost of moving a byte of information around has fallen on the order of 10-million-fold. Never before in the human history has any product or service gotten 10 million times cheaper-much less in the course of a couple decades. That's as if a 747 plane, once at $150 million a piece, could now be bought for about the price of a large pizza." - Michael Rothschild

"Software: These programs give instruction to the CPU, which processes billions of tiny facts called bytes, and within a fraction of a second it sends you an error message that requires you to call the customer-support hot line and be placed on hold for approximately the life-span of a caribou." - Dave Barry

"Intuition becomes increasingly valuable in the new information society precisely because there is so much data." - John Naisbitt

"People get a message stating, There are a lot of interesting things on this disk, but I seem to have misplaced my glasses, so I can't read it right now. Would you like me to utterly destroy all your work for the last year? Oh, I'm sorry. That's not actually what it says. It says, Disk damaged. Initialize? Anyone writing messages like this needs to be initialized." - Bruce Tognazzini

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." - Andrew Tannenbaum

"Information is the currency of democracy." - Thomas Jefferson

"It becomes plausible that information belongs among the great concepts of science such as matter, energy and electric charge." - Norbert Wiener in 1954

"There's no sense being exact about something if you don't even know what you're talking about." - John von Neumann

"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

"here are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies." - Charles Hoare

"A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof was to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools." - Douglas Adams

"In the beginning we must simplify the subject, thus unavoidably falsifying it, and later we must sophisticate away the falsely simple beginning." - Maimonides

"It occurred to me this morning that many system design flaws can be traced to unwarrantedly anthropomorphizing the user." - Steven Maker

"It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious." - Alfred North Whitehead

"Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory." - Leonardo da Vinci

"The Linux philosophy is to laugh in the face of danger. Oops. Wrong one. Do it yourself. That's it." - Linus Torvalds

"I've noticed lately that the paranoid fear of computers becoming intelligent and taking over the world has almost entirely disappeared from the common culture. Near as I can tell, this coincides with the release of MS-DOS." - Larry DeLuca

"In pioneer days they used oxen for heavy pulling, and when one ox couldn't budge a log, they didn't try to grow a larger ox. We shouldn't be trying for bigger computers, but for more systems of computers." - Rear Admiral Grace Hopper

"What would you rather have to plow a field - two strong oxen or 1,024 chickens? " - Seymour Cray

"Some people have told me they don't think a fat penguin really embodies the grace of Linux, which just tells me they have never seen an angry penguin charging at them in excess of 100mph." - Linus Torvalds

"Saying that XP is the most stable MS OS is like saying that asparagus is the most articulate vegetable." - Dave Barry

"In 1984 mainstream users were choosing VMS over UNIX. Ten years later they are choosing Windows over UNIX. What part of that message aren't you getting? " - Tom Payne

"The sad and sobering fact is, our current personal computers - the Macintosh included - are amazingly fragile nightmare kludges of delicate interactions that only barely work right most of the time." - Steve Gibson

"When you get a result that you expect, you have another result; but when you get a result that you don't expect, you have a discovery." - Frank Westheimer

"He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator." - Francis Bacon

"If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it." - Albert Einstein

"The process of preparing programs for a digital computer is especially attractive, not only because it can be economically and scientifically rewarding, but also because it can be an aesthetic experience much like composing poetry or music." - Don Knuth

"It seems safe to say that significant discovery, really creative thinking, does not occur with regard to problems about which the thinker is lukewarm." - Mary Henle

"There is no such thing as rule-governed creativity." - Emperor Leto II

"In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed - and produced Michelangelo, da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock." - Harry Lime

"At some point in the project somebody will start whining about the need to determine the project requirements. This involves interviewing people who don't know what they want but, curiously, know exactly when they need it." - Scott Adams

"Computer Science is the only discipline in which we view adding a new wing to a building as being maintenance." - Jim Horning

"Striving to better, oft we mar what's well." - William Shakespeare

Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance." - Kurt Vonnegut

"There's no problem so large it can't be solved by killing the user off, deleting their files, closing their account and reporting their REAL earnings to the IRS." - BOFH

"There are few situations in life which cannot be remedied, and without loss of time, either by suicide, a bag of gold, or by thrusting a despised adversary over a steep cliff on a dark night." - Kai Lung

"Normal people believe that if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Engineers believe that if it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet." - Scott Adams

"Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well-informed just to be undecided about them." - Laurence J Peter

"Intellectuals solve problems: geniuses prevent them." - Albert Einstein

"The Analytical Engine will always reject a wrong card by continually ringing a loud bell and stopping itself until supplied with the precise intellectual food it demands." - Charles Babbage

"It is a bad plan that admits of no modifications." - Publius Syrus

"What has not been examined impartially has not been well examined. Skepticism is therefore the first step toward truth." - Denis Diderot

"It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer." - Albert Einstein

"Each problem that I solved became a rule which served afterwards to solve other problems." - Rene Descartes

"An undefined problem has an infinite number of solutions." - Robert A Humphrey

"We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them." - Albert Einstein

"One test is worth a thousand expert opinions." - Bill Nye

"There is always an easy solution to every...problem - neat, plausible, and wrong." - H L Mencken

"The obscure we always see sooner or later; the obvious always seems to take a little longer." - Edward R Murrow

"One is always a long way from solving a problem until one actually has the answer." - Stephen Hawking

"But in our enthusiasm, we could not resist a radical overhaul of the system, in which all of its major weaknesses have been exposed, analyzed, and replaced with new weaknesses." - Bruce Leverett

"The major cause of problems are solutions." - Eric Severeid

"Even the humble everyday ATM does not really diagnose and repair itself. It demands a largely hidden staff of technicians, some of whom are paid four times as much as bank tellers." - Edward Tenner

"I am glad of all details, whether they seem to you to be relevant or not." - Sherlock Holmes

"Against invincible stupidity, not even the gods themselves shall prevail." - Friedrich von Schiller

"Against boredom even the gods themselves struggle in vain." - Friedrich Nietzsche

We are too much accustomed to attribute to a single cause that which is the product of several, and the majority of our controversies come from that." - Justus von Liebig

"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." - Sherlock Holmes

"Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning." - Rich Cook

"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent full of doubt." - Bertrand Russell

"The best way to prepare [to be a programmer] is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and fished out listings of their operating system." - Bill Gates

"You can get into a habit of thought in which you enjoy making fun of all those other people who don't see things as clearly as you do. We have to guard carefully against it." - Carl Sagan

"Sometimes the best engineers come in bodies that can't talk." - Nolan Bushnell

"To many managers, getting rid of the arrogant, undisciplined, over-paid, technology-obsessed, improperly-dressed etc. programmers would appear to be a significant added benefit." - Bjarne Stroustrup

"Optimism is an occupational hazard of programming: feedback is the treatment." - Kent Beck

"I think it is inevitable that people program poorly. Training will not substantially help matters. We have to learn to live with it." - Alan Perlis

"Beware of programmers who carry screwdrivers." - Leonard Brandwein

"The only thing more frightening than a programmer with a screwdriver or a hardware engineer with a program is a user with a pair of wire cutters and the root password." - Elizabeth Zwicky

"Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind over-taxed." - Oliver Wendell Holmes

"The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think." - Horace Walpole

"Being a social outcast helps you stay concentrated on the really important things, like thinking and hacking." - Eric Raymond

"We shall do a much better programming job, provided we approach the task with a full appreciation of its tremendous difficulty, provided that we respect the intrinsic limitations of the human mind and approach the task as very humble programmers." - Alan Turing

"People that think logically are a nice contrast to the real world." - Matt Biershbach

"The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing until it's too late." - Seymour Cray

"Fast, fat computers breed slow, lazy programmers." - Robert Hummel

"That's what's cool about working with computers. They don't argue, they remember everything and they don't drink all your beer." - Paul Leary

"Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming." - Brian Kernigan

"For a long time it puzzled me how something so expensive, so leading edge, could be so useless, and then it occurred to me that a computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things. They are, in short, a perfect match." - Bill Bryson

"That tendency to err that programmers have been noticed to share with other human beings has often been treated as though it were an awkwardness attendant upon programming's adolescence, which like acne would disappear with the craft's coming of age. It has proved otherwise." - Mark Halpern

"Computer geek: an asocial, malodorous, pasty-faced monomaniac with all the personality of a cheese-grater." - Jargon Files

"Long hair minimizes the need for barbers; socks can be done without; one leather jacket solves the coat problem for many years; suspenders are superfluous." - Albert Einstein

"A programmer is a person who passes as an exacting expert on the basis of being able to turn out, after innumerable punching, an infinite series of incomprehensive answers calculated with micrometric precisions from vague assumptions based on debatable figures taken from inconclusive documents and carried out on instruments of problematical accuracy by persons of dubious reliability and questionable mentality for the avowed purpose of annoying and confounding a hopelessly defenseless department that was unfortunate enough to ask for the information in the first place." - IEEE Grid newsmagazine

"Eggheads unite! You have nothing to lose but your yolks." - Adlai Stevenson

Pessimists, we're told, look at a glass containing 50% air and 50% water and see it as half empty. Optimists, in contrast, see it as half full. Engineers, of course, understand the glass is twice as big as it needs to be. - Bob Lewis

"It's not so much what you have to learn if you accept weird theories, it's what you have to unlearn." - Isaac Asimov

"What we call progress is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance." - Henry Havelock Ellis

"Technological progress is like a fragile and vulnerable plant, whose flourishing is not only dependent on the appropriate surroundings and climate, but whose life is almost always short. It is highly sensitive to the social and economic environment and can be easily arrested." - Joel Mokyr

"Change is one thing, progress is another. Change is scientific, progress is ethical. Change is indubitable, whereas progress is a matter of controversy." - Bertrand Russell

"Restlessness and discontent are the first necessities of progress." - Thomas Edison

"Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight." - Bill Gates

"The science of today is the technology of tomorrow." - Edward Teller

"The most damaging phrase in the language is, 'It's always been done that way.'" - Rear Admiral Grace Hopper

"So much havoc has optimism wrought in this world that pessimism appears not only a legitimate way of looking at things but a moral duty." - Christopher Spranger

"Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature." - Tom Robbins

"All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently, the first condition of progress is the removal of censorships." - George Bernard Shaw

"Nature laughs at the difficulties of integration." - Pierre-Simon Laplace

"The nature of exponentials is that if you extrapolate them far enough you always get a disaster." - Gordon Moore

"Progress is what happens when impossibility yields to necessity." - Arnold J Glasow

"Being able to break security doesn't make you a hacker anymore than being able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer." - Eric Raymond

"The user's going to pick dancing pigs over security every time." - Bruce Schneier

"Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind." - US General William Westmoreland

"With yet another email virus spreading across the globe, 41 US states and six European countries today announced that the act of creating an attachment-based computer virus will now be considered a hate crime because it intentionally targets stupid people. Like any other segment of the population, people of stupidity need protection from bias." - SatireWire

"Publishers often refer to prohibited copying as piracy. In this way, they imply that illegal copying is ethically equivalent to attacking ships on the high seas, kidnapping and murdering the people on them." - Richard Stallman

"Computer language design is just like a stroll in the park. Jurassic Park, that is." - Larry Wall

"[The BLINK tag in HTML] was a joke, okay? If we thought it would actually be used, we wouldn't have written it!" - Mark Andreessen

"He who hasn't hacked assembly language as a youth has no heart. He who does as an adult has no brain." - John Moore

"When Roman engineers built a bridge, they had to stand under it while the first legion marched across. If programmers today worked under similar ground rules, they might well find themselves getting much more interested in Ada." - Robert Dewar

"I remember being impressed with Ada because you could write an infinite loop without a faked up condition. The idea being that in Ada the typical infinite loop would normally be terminated by detonation." - Larry Wall

"Real programmers can write assembly code in any language." - Larry Wall

"If C++ has taught me one thing, it's this: Just because the system is consistent doesn't mean it's not the work of Satan." - Andrew Plotkin

"C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do, it blows away your whole leg." - Bjarne Stroustrup

"Being really good at C++ is like being really good at using rocks to sharpen sticks." - Thant Tessman

"If you think C++ is not overly complicated, just what is a protected abstract virtual base pure virtual private destructor and when was the last time you needed one?" - Tom Cargill

"C is often described, with a mixture of fondness and disdain varying according to the speaker, as 'a language that combines all the elegance and power of assembly language with all the readability and maintainability of assembly language.'" - MIT Jargon Dictionary

"C++ is the only current language making COBOL look good." - Bertrand Meyer

"The last good thing written in C++ was the Pachelbel Canon." - Jerry Olson