He that cannot reason is a fool. He that will not is a bigot. He that dare not is a slave.
Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
i do not mind the heat. it is, after all, just another thing to feel. and it is certainly more identifiable than everything else i am currenty feeling.
Forget the damned motor car and build the cities for lovers and friends.
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
I believe every human has a finite number of heartbeats. I don’t intend to waste any of mine running around doing exercises.
Neil Armstrong
Companies have two choices: Join the conversation or join the conversation later anyway.
Bob Pearson, Dell
Questions about whether design is necessary or affordable are quite beside the point: design is inevitable. The alternative to good design is bad design, not no design at all.
Douglas Martin (Book Design)
The public is more familiar with bad design than good design. It is, in effect, conditioned to prefer bad design, because that is what it lives with. The new becomes threatening, the old reassuring.
Paul Rand (Design, Form, and Chaos)
With respect to the theological view of the question; this is always painful to me.—I am bewildered.—I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see, as plainly as others do, & as I shd wish to do, evidence of design & beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice. Not believing this, I see no necessity in the belief that the eye was expressly designed. On the other hand I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe & especially the nature of man, & to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance. Not that this notion at all satisfies me …. But the more I think the more bewildered I become; as indeed I have probably shown by this letter.
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.
Charles Darwin, Introduction to The Descent of Man (1871)
I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
The question of whether computers can think is like the question of whether submarines can swim.
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
H. L. Mencken
No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American middle class.
H. L. Mencken
Whenever you find yourself inventing new piece of technology for an orthogonal part of the stack, it usually means you’re doing something wrong in your layer.
The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.
Bertrand Russell
ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.
Charles Darwin
It’s better to be a pirate than to join the Navy.
Steve Jobs, Odyssey: Pepsi to Apple
Here is the ultimatum of our camp: what can be smashed, must be smashed; whatever survives a blow has value, whatever flies to smithereens is rubbish; in any case, smash right and left, it will and can do no harm.
Dmitry I. Pisarev
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
Furious activity is no substitute for understanding.
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
It is incumbent on us diligently to remember that the kingdom of heaven was promised to the poor in spirit, and that minds afflicted by calamity and the contempt of mankind cheerfully listen to the divine promise of future happiness; while, on the contrary, the fortunate are satisfied with the possession of this world; and the wise abuse in doubt and dispute their vain superiority of reason and knowledge.
- I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind - that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking.
- I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly useless to the race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood, however virtuous in intent, can be anything but vicious.
- I believe that all government is evil, in that all government must necessarily make war upon liberty…
- I believe that the evidence for immortality is no better than the evidence of witches, and deserves no more respect.
- I believe in the complete freedom of thought and speech…
- I believe in the capacity of man to conquer his world, and to find out what it is made of, and how it is run.
- I believe in the reality of progress.
- I - But the whole thing, after all, may be put very simply. I believe that it is better to tell the truth than to lie. I believe that it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe that it is better to know than be ignorant.
If you cant afford to do something right, then be darn sure you can afford to do it wrong.
Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.
I object to doing things that computers can do.
Calvin (& Hobbes)
Why should I have to WORK for everything?! It’s like saying I don’t deserve it!
I must obey the inscrutable exhortations of my soul.”
Weekends don’t count unless you spend them doing something completely pointless.
If you do the job badly enough, sometimes you don’t get asked to do it again.
Reality continues to ruin my life.
What assurance do I have that your parenting isn’t screwing me up?
Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.
I hate to think that all my current experiences will someday become stories with no point.
Do you hate being a girl? What’s it like? Is it like being a bug?
I imagine bugs and girls have a dim perception that nature played a cruel trick on them, but they lack the intelligence to comrehend the magnitude of it.
Childhood is short, maturity is forever.
I don’t need to compromise my principles, because they don’t have the slightest bearing on what happens to me anyway.
Oh, great altar of passive entertainment… Bestow upon me thy discordant images at such speed as to render linear thought impossible!
In my opinion, we don’t devote nearly enough scientific research to finding a cure for jerks.
Why waste time learning, when ignorance is instantaneous?
There’s an inverse relationship between how good something is for you, and how much fun it is.
There’s no problem so awful that you can’t add some guilt to it and make it even worse!
So the secret to good self-esteem is to lower your expectations to the point where they’re already met?
I don’t know which is worse, …that everyone has his price, or that the price is always so low.
When I grow up, I’m not going to read the newspaper and I’m not going to follow complex issues and I’m not going to vote. That way I can complain when the government doesn’t represent me. Then, when everything goes down the tubes, I can say the system doesn’t work and justify my further lack of participation.
I used to hate writing assignments, but now I enjoy them. I realized that the purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity. With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog!
You know how people are. They only recognize greatness when some authority confirms it.
History is the fiction we invent to persuade ourselves that events are knowable and that life has order and direction. That’s why events are always reinterpreted when values change. We need new versions of history to allow for our current prejudices.
It’s not the pace of life I mind. It’s the sudden stop at the end.
As far as I’m concerned, if something is so complicated that you can’t explain it in 10 seconds, then it’s probably not worth knowing anyway.
People think it must be fun to be a super genius, but they don’t realize how hard it is to put up with all the idiots in the world.
It’s only work if somebody makes you do it.
Reading goes faster if you don’t sweat comprehension.
There’s never enough time to do all the nothing you want.
A day can really slip by when you’re deliberately avoiding what you’re supposed to do.
I’M SIGNIFICANT!…screamed the dust speck.
The worst part is that I don’t even have the fun of doing the things I’m getting blamed for.
