Favorite Quotes
January 18th, 2009
Happy quotes of randomness, copied down when they seemed particularly appropriate or poignant. Some come from my personal readings, some I picked up randomly. I’ll let you guess which is which. Some are funny, some are serious. You judge.
“Linux is only free if your time has no value”
–Jamie Zawinski
“There have always been two kinds of original thinkers, those who upon viewing disorder try to create order, and those who upon encountering order try to protest it by creating disorder. The tension between the two is what drives learning forward. … For what better way to strengthen organized knowledge than continually to defend it from hostile forces?”
– Edward O. Wilson, Consilience
“Well-studied models and well-tested empirical generalizations embody the collective wisdom of one’s fellow scientists. An isolated individual thinker has no chance against a problem of any complexity.”
– Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd, in Not By Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution
It would not do for any man to begin saying, “Well, if things get bad, God will fix it.” In the end, Earthlings must depend on their own powers to find their way through.
– Kami-sama, Dragonball
“In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away.”
– Antoine de St.-Exupery in Wind, Sand and Stars
“This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
– Winston Churchill
“The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work.”
– John von Neumann
“Only the curious will learn and only the resolute overcome the obstacles to learning. The quest quotient has always excited me more than the intelligence quotient.”
– Eugene S. Wilson
“It takes…a mind debauched by learning to carry the process of making the natural seem strange, so far as to ask for the why of any instinctive human act. To the metaphysician alone can such questions occur as: Why do we smile, when pleased, and not scowl? Why are we unable to talk to a crowd as we talk to a single friend? Why does a particular maiden turn our wits so upside-down? The common man can only say, “Of course we smile, of course our heart palpitates at the sight of the crowd, of course we love the maiden, that beautiful soul clad in that perfect form, so palpably and flagrantly made for all eternity to be loved!”
– William James, 1890
“If all the absurd theories of lawyers and divines were to vitiate the objects in which they are conversant, we should have no law and no religion left in the world.”"We are but too apt to consider things in the state in which we find them, without sufficiently adverting to the causes by which they have been produced and possibly may be upheld.”"But what is liberty without wisdom and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.”
– Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France
“There is not one single one of us who, if he wished to abase himself, restrain his moral faculties, lower his desires, abjure activity, glory, deep and generous emotions, could not demean himself and be happy. No, Sirs, I bear witness to the better part of our nature, that noble disquiet which pursues and torments us, that desire to broaden our knowledge and develop our faculties. It is not to happiness alone, it is to self-development that our destiny calls us.”
– Benjamin Constant, The liberty of the ancients compared with that of the moderns
“To be driven by appetite alone is slavery, and obedience to the law one has prescribed for oneself is liberty.”
–Rousseau, On the Social Contract, Book I
“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
–Sherlock Holmes (A. Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four)
“Sometimes the truth is painful,
But it’s made your cheeks all rosy,
And your eyes bright as stars.”
–Ghost of Christmas present, Scrooged
“I’m worse at what I do best
And for this gift I feel blessed”
– Nirvana, Smells Like Teen Spirit
“Courage is not the lack of fear. It is acting in spite of it. ”
–Mark Twain
“The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.”
– E.W. Dijkstra
“To iterate is human, and programmers are human.”
- Anonymous
“Science, sufficiently advanced, is indistinguishable from magic.”
- Arthur C. Clarke
“As I predicted, our last enemy is human.”
- Evangelion
“Whenever we write an axiom, a critic can say that the axiom is true only in a certain context. With a little ingenuity the critic can usually devise a more general context in which the precise form of the axiom doesn’t hold.”John. McCarthy
Generality in Artificial Intelligence
Communications of ACM, 30(12):1030-1035, 1987
Poignant commentary on modern business practiceWe trained hard, but it seemed that everytime we were beginning to form up into teams, we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralization.Petronius Arbiter (210 B.C.)
What to say when you don’t know the answer“For my part, I must plead the privilege of a sceptic, and confess, that this difficulty is too hard for my understanding.”
-David Hume
“…the more a subject is understood, the more briefly it may be explained.”
Thomas Jefferson, 1816
“A great many of the ideas about God which are trotted out as novelties today, are simply the ones which real Theologians tried centuries ago and rejected.”
- C.S. Lewis
“Reason must approach nature with the view, indeed, of receiving information from it, not, however, in the character of a pupil, who listens to all that his master chooses to tell him, but in that of a judge, who compels the witnesses to reply to those questions which he himself thinks fit to propose.”
- Kant, preface to 2nd edition of Critique of Pure Reason
“Nature confesses that she has given to the human race the tenderest hearts, by giving us the power to weep. This is the best part of us.” (Roman proverb)
“One should never strike a woman; not even with a flower.”
Hindu proverb
“‘Tis impossible to reason justly, without understanding perfectly the idea concerning which we reason; and ’tis impossible perfectly to understand any idea, without tracing it up to its origin, and examining that primary impression, from which it arises. The examination of the impression bestows a clearness on the idea; and the examination of the idea bestows a like clearness on all our reasoning.”
- David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Book 1, Part III, Section II”‘Tis certain we cannot take pleasure in any discourse, where our judgement gives no assent to those images which are presented to our fancy.”
- David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Book 1, Part III, Section X
“Each man’s nature lies hidden under a mass of enveloping pretence, like veils streched to cover it from sight.” - Cicero
“Artwork has the power to calm the mind. There is no need for useless explanations.”
- Clayman, Get Backers
“Thus mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.”
- Bertrand Russell
As a leaf is carried by a stream, whether the stream ends in a
lake or in the sea, so too is the output of your program carried by
a stream not knowing if the stream goes to the screen or to a file.- Washroom Wall of a Computer Science Department (1995)
“Even weirdness has its limits.”
- Excel Saga
“The time when we consent to what is unlawful is in fact when we in no way draw back from its accomplishment and are inwardly ready, if given the chance, to do it. Anyone who is found in this disposition incurs the fullness of guilt; the addition of the performance of the deed adds nothing to increase the sin.” - Peter Abelard, What Sin and Vice consist in (from Know Thyself or Ethics
)
“Yet how many men, esteemed in their own day, have been erased by that amnesia which is the scarcity of historians for them! And all the same, what good would such histories do if dark and distance antiquity suppresses them along with those who wrote them?” - Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy
“Proof is an idol before which the mathematician tortures himself.”
- Sir Arthur Eddington
“Enlightening a fool is like pouring water into the ocean.”
- Voltaire
“Truth is stranger than fiction because fiction has to make sense.”
- From This is True
“Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.”
- E.W. Dijkstra
“A lot of people like snow. I find it to be an unnecessary freezing of water.”
- Carl Reiner
“Nobody knows what’s fun and why.”
- Serial Experiments Lain
On the other hand…“If you know of any one-handed economists, bring them to me.”
- President Truman
“I want to know God’s thoughts… the rest are details.”
- Einstein
“If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
- Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Machiavelli, The Prince:”Upon this, one has to remark that men ought either to be well treated or crushed, because they can avenge themselves of lighter injuries, of more serious ones they cannot; therefore the injury that is to be done to a man ought to be of such a kind that one does not stand in fear of revenge.”"And it ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, then to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.”
Descartes, Third Meditation:”And the chief and most common mistake which is to be found here consists in my judging that the ideas which are in me resemble, or conform to, things located outside me. Of course, if I considered just the ideas themselves simply as modes of my thought, without referring them to anything else, they could scarcely give me any material for error.”
Montaigne:”…all Philosophy does the same, presenting us not with what really is, nor even with what she believes to be true, but with the best probababilites and elegancy she has wrought. Take Plato, explaining the attributes of the bodies of men and beasts: ‘We would be certain that what we say is true, if we could have it confirmed by an oracle; as it is, we can only be certain that I have spoken with the greatest appearance of truth that I can find.’”"Protagoras says that in Nature nothing exists but doubt: that everything is equally open to discussion, including the assertion that everything is equally open to discussion.”
“One should never increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything.”
- Occam’s Razor”For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.”
- H. L. Mencken
Shawn Cokus, my PIC10A (computer science) professor:
- People like computer science because… “it is imposing your will on the machine.”
- “There are two slashes in the world…”
- Getting the wrong answer: “That’s, like, way not this.”
- The “my-number-is-bigger-than-yours” game: “But eventually you grow up, that’s how the game ends.”
- After telling a story about a misguided rocket: “The machine will not explode in the PIC lab.”
- Demonstrating range of data: “I can’t draw the steps because there’s like 4 billion of them.”
- “Floating point numbers are like a disease, but a good disease.”
- Writing pi out to 17 decimal places: “You can double check me if you, like, really care.”
- “We’re completely going to ignore these ‘world’ issues.”
- “Bool variables aren’t so exciting.”
- “Void indicates the absence of something.”
- “If he’s so dumb that he can’t guess all the numbers from 1 to 999, he deserves to be stuck in the program forever.”
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