Quotes

• [In reply to a question older than most programming languages]

  Lisp doesn't look any deader than usual to me.

  — David Thornley

• Premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming.

  — Donald Knuth

• Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming: any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.

  — Phil Greenspun

• Including Common Lisp.

  — Robert Morris

• I object to doing things that computers can do.

  — Olin Shivers

• Dealing with failure is easy: Work hard to improve. Success is also easy to handle: You've solved the wrong problem. Work hard to improve.

  — Alan Perlis, Epigrams in programming

• Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

  — Alan Kay

• Sexual abstinence is harmless when practiced in moderation.

• If man were meant to be nude, he would have been born that way.

  — Oscar Wilde

• I've had a wonderful time, but this wasn't it.

  — Groucho Marx (1895-1977)

• Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go.

  — Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

• Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.

  — Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821)

• [On his deathbed, in response to a priest asking that he renounce Satan]

  Now, now my good man; this is no time for making enemies.

  — Voltaire (1694-1778)

• Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing.

  — Wernher Von Braun (1912-1977)

• His ignorance is encyclopedic.

  — Abba Eban (1915-)

• This question is moo (so dumb that even cows don't spend a lot of time talking about it).

  — Joey Tribiani

• You cannot reason a person out of a position he did not reason himself into in the first place.

  — Jonathan Swift

• I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ

  — Gandhi

• [asked what he thought of western civilisation]

  That would be a good idea.

  — Gandhi

• A man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. He sits on a hot stove for a minute, it's longer than any hour. That is relativity.

  — Albert Einstein

• Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.

  — Albert Einstein (Reader's Digest, Oct 1977)

• God does not play dice with the universe.

  — Albert Einstein

• Who are you to tell God what to do?

  — Niels Bohr

• God not only plays dice. He also sometimes throws the dice where they cannot be seen.

  — Stephen Hawking (Nature, 257)

• Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.

  — Heraclitus

• A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history - with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila.

  — Mitch Ratliffe

• Making fun of born-again christians is like hunting dairy cows with a high powered rifle and scope

  — P.J. O’Rourke

• DOS Computers manufactured by companies such as IBM, Compaq, Tandy, and millions of others are by far the most popular, with about 70 million machines in use worldwide. Macintosh fans, on the other hand, may note that cockroaches are far more numerous than humans, and that numbers alone do not denote a higher life form.

  — New York Times, 11/26/91

• It is inhumane, in my opinion, to force people who have a genuine medical need for coffee to wait in line behind people who apparently view it as some kind of recreational activity.

  — Dave Barry, humour columnist, Miami Herald

• The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder.

  — Ralph W. Sockman

• I am still learning.

  — Michelangelo, 1560, at age 85

• The best tank terrain is that without anti-tank weapons.

  — Russian military doctrine.

• Courage doesn't always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, "I will try again tomorrow".

  — Mary Anne Radmacher-Hershey

• There's a statistical theory that if you gave a million monkeys typewriters and set them to work, they'd eventually come up with the complete works of Shakespeare. Thanks to the Internet, we now know this isn't true.

  — Ian Hart

• If Java had true garbage collection, most programs would delete themselves upon execution.

  — Robert Sewell

• Like the creators of sitcoms or junk food or package tours, Java's designers were consciously designing a product for people not as smart as them.

  — Paul Graham

• Home computers are being called upon to perform many new functions, including the consumption of homework formerly eaten by the dog.

  — Doug Larson

• [On computers] But they are useless. They can only give you answers.

  — Pablo Picasso

• The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

  — Bernard Shaw

• Scientific research consists in seeing what everyone else has seen, but thinking what no one else has thought.

  — Albert Szent-Gyorgyi [Nobel Prize 1937]

• An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes, which can be made, in a very narrow field.

  — Neils Bohr

• As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.

  — Albert Einstein

• We are all agreed that your theory is absolutely crazy. But what divides us is whether your theory is crazy enough.

  — Neils Bohr on Wolfgang Pauli's unified theory

• I have always wished that my computer would be as easy to use as my telephone. My wish has come true. I no longer know how to use my telephone.

  — Bjarne Stroustrup [invented C++]

• Change in inevitable, except from a vending machine.

• Lisp is the red pill.

  — John Fraser, comp.lang.lisp

• Lisp is like a ball of mud - you can throw anything you want into it, and it's still Lisp.

• Java was, as Gosling says in the first Java white paper, designed for average programmers. It's a perfectly legitimate goal to design a language for average programmers. (Or for that matter for small children, like Logo.) But it is also a legitimate, and very different, goal to design a language for good programmers.

  — Paul Graham

• LISP has survived for 21 years because it is an approximate local optimum in the space of programming languages.

  — John McCarthy

• Java and C++ make you think that the new ideas are like the old ones. Java is the most distressing thing to hit computing since MS-DOS.

  — Alan Kay

• I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor.

  — Neal Stephenson

• Don't get me wrong: Emacs is a great operating system - it lacks a good editor, though.^[1]

• Like the ski resort of girls looking for husbands and husbands looking for girls, the situation is not as symmetrical as it might seem.

  — Alan McKay

• Ideas don't stay in some minds very long because they don't like solitary confinement

• Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats.

  — Howard Aiken

• Mitchell's Law of Committees: Any simple problem can be made insoluble if enough meetings are held to discuss it.

• On two occasions I have been asked, "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?". In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower, House put this question. I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

  — Charles Babbage

• Patents are bad for the software industry.

  -Bill Gates (in 1991)

• Best Practices: Making sure your blunders are popular ones. Rationally, this term should mean "methods that meet professional standards of competence and due care", but tends instead to be a managerial code phrase meaning "If anything goes wrong, I want to escape being a specific target of blame by pointing out that our hapless cock-up was the same one countless others made, too."

  — Rick Moen

• Save the earth: Its the only planet that has chocolate!

• There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are

  — Somerset Maugham

• If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping in a room with a mosquito

  — African Proverb

• If one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out

  — Oscar Wilde

• Religion. The air guitar of thought

  — Anonymous

• Man is the only kind of varmint that sets his own trap, baits it, then steps in it.

  — John Steinbeck

• Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind

  — Dr. Seuss

• He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.

  — Friedrich Nietzsche, in Jenseits von Gut und Böse (Beyond Good and Evil)

• Major Aristotle taught that the brain exists merely to cool the blood and is not involved in the process of thinking. This is true only of certain persons.

  — Will Cuppy

• The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.

  — Bertrand Russell

• A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it.

  — "K", Men in Black (screenplay by Ed Solomon)

• It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue.

  — Voltaire

• It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong.

  — Voltaire

• I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I'm a human being, first and foremost, and as such I'm for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.

  — Malcolm X

• [Response to graffiti on a University toilet wall complaining about student poverty]

  You are not poor. You are about to flush your turds with good drinking water while a third of the planet's people drink unprocessed sewage.

  — Anon

• Losing an illusion makes you wiser than finding a truth.

  — Ludwig Borne

• We are a way for the cosmos to know itself

  — Carl Sagan

• All it needs for evil to flourish is for people of good will to do nothing

  — Edmund Burke

• Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.

  — Richard Feynman

• For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

  — Richard Feynman (Rogers' Commission Report into the Challenger Crash Appendix F - Personal Observations on Reliability of Shuttle, June 1986)

• 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. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.

  — Dwight Eisenhower, April 16, 1953

• Everyone can be taught to sculpt: Michelangelo would have had to be taught how not to. So it is with the great programmers.

  — Alan Perlis, Epigrams in programming

• Everything is controlled by a small evil group to which, unfortunately, no one we know belongs.

  — Anon

• Everything should be built top-down, except the first time.

  — Alan Perlis, Epigrams in programming

• Experience is that marvelous thing that enables you recognize a mistake when you make it again.

  — F. P. Jones

• Beware of the Turing tar-pit in which everything is possible but nothing of interest is easy

  — Alan Perlis, Epigrams in programming

• It goes against the grain of modern education to teach children to program. What fun is there in making plans, acquiring discipline in organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail and learning to be self-critical?

  — Alan Perlis, Epigrams in programming

• Let it be admitted, once and for all, that you cannot have a democratic government long, cannot make a democracy function properly, if you have an apathetic and passive people.

  — J B Priestley

• Here is my first principle of foreign policy: good government at home.

  — William Ewart Gladstone

• Ten years of rejection slips is nature's way of telling you to stop writing.

  — R. Geis

• Doubt is not an agreeable condition, but certainty is an absurd one.

  — Voltaire

• [In response to the question "What is the best type of Jihad?"]

  Speaking truth before a tyrannical ruler.

  — Muhammad, Riyadh us-Saleheen Volume 1:195

• I have decided to stick with love. hate is too great a burden to bear

  — Martin Luther King Jr.

• It is true that behavior cannot be legislated, and legislation cannot make you love me, but legislation can restrain you from lynching me, and I think that is kind of important.

  — Martin Luther King Jr., Speech at Oberlin College (22 October 1964)

• There is something strangely inconsistent about a nation and a press that would praise you when you say, "Be nonviolent toward Jim Clark," but will curse and damn you when you say, "Be nonviolent toward little brown Vietnamese children." There is something wrong with that press.

  — Martin Luther King Jr., Speech at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia (30 April 1967)

• Only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars.

  — Martin Luther King Jr., "I've Been to the Mountaintop", Speech in Memphis, Tennessee (3 April 1968)

• Dante once said that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in a period of moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.

  — John F. Kennedy, At the signing of a charter establishing the German Peace Corps, Bonn, West Germany (24 June 1963)

• I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.

  — John F. Kennedy, Speech to Special Joint Session of Congress (25 May 1961)

• On some positions, Cowardice asks the question, "Is it safe?" Expediency asks the question, "Is it politic?" And Vanity comes along and asks the question, "Is it popular?" But Conscience asks the question "Is it right?" And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must do it because Conscience tells him it is right.

  — Martin Luther King, Jr. "Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution" (31 March 1968)

• The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more often likely to be foolish than sensible.

  — Bertrand Russel

• If the misery of the poor be caused not by laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.

  — Charles Darwin

• Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth

  — Albert Einstein

• Husbands are like fires; they go out when unattended.

  — Zsa Zsa Gabor

• Women want a lot of things from one man. Conversely, men want one thing from a lot of women.

  — Anon

• I sat down beside her, said hello, offered to buy her a drink... and then natural selection reared its ugly head.

  — Anon

• The level of these first three volumes has remained so high, and they have displayed so wide and deep a familiarity with the art of computer programming, that a sufficient “review” of future volumes could almost be: “Knuth, Volume n has been published”

  — Data Processing Digest

• One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic

  — Joseph Stalin

• First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

  — Mohandas Gandhi

• Books are as useful to a stupid person as a mirror is useful to a blind person.

  — Chanakya

• Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later

  — Frederick Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month

• The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously

  — Hubert Humphrey

• The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks

  — Randall Jarrell (American poet, 1914-1965)

• Doing linear scans over an associative array is like trying to club someone to death with a loaded Uzi.

  — Larry Wall

• Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.

  — Howard Thurman

• Modern technology has put on every desk the equivalent of a large computing center of the '60s, with all the maintenance and administrative problems of a large computing center of the '60s

  — Lou Gerstner, IBM

• 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.

  — Lazarus Long in Time Enough for Love by Robert A. Heinlein

• Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child.

  — Lazarus Long in Time Enough for Love by Robert A. Heinlein

• Political tags — such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth — are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surly curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort.

  — Lazarus Long in Time Enough for Love by Robert A. Heinlein

• Sex should be friendly. Otherwise stick to mechanical toys; it's more sanitary.

  — Lazarus Long in Time Enough for Love by Robert A. Heinlein

• The most preposterous notion that H. 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.

  — Lazarus Long in Time Enough for Love by Robert A. Heinlein

• Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as "bad luck."

  — Lazarus Long in Time Enough for Love by Robert A. Heinlein

• [...] the 3-legged stool of understanding is held up by history, languages, and mathematics. Equipped with these three you can learn anything you want to learn. But if you lack any one of them you are just another ignorant peasant with dung on your boots.

  — Robert A. Heinlein in The Happy Days Ahead

• Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable

  — Thomas Jefferson

• All great truths start as blasphemy

  — George Bernard Shaw

• Debating creationists on the topic of evolution is rather like trying to play chess with a pigeon — it knocks the pieces over, craps on the board, and flies back to its flock to claim victory.

  — Scott D. Weitzenhoffer in a comment on amazon.com regarding Eugenie Scott's book Evolution Vs. Creationism: An introduction

• The plural of anecdote is not data.

  — Anon

• The clear message of history is that the anecdotal method delivers both wheat and chaff, but does not enable us to tell which is which.

  — Paul Meehl

• Time converts the improbable into the inevitable.

  — Aristotle

• You don't have to be real to be the Doctor

  — Doctor Who, s10e6 Extremis