quotes

Know how to solve every problem that has ever been solved.

What I cannot create, I do not understand.

Richard Feynman

If you try to punch the ugly taste out of a culture, it becomes an ugly culture.

Jean-Louis Gassée

Look at Mozart/Oz for a good example of how the functional language people think network programming should work. There is all kinds of implicit state smeared all over the network. It’s like Curious George had an accident with the state can.

cromwell (of Reddit)

Remember, Jack: whenever serious and competent people need to get things done in the real world, all considerations of tradition and protocol fly out the window.

Eliza quoting Jack (Neal Stephenson, Quicksilver)

There is no defense against reproach but obscurity.

Addison

Most people go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They’ve already passed their test in life. They’re aristocrats.

Diane Arbus

If your pictures aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough.

Robert Capa

If you look after goodness and truth, beauty will take care of itself.

Eric Gill

By keenly confronting the enigmas that surround us, and by considering and analyzing the observations I had made, I ended up in the domain of mathematics.

Escher

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

Debugging a program running on a $100M piece of hardware that is 100 million miles away is an interesting experience. Having a read-eval-print loop running on the spacecraft proved invaluable in finding and fixing the problem.

Erann Gat

You sit at the board and suddenly your heart leaps. Your hand trembles to pick up the piece and move it. But what chess teaches you is that you must sit there calmly and think about whether it’s really a good idea and whether there are other, better ideas.

Stanley Kubrick

Microoptimizations can play a part in any system, but design is even more important. Rewriting a routine to speed it up by 80% may sound impressive, but that routine may have only been using 5% of the CPU time. Looking at the larger picture and saving 10% overall by redesigning the way an operation is carried out gives over double the benefit. There is room for both in NetBSD, but we prefer getting a design right to tweaking a poor implementation.

NetBSD

Despite the intelligence of many of its supporters, libertarianism is an instance of the simplest (and therefore silliest) type of politics: the single-villain ideology. Everything is blamed on the government. […] Not being a libertarian doesn’t mean loving the state; it means accepting complexity. The real world is a monstrously complicated place; there’s not just one thing wrong with it, nor just one thing that can be changed to fix it. Things like prosperity and freedom don’t have one cause; they’re a balancing act.

The Zompist

… cheeky Unix users, if you’ll pardon the pleonasm.

Jean-Louis Gassée

The Marshall guitar amplifier doesn’t just get louder when you turn it up. It distorts the sound to produce a whole range of new harmonics, effectively turning a plucked string instrument into a bowed one. A responsible designer might try to overcome this limitation – probably the engineers at Marshall tried, too. But that sound became the sound of, among others, Jimi Hendrix. That sound is called electric guitar.

Brian Eno, Revenge of the Intuitive

I’ll repeat my outré contention that classical music, for all its elite trappings, is actually a radical, disruptive force in American culture, whereas most popular culture, for all its rebellious trappings, is intensely conservative.

Alex Ross

In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.

Theodor Adorno

I do know that nobody knew how our newsroom operated. There was a wonderful occasion when – uh – during the tire-burning period of trouble in Soweto [June 1986], the police closed Soweto down completely to all journalists […]. Yet every morning, the next day, detailed reports of what had happened in Soweto were on our radio station.

And, in the end, a Colonel Vandermoeller[?] wanted to talk to me [laughs]. And what I explained to him was – and he was a bit confounded by this – was that we weren’t breaking any laws because the people who were reporting it were Black journalists who had to go back to Soweto every night because they weren’t allowed to stay in Johannesburg.

Michael Bukht (a.k.a. Michael Barry), Capital Radio 604 Podcast interview

Prizes do not mean anything to me. I think it is more important to make a child aware of the existence of a weird creature like a water spider that breathes through its backside.

Hayao Miyazaki, asked about his Golden Bear Award, Osella, and Oscar

Get your data structures correct first, and the rest of the program will write itself.

David Jones

Object-oriented design is the Roman numerals of computing.

Rob Pike

For 80% of all data sets, 95% of the information can be seen in a good graph.

William S. Cleveland

I want strangers to not be upset. I want my friends to be entertained, satisfied, and safe, but not necessarily unoffended.

Nick Blanchard-Wright

A voyage to the moon, however romantick and absurd the scheme may now appear, since the properties of air have been better understood, seemed highly probable to many of the aspiring wits in the last century

Samuel Johnson

There’s nothing I like less than bad arguments for a view that I hold dear.

Daniel Dennett

My favourite piece of information is that Branwell Brontë, brother of Emily and Charlotte, died standing up leaning against a mantelpiece, in order to prove it could be done. This is not quite true, in fact. My absolute favourite piece of information is the fact that young sloths are so inept that they frequently grab their own arms and legs instead of tree limbs, and fall out of trees.

Douglas Adams

In any free society, the conflict between social conformity and individual liberty is permanent, unresolvable, and necessary.

Kathleen Norris

Now, that last bit wasn’t very funny. But the fact that you wanted it to be funny and I disappointed you … turned me on.

Jarvis (Rob Newman, Newman & Baddiel)

Parts that don’t exist can’t break.

Russell Nelson

Sex is the mathematics urge sublimated.

M. C. Reed

So [Wednesday] night Ken wrote packing and unpacking code and I started tearing into the C and graphics libraries. The next day all the code was done and we started converting the text files on the system itself. By Friday some time Plan 9 was running, and only running, what would be called UTF-8.

Rob Pike

One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.

Bertrand Russell

When you are young in this world, you believe that the class of deductive truths about social matters is larger than it turns out to be. […] I have discovered, to my infinite regret, that most of the serious debates over the basic principles of any political order have an irreducible empirical content.

Richard A. Epstein

We have noticed in nature that the behavior of a fluid depends very little on the nature of the individual particles in that fluid. For example, the flow of sand is very similar to the flow of water or the flow of a pile of ball bearings. We have therefore taken advantage of this fact to invent a type of imaginary particle that is especially simple for us to simulate. This particle is a perfect ball bearing that can move at a single speed in one of six directions. The flow of these particles on a large enough scale is very similar to the flow of natural fluids.

This was a typical Richard Feynman explanation. On the one hand, it infuriated the experts who had worked on the problem because it neglected to even mention all of the clever problems that they had solved. On the other hand, it delighted the listeners since they could walk away from it with a real understanding of the phenomenon and how it was connected to physical reality.

Danny Hillis, Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine

We don’t get paid for activity, just for being right. As to how long we’ll wait, we’ll wait indefinitely.

Warren Buffet

Luge strategy? Lie flat and try not to die.

Carmen Boyle

Newt had always suspected that people who regularly used the word community were using it in a very specific sense that excluded him and everyone he knew.

Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, Good Omens

A community is an alibi for the failure of individual love.

Leonard Cohen

la stampa non possa in tutto ripresentarte la viua mano.

the press cannot entirely reproduce the living hand.

Ludovico Vicentino degli Arrighi, La Operina

I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

All right, then, I’ll go to hell – and tore it up.

It was awful thoughts and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming. I shoved the whole thing out of my head; and said I would take up wickedness again, which was in my line, being brung up to it, and the other warn’t. And for a starter, I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again; and if I could think up anything worse, I would do that, too; because as long as I was in, and in for good, I might as well go the whole hog.

Huckleberry Finn

It is our responsibility to leave the people of the future a free hand.

Richard Feynman

The Feynman Problem-Solving Algorithm:

1. write down the problem;
2. think very hard;
3. write down the answer.

Murray Gell-Mann(?)

Firmer, simpler, quieter, warmer.

Dag Hammarskjöld

Κύκλωψ, εἰρωτᾷς μ᾽ ὄνομα κλυτόν, αὐτὰρ ἐγώ τοι
ἐξερέω: σὺ δέ μοι δὸς ξείνιον, ὥς περ ὑπέστης.
Οὖτις ἐμοί γ᾽ ὄνομα: Οὖτιν δέ με κικλήσκουσι
μήτηρ ἠδὲ πατὴρ ἠδ᾽ ἄλλοι πάντες ἑταῖροι.

Cyclops, you asked me my glorious name, and now I will
tell you: and you will give me hospitality, as you agreed.
Noebudee is my name: Noebudee I have been called
by my mother, father and all my other companions.

The Odyssey, book 9, lines 364–7

[As a photographer] I work from awkwardness. By that I mean I don’t like to arrange things. If I stand in front of something, instead of arranging it, I arrange myself.

Diane Arbus

Genres exist so morons don’t forget what they like to read.

David Miller

Sometimes one has to say difficult things, but one ought to say them as simply as one knows how.

G. H. Hardy

Pascal and C are special-purpose languages for manipulating the registers and memory of a von Neumann-style computer.

Peter Norvig

Computers are precise and methodical. Hacking is something you do with a gleeful laugh.

Paul Graham

Matthew Arnold has said that, when “England entered the prison of Puritanism,” it “turned the key on its intellectual progress for two hundred years.” In reality, it was precisely this class, made up of inheritors of puritan narrowness and perseverance, which created a new culture for England out of its coffee-houses. […] As they cared little for the more frivolous diversions of the capital, they tended more and more to seek the pleasures of news and conversation, until, by the beginning of the eighteenth century, coffee-houses had become the most striking feature of London life. […] Men who gathered day after day in these resorts were not only interested in their companions’ ideas and demeanour; they cultivated an eye for trivial actions and utterances, a gift for investigating other people’s prejudices and partialities, and they realised the pleasure of winning their way into the intricacies of another man’s mind. Hence, they acquired new attitude towards their fellow-creatures. Characters which would formerly have been ridiculed or despised were now valued as intellectual puzzles, eccentricities attracted sympathetic attention, and it became the note of intelligent men to be tolerant.

The Cambridge History of English and American Literature

Hostility towards Microsoft is not difficult to find on the Net, and it blends two strains: resentful people who feel Microsoft is too powerful, and disdainful people who think it’s tacky. This is all strongly reminiscent of the heyday of Communism and Socialism, when the bourgeoisie were hated from both ends: by the proles, because they had all the money, and by the intelligentsia, because of their tendency to spend it on lawn ornaments.

Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning was the Command Line

Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you’re as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?

Brian Kernighan

Half-assed programming was a time-filler that, like knitting, must date to the beginning of the human experience.

Pham Nuwen (Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep)

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

I bought a seven-dollar pen because I always lose pens and I got sick of not caring.

Mitch Hedberg

That is why the ideal literary diet consists of trash and classics; all that has survived, and all that has no reason to survive – books you can read without thinking, and books you have to read if you want to think at all.

Anthony Lane, Nobody’s Perfect

I eagerly await new concepts and processes. I believe that the electronic image will be the next major advance. Such systems will have their own inherent and inescapable structural characteristics, and the artist and functional practitioner will again strive to comprehend and control them.

Ansel Adams, The Negative

Eddie Izzard: But I like the purity. I’m interested in simple and pure. Like, er, they did a special – a film about the discovery of the DNA molecule and Crick and Watson. And Watson said the truth is pretty.

Jeremy Clarkson: The truth is pretty? But then Francis Bacon said there is no beauty that hath not some strangeness about its proportion.

Eddie Izzard: Well, he was named after bits of a pig.

Top Gear 2004-12-19

It’s like trying to compare two testicles. One is not better than the other. Both are vital to the Röyksopp anatomy.

Svein Berge on which of his band’s albums he prefers

“Someone comes to Klint’s studio and asks him, ‘What are you working on?’ Klint replies, ‘I’m working on a chair.’ Eighteen months later, the same man visits and again asks Klint what he is working on. ‘I told you,’ Klint says, ‘I’m working on a chair.’”

Jorn Utzon as recounted by Peter Myers

In our society, you can state your views, but they have to be correct.

attributed by the EFF to Ernie Hai of the Singapore Government Internet Project

C++: an octopus made by nailing extra legs onto a dog.

Steve Taylor

And it is stated that The New Yorker, that famously punctilious periodical, renders the nineteen-eighties as the 1980’s, which it does not. The New Yorker renders the nineteen-eighties as the nineteen-eighties.

Louis Menand reviewing Eats Shoots and Leaves in The New Yorker

As soon as we started programming [circa 1949], we found to our surprise that it wasn’t as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs.

Maurice Wilkes

Rightly indicated, the extravagant extenders and tails on capital letters shall, by every good man of taste and discernment, be known as Those Deely Things.

Carl Crossgrove

The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Rilke used to say that no poet would mind going to gaol, since he would at least have time to explore the treasure house of his memory. In many respects Rilke was a prick.

Clive James

The man was wearing his Grand Master’s blue robes and high hat. He and his young disciple had walked the length and breadth of China.

But what, Paddy asked him, did you do during the Cultural Revolution?

I went for a walk in the Kun L’ung Mountains.

Bruce Chatwin

Men are basically smart or dumb and lazy or ambitious. The dumb and ambitious ones are dangerous and I get rid of them. The dumb and lazy ones I give mundane duties. The smart ambitious ones I put on my staff. The smart and lazy ones I make my commanders.

Erwin Rommel

Doing something stupid once is just plain stupid. Doing something stupid twice is a philosophy.

Dan O’Neil

… including Common Lisp.

Robert Morris (on Greenspun’s Tenth Law)

Don’t include a sentence in documentation if its negation is obviously false.

Bob Martin

Science, incidentally, not only ignores the question of indwelling essences by looking instead at measurable relationships, but science also does not agree that knowledge is obtained through Rothbard’s medieval investigation by reason, i.e., by inventing definitions and then deducing what your definitions implicitly assumed.

Robert Anton Wilson

A long-playing full shot is what always separates the men from the boys. Anybody can make movies with a pair of scissors and a two-inch lens.

Orson Welles

I object to doing things that computers can do.

Olin Shivers

Idolatry is committed not merely by setting up false gods, but also by setting up false devils; by making men afraid of war or alcohol, or economic law, when they should be afraid of spiritual corruption and cowardice.

G. K. Chesterton

I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him.

Mark Twain

I cannot imagine a life in which I would not be surrounded by music. I mean that in the McLuhan sense, if you like, of having a sort of electronic wallpaper decorating your room. I mean in the sense of driving along in your car with a cassette cartridge in, which shelters you from the world, which protects you and keeps you at a certain distance from the world. Because I think the only advantage that any artist has, and the only thing that any artist can write about (and all artists do write about it, whether they know it or not), is that distance from the world. Some realize it and some do not realize it. I do realize it, and I know that I obtain it through media, and I know that I would have been very unhappy as a ninteenth-century man.

Glenn Gould

Nell, the Constable continued, indicating through his tone of voice that the lesson was concluding, the difference between stupid and intelligent people – and this is true whether or not they are well-educated – is that intelligent people can handle subtlety. They are not baffled by ambiguous or even contradictory situations – in fact, they expect them and are apt to become suspicious when things seem overly straightforward.

Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age

Such compression of large amounts of information into a few exformation-rich macrostates with small quantities of nominal information are not only intelligent: they are very beautiful: yes, even sexy. Seing a jumble of confused data and shreds of rote learning compressed into a consice, clear message can be a real turn-on.

Tor Nørretranders, The User Illusion