misc/

25-01-2026 / Cat-v.org Quotes Archive Backup

Backing up the Quotes Archive from Cat-v.org and completely ignoring the fact that I've been inactive on Neocities for about 8 months.

Introduction

Over the years, I have discovered many interesting websites and resources, One of which was Cat-v.org Random Contrarian Insurgent Organization.

"Cat-v.org hosts a series of sites dedicated to diverse subjects that share an idiosyncratic intellectual perspective, questioning orthodoxy and fomenting elitism and high standards in topics from software design to politics, passing by art and journalism and anything else interesting. Other than total and complete world domination, the overriding goal is to encourage and stimulate critical and independent thinking."

I really liked their Quotes Archive, which contained many quotes on different topics including politics, software, art, economics, education, war and so on. The problem? At the time of writing, their quotes page is completely empty for some reason and it's been this way for at least 2 months now. Not sure what's happened, I am re-posting the entire collection of quotes, pulled from the Internet Archive.

General/Unsorted

The power of accurate observation is often called cynicism by those who have not got it.

        — George Bernard Shaw

It’s possible that I understand better what’s going on, or it’s equally possible that I just think I do.

        — Russ Cox

A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions–as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all.

        — Friedrich Nietzsche

Only the mediocre are always at their best.

        — Jean Giraudoux

Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.

        — Friedrich Nietzsche

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.

        — Friedrich Nietzsche

Inspiration does exist, but it must find you working.

        — Pablo Picasso

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

        — Daniel Dennett

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words [and] a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.

        — Elements of Style, William Strunk, Jr. - 1918

Information is not knowledge, Knowledge is not wisdom, Wisdom is not truth, Truth is not beauty, Beauty is not love, Love is not music, Music is the best.

        — Frank Zappa

If you wind up with a boring, miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest, or some guy on TV telling you how to do your shit, then YOU DESERVE IT.

        — Frank Zappa

Night time is really the best time to work. All the ideas are there to be yours because everyone else is asleep.

        — Catherine O'Hara

Reality is what refuses to go away when I stop believing in it.

        — Philip K. Dick

Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what’s right.

        — Isaac Asimov

Alles Grosse und Gescheite existiert in der Minoritaet. Es ist nie daran zu denken, dass die Vernunft populaer werde. Leidenschaft und Gefuehle moegen populaer werden, aber die Vernunft wird immer nur im Besitze einzelner Vorzueglicher sein.

[“Every big and clever exists in the minority. You will never think of getting it majority. Passion and feelings can get popular, but sanity will only be the proper of some people.]

        — Johnann Wolfgang von Goethe [Quoted by 20h in reference to Utah2000]

The Great Man … is colder, harder, less hesitating, and without respect and without the fear of “opinion”; he lacks the virtues that accompany respect and “respectability”, and altogether everything that is the “virtue of the herd”. If he cannot lead, he goes alone. … He knows he is incommunicable: he finds it tasteless to be familiar. … When not speaking to himself, he wears a mask. There is a solitude within him that is inaccessible to praise or blame.

        — Friedrich Nietzche, The Will to Power

Man is condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not create himself, yet, [he] is free; because, once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.

        — Jean Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism

The existentialist does not believe in the power of passion. He will never agree that a sweeping passion is a ravaging torrent which fatally leads a man to certain acts and is therefor an excuse. He thinks that man is responsible for his passion.

        — Jean Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism

If you don’t know where you are going, every road will get you nowhere.

        — Henry Kissinger

Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.

        — Alan Perlis, http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/perlis-alan/quotes.html

Him that I love, I wish to be free – even from me.

        — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

We are shaped and fashioned by what we love.

        — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Distrust those in whom the desire to punish is strong

        — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Similar statements have been made by Nietzsche, and attributed to Dostoevsky)

There is nothing worse than imagination without taste.

        — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

It is an old observation that the best writers sometimes disregard the rules of rhetoric. When they do so, however, the reader will usually find in the sentence some compensating merit, attained at the cost of the violation. Unless he is certain of doing as well, he will probably do best to follow the rules. After he has learned, by their guidance, to write plain English adequate for everyday uses, let him look, for the secrets of style, to the study of the masters of literature.

        — Elements of Style, William Strunk, Jr. - 1918

Committees do harm merely by existing.

        — Freeman Dyson

Il semble que la perfection soit atteinte non quand il n'y a plus rien à ajouter, mais quand il n'y a plus rien à retrancher.

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

        — Antoine-Marie-Roger de Saint-Exupery, Wind, Sand and Stars

There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.

        — George Orwell

To keep out evil doctrine by licensing is like the exploit of that gallant man who sought to keep out crows by shutting his park gate.

        — John Milton

Some people have very sensitive corns, and the only way to live with them is to step on those corns until they are used to it.

        — Wolfgang Pauli

It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.

        — Thomas Sowell

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.

        — Thomas Jefferson

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. All progress, therefore, depends upon the unreasonable man.

        — George Bernard Shaw

I try not to think with my gut. If I’m serious about understanding the world, thinking with anything besides my brain, as tempting as that might be, is likely to get me into trouble.

        — Carl Sagan [When asked a question to which he didn’t know the answer and after he firmly said so and the questioner persisted: ‘But what is your gut feeling?’]

The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.

        — Horace Walpope

How do you have a just society when genetics is unjust?

        — James Watson

The chief cause of problems is solutions.

        — Eric Sevareid

To be empty of a fixed identity allows one to enter fully into the shifting, poignant, beautiful and tragic contingencies of the world.

        — Stephen Batchelor, “Verses from the Center”

Above all, don’t fear difficult moments. The best comes from them.

        — Nobel Laureate Rita Levi Montalcini, on the occasion of her 100th birthday

Sufficiently advanced political correctness is indistinguishable from sarcasm.

        — Erik Naggum

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

        — Bertrand Russell

No monumental evil act in the history of mankind has been committed by anyone who thought of themselves as “evil” — on the contrary, the worse the (objective) evil, the more the perpetrator was completely convinced of the goodness of himself and of his “purification”.

        — Eric Naggum

… there is a special place of torment reserved for those have been neutral in life. Their sin is regarded so grave that they are not even allowed into hell, only its vestibule, separated from hell by the river Archeron. For their sin of indecision and vacillation, Dante devised an appropriate and awful torment: they were condemned to rush for ever behind a banner “which whirls with aimless speed as though it would never take a stand, while also being stung by swarms of persuing hornets”.

        — Deliver Us From Evil, William Shawcross, pp. 32-33. ISBN 0-7475-4844-7 (quoted in 9fans by Boyd Roberts)

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

        — Hanlon’s razor

I divide my officers into four classes; the clever, the lazy, the industrious, and the stupid. Each officer possesses at least two of these qualities. Those who are clever and industrious are fitted for the highest staff appointments. Use can be made of those who are stupid and lazy. The man who is clever and lazy however is for the very highest command; he has the temperament and nerves to deal with all situations. But whoever is stupid and industrious is a menace and must be removed immediately!

        — German General Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord in Truppenführung

Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.

        — Santayana

Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence.

        — Albert Einstein

A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.

        — George Bernard Shaw

We only acknowledge small faults in order to make it appear that we are free from great ones.

        — La Rochefoucauld

When you start off by telling those who disagree with you that they are not merely in error but in sin, how much of a dialogue do you expect?

        — Thomas Sowell

They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.

        — Andy Warhol

The opposite of courage is not cowardice, it’s conformity.

        — John Perry Barlow

For every 10 people who are clipping at the branches of evil, you’re lucky to find 1 who’s hacking at the roots.

        — Thoreau

Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears.

        — Marcus Aurelius

The noblest way of taking revenge on others is by refusing to become like them.

        — Marcus Aurelius

The ultimate result of shielding men from the results of folly is to fill the world with fools.

        — Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), ”State Tampering with Money and Banks“ (1891)

You must deffend people you disagree with, it is how you find out what your principles really are.

        — Penn Jillette

I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever, in religion, in philosophy, in politics or in anything else, where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to Heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.

        — Thomas Jefferson

The man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears.

        — Michel de Montaigne

Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others.

        — Oscar Wilde

Security is mostly a superstition. […] Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.

        — Helen Keller

If you obey all the rules, you will miss all the fun.

        — Katharine Hepburn

If you can’t get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you’d best teach it to dance.

        — George Bernard Shaw

If you’re the smartest person in the room, go look for a room with smarter people in it.

        — kevinpet in hackernews

Fashion is what you adopt when you don’t know who you are.

        — Quentin Crisp

Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.

        — Vladimir Nabokov

A good leader is someone whose troops will follow him, if only out of curiosity.

        — Gen. Colin Powell

Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit.

        — Somerset Maugham

“You are right. Mister Bond. That is just what I am, a maniac. All the greatest men are maniacs. They are possessed by a mania which drives them forward towards their goal. The great scientists, the philosophers, the religious leaders - all maniacs. What else but a blind singleness of purpose could have given focus to their genius, would have kept them in the groove of their purpose? Mania, my dear Mister Bond, is as priceless as genius. Dissipation of energy, fragmentation of vision, loss of momentum, the lack of follow-through - these are the vices of the herd. I do not possess these vices. I am, as you correctly say, a maniac.”

        — Dr. No

A superior pilot uses his superior judgment to avoid having to exercise his superior skill.

        — Frank Borman [found in http://jwz.livejournal.com/1096593.html]

Share your knowledge. It’s a way to achieve immortality.

        — Dalai Lama

Eventually, I decided that thinking was not getting me very far and it was time to try building.

        — Rob Pike, “The Text Editor sam”

Any view of things that is not strange is false.

        — Neil Gaiman, Sandman

“It’s better to be lucky than smart, but it’s easier to be smart twice than lucky twice.”

        — Seen by Henry Spencer on a button at the World Science Fiction Convention

One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star.

        — Nietzsche

Religion is an insult to human dignity. Without it you’d have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion.

        — Stephen Weinberg

Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.

        — John F. Kennedy

A witty saying proves nothing.

        — Voltaire

The Future

The future is always scary to those who cling to the past.

        — Tim O'Reilly

The future is here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.

        — William Gibson

The future has a way of arriving unannounced.

        — George F. Will

Travel

The greatest thing about a city is the unexpected encounter.

        — Eric Kuhne

A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.

        — Lao Tzu

There’s nothing I’m afraid of like scared people.

        — Robert Frost

I said to my soul, be still, wait without hope For hope would be hope for the wrong thing.

        — T.S. Eliot

Humor is the only divine quality to be found in humanity.

        — Schopenhauer

The shortest path to exceeding expectations doesn’t generally pass through meeting expectations.

        — Ward Cunningham

Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after.

        — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

When you’re a connoiseur you look for interesting rather than good.

        — Bram Cohen(?)

To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.

        — Thomas Paine

One is never so dangerous as when he’s utterly convinced he is right.

        — John Perry Barlow

There are no whole truths: all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays to the devil."

        — Alfred North Whitehead

Give me six lines written by the most honorable of men, and I will find an excuse in them to hang him.

        — Cardinal Richelieu

Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.

        — Daniel Kahneman

Offending people is a necessary and healthy act. Every time you say something that’s offensive to another person you just caused a discussion. You just forced them to have to think.

        — Louis C. K.

When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It’s the truth.

        — Steve Jobs

Some people never go crazy, What truly horrible lives they must live.

        — Charles Bukowski

Be kind, for everyone is fighting a hard battle.

        — Ian MacLaren

Sometimes the appropriate response to reality is to go insane.

        — Philip K. Dick

Your mind is credulous enough to believe any narrative you feed it. Choose wisely.

        — Stephen Sadowski

I like offending people because I think people who get offended should be offended.

        — Linus Torvalds

Morality is doing what’s right regardless of what you’re told. Obedience is doing what you’re told regardless of what is right.

        — Unknown

Why do I always parody? Neither in life nor in writing can I achieve complete sincerity.

        — William S. Burroughs

It’s possible for good people in badly designed systems to perpetrate acts of great evil completely unthinkingly.

        — Ben Goldacre

Art

One of the surest tests [of the superiority or inferiority of a poet] is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.

        — T.S. Eliot - The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. Philip Massinger (1922)

Good artists copy; great artists steal.

        — Pablo Picasso

Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie.

        — Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails

If there’s a movie of Neuromancer, what I really want the special effects guys to do is make you see, from Case’s point of view, the little acid giggies: the little lines and trails coming off of things.

        — William Gibson

Out of the ashes of the music business, comes the rebirth of the musician business.

        — John Perry Barlow

The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape…

        — Pablo Picasso

An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.

        — Charles Bukowski

Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.

        — Jean Cocteau

Buscad la belleza. Es la única protesta que merece la pena en este asqueroso mundo.

        — Ramón Trecet

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows.

        — Jim Jarmusch

Business

The biggest secret to winning in the marketplace is choosing very incompetent competitors.

        — Bram Cohen

In essence, let the market design the product.

        — Paul Graham, The Future of Web Startups

Economics

Just as a poetic discussion of the weather is not meteorology, so an issuance of moral pronouncements or political creeds about the economy is not economics. Economics is a study of cause-and-effect relationships in an economy.

        — Thomas Sowell

The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.

        — Thomas Sowell

Economics is the painful elaboration of the obvious.

The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.

        — Friedrich von Hayek

I can’t imagine economists admitting how little they actually know. If they admitted to themselves, it would hurt their ego. If they admitted to others, it would hurt their job prospects.

        — Joseph Mattes, Vienna (The Economist, letters December 04, 2010)

The use of mathematics has brought rigor to economics. Unfortunately, it has also brought mortis.

        — Attributed to Robert Heilbroner

A study of economics usually reveals that the best time to buy anything is last year.

        — Marty Allen

Economic statistics are like a bikini, what they reveal is important, what they conceal is vital

        — Attributed to Professor Sir Frank Holmes, Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand, 1967.

Doing econometrics is like trying to learn the laws of electricity by playing the radio.

        — Guy Orcutt

The First Law of Economists: For every economist, there exists an equal and opposite economist.

The Second Law of Economists: They’re both wrong.

        — David Wildasin

“Murphys law of economic policy”: Economists have the least influence on policy where they know the most and are most agreed; they have the most influence on policy where they know the least and disagree most vehemently.

        — Alan S. Blinder

An economist is someone who, when he finds something that works in practice, tries to make it work in theory.

        — Unknown

The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.

        — Joan Violet Robinson

An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn’t happen today.

        — Laurence J. Peter

Having a[n in] house economist became for many business people something like havinga resident astrologer for the royal court: I don’t quite understand what this fellow is saying but there must be something to it.

        — Linden. (Jan. 11, 1993). Dreary Days in the Dismal Science. Forbes. Pp. 68-70.

Economics is the only field in which two people can get a Nobel Prize for saying exactly the opposite thing.

        — Unknown

Economists do it with models.

        — Heard at the LSE

Bentley’s second Law of Economics: The only thing more dangerous than an economist is an amateur economist!

Berta’s Fundamental Law of Economic Rents.. “The only thing more dangerous than an amateur economist is a professional economist.”

Definition: Policy Analyst is someone unethical enough to be a lawyer, impractical enough to be a theologian, and pedantic enough to be an economist.

Q: Why did God create economists ?

A: In order to make weather forecasters look good.

Q: Why has astrology been invented?

A: So that economy could be an accurate science.

Economists have forecasted 9 out of the last 5 recessions.

        — Unknown

An econometrician and an astrologer are arguing about their subjects. The astrologer says, “Astrology is more scientific. My predictions come out right half the time. Yours can’t even reach that proportion”. The econometrician replies, “That’s because of external shocks. Stars don’t have those”.

When an economist says the evidence is “mixed,” he or she means that theory says one thing and data says the opposite.

        — Attributed to Richard Thaler, now at the Univ of Chicago

The last severe depression and banking crisis could not have been achieved by normal civil servants and politicians, it required economists involvement.

        — Unknown

State run lotteries: think of them as tax breaks for the intelligent.

        — Evan Leibovitch

Inflation is the one form of taxation that can be imposed without legislation.

        — Milton Friedman

Having a little inflation is like being a little pregnant–inflation feeds on itself and quickly passes the “little” mark.

        — Dian Cohen

Tariffs, quotas and other import restrictions protect the business of the rich at the expense of high cost of living for the poor. Their intent is to deprive you of the right to choose, and to force you to buy the high-priced inferior products of politically favored companies.

        — Alan Burris, A Liberty Primer

Perhaps the removal of trade restrictions throughout the world would do more for the cause of universal peace than can any political union of peoples separated by trade barriers.

        — Frank Chodorov

When goods don’t cross borders, soldiers will.

        — Fredric Bastiat, early French economist

The primary reason for a tariff is that it enables the exploitation of the domestic consumer by a process indistinguishable from sheer robbery.

        — Albert Jay Nock

Regulation - which is based on force and fear - undermines the moral base of business dealings. It becomes cheaper to bribe a building inspector than to meet his standards of construction. A fly-by-night securities operator can quickly meet all the S.E.C. requirements, gain the inference of respectability, and proceed to fleece the public. In an unregulated economy, the operator would have had to spend a number of years in reputable dealings before he could earn a position of trust sufficient to induce a number of investors to place funds with him. Protection of the consumer by regulation is thus illusory.

        — Alan Greenspan

You fucking academic eggheads! You don’t know shit. You can’t deregulate this industry. You’re going to wreck it. You don’t know a goddamn thing!

        —Robert Crandall, boss of American Airlines, to an unnamed Senate lawyer in 1971

The direct use of physical force is so poor a solution to the problem of limited resources that it is commonly employed only by small children and great nations.

        — David Friedman

See, when the Government spends money, it creates jobs; whereas when the money is left in the hands of Taxpayers, God only knows what they do with it. Bake it into pies, probably. Anything to avoid creating jobs.

        — Dave Barry

I don’t think you can spend yourself rich.

        — George Humphrey

A major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that it … gives people what they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.

        — Milton Friedman

The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit.

        — Milton Friedman

The only thing worse than being exploited by capitalism is not being exploited by capitalism.

        — Joan Violet Robinson

Manufacturing and commercial monopolies owe their origin not to a tendency imminent in a capitalist economy but to governmental interventionist policy directed against free trade and laissez faire.

        — Ludwig Mises, “Socialism”

If an exchange between two parties is voluntary, it will not take place unless both believe they will benefit from it. Most economic fallacies derive from the neglect of this simple insight, from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can only gain at the expense of another.

        — Milton Friedman

States with central-planning regimes […] do tend to consume much less energy (and much less of everything else) […] than do Americans. There is a word for that: poverty.

        — The Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism

Any system which gives so much power and so much discretion to a few men, [so] that mistakes – excusable or not – can have such far reaching effects, is a bad system. It is a bad system to believers in freedom just because it gives a few men such power without any effective check by the body politic – this is the key political argument against an independent central bank…To paraphrase Clemenceau: money is much too serious a matter to be left to the Central Bankers.

        — Milton Friedman

A central banker walks into a pizzeria to order a pizza.

When the pizza is done, he goes up to the counter get it. There a clerk asks him: “Should I cut it into six pieces or eight pieces?”

The central banker replies: “I’m feeling rather hungry right now. You’d better cut it into eight pieces.”

For one thing, there are many “inventions” that are not patentable. The “inventor” of the supermarket, for example, conferred great benefits on his fellowmen for which he could not charge them. Insofar as the same kind of ability is required for the one kind of invention as for the other, the existence of patents tends to divert activity to patentable inventions.

        — Milton Friedman

From the experience of all ages and nations, I believe, that the work done by freemen comes cheaper in the end than the work performed by slaves.

The work done by slaves, though it appears to cost only their maintenance, is in the end the dearest of any. A person who can acquire no property can have no other interest but to eat as much and to labour as little as possible.

Whatever work he does, beyond what is sufficient to purchase his own maintenance, can be squeezed out of him by violence only, and not by any interest of his own.

        — Adam Smith

It is because it’s prohibited. See, if you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel. That’s literally true.

        — Milton Friedman

John Maynard Keynes: “In the long run we are all dead.”

Joan Robinson: “Yes, but not all at the same time.”

The real minimum wage is zero: unemployment.

        — Thomas Sowell

All of the progress that the US has made over the last couple of centuries has come from unemployment. It has come from figuring out how to produce more goods with fewer workers, thereby releasing labor to be more productive in other areas. It has never come about through permanent unemployment, but temporary unemployment, in the process of shifting people from one area to another.

        — Milton Friedman

Talk is cheap. Supply exceeds Demand.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

        — Upton Sinclair

When you start paying people to be poor, you wind up with an awful lot of poor people.

        — Milton Friedman

of course the country could never listen to this guy….it just makes too much damn sense.

        — ryanx0 about Milton Friedman [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Se_TJzB9-z0]

Every individual necessarily labors to render the annual revenue of society as great as he can. He generally neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. He intends only his own gain, and he is, in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was not part of his intention.

        — Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations

SOCIALISM: You have two cows. State takes one and give it to someone else.

COMMUNISM: You have two cows. State takes both of them and gives you milk.

FASCISM: You have two cows. State takes both of them and sell you milk.

NAZISM: You have two cows. State takes both of them and shoot you.

BUREAUCRACY: You have two cows. State takes both of them, kill one and spill the milk in system of sewage.

CAPITALISM: You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull.

Back during the Solidarity days, I heard that the following joke was being told in Poland:

A man goes into the Bank of Gdansk to make a deposit. Since he has never kept money in a bank before, he is a little nervous.

"What happens if the Bank of Gdansk should fail?" he asks.

"Well, in that case your money would be insured by the Bank of Warsaw."

"But, what if the Bank of Warsaw fails?"

"Well, there'd be no problem, because the Bank of Warsaw is insured by the National Bank of Poland."

"And if the National Bank of Poland fails?"

"Then your money would be insured by the Bank of Moscow."

"And what if the Bank of Moscow fails?"

"Then your money would be insured by the Great Bank of the Soviet Union."

"And if that bank fails?"

"Well, in that case, you'd lose all your money. But, wouldn't it be worth it?"

All models are wrong but some are useful.

        — George Box

I’d rather be vaguely right than precisely wrong.

        — J.M.Keynes; Found in Forbes magazine 01/25/1999 issue. In the Numbers Game column by Bernard Cohen

Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than an exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise.

        — J. Tukey

There is an entirely leisure class located at both ends of the economic spectrum

        — Unknown

Education

I can’t give you a brain, but I can give you a diploma.

        — L. Frank Baum (from The Wizard of Oz)

It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.

        — Albert Einstein

The so-called ‘middle class’ achieve their priveleged access to consumption and security through education, in which they are obliged to invest a substantial part of their income, acquireing as their property a degree which represents the sorry fact that ‘the candidate can tolerate boredom and knows how to follow the rules.’

        — Stanley Aronowitz, The Knowledge Factory, p. 10

We’ve not been to school. We are using our minds.

        — Unknown

Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.

        — Bertrand Russell

Never let your schooling interfere with your education.

        — Mark Twain

One of the painful signs of years of dumbed-down education is how many people are unable to make a coherent argument. They can vent their emotions, question other people’s motives, make bold assertions, repeat slogans– anything except reason.

        — Thomas Sowell

A general State education is a mere contrivance for molding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mold in which it casts them is that which pleases the dominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, an aristocracy, or a majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body.

        — John Stuart Mill, 1859

Modern education is like being taken to the world’s greatest restaurant & being forced to eat the menu.

        — Murray Gell-Mann

The great thing is that school encourages ‘knowledge bulimia’, learn it for the test, forget it after.

        — aiju

First, God created idiots. That was just for practice. Then He created school boards.

        — Mark Twain

Friends and Enemies

The more we love our friends, the less we flatter them; it is by excusing nothing that pure love shows itself.

        — Moliere (1622-1672)

There are only two people who can tell you the truth about yourself - an enemy who has lost his temper and a friend who loves you dearly.

        — Antisthenes, Greek philosopher of Athens, disciple of Socrates (445-365bc)

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art…. It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.

        — C.S. Lewis

True friends stab you in the front.

        — Oscar Wilde

Don’t walk in front of me, I may not follow. Don’t walk behind me, I may not lead. Walk beside me and be my friend.

        — Albert Camus

Actually, good friends tell good friends when they think they’re fucking up. […] The problem arises when the friends can’t figure out which one is fucking up, and get annoyed with each other.

[http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=32966&cid=3559854]

Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.

        — Anäis Nin

Your friend is the man who knows all about you, and still likes you.

        — Elbert Hubbard

We really don’t have enemies. It’s just that some of our best friends are trying to kill us.

        — Unknown

Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of joy you must have somebody to divide it with.

        — Mark Twain

The tender friendships one gives up, on parting, leave their bite on the heart, but also a curious feeling of a treasure somewhere buried.

        — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Southern Mail,

Loyalty to a person and whatever they say or do, that’s the opposite of real loyalty, which is loyalty based on inquiry, and telling someone what you really think and feel–your best estimation of the truth instead of what they want to hear.

        — Paul O'Neill, US ex-Secretary of the Treasury

A good friend is a connection to life - a tie to the past, a road to the future, the key to sanity in a totally insane world.

        — Lois Wyse

A friend can tell you things you don’t want to tell yourself.

        — Frances Ward Weller

What is best in life?

Conan: To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women.

Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.

        — Oscar Wilde

Liberty

Liberty is about our rights to question everything.

        — Ai WeiWei

The fact is that the average man’s love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth. He is not actually happy when free; he is uncomfortable, a bit alarmed, and intolerably lonely. Liberty is not a thing for the great masses of men.

        — H.L. Mencken

Liberty resides in the rights of that person whose views you find most odious.

        — John Stuart Mill

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.

        — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

        — George Orwell

To be free is nothing, to become free is everything.

        — Hegel

Monsieur l'abbé, I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write.

        — Voltaire [http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Voltaire]

Love allows freedom; not only allows, but strengthens freedom. And anything that destroys freedom is not love.

        — Osho

Freedom takes a lot of effort.

        — Anna Stepanovna Politkovskaya - Quote found in the dedication of The Peaceful Pill Handbook

Politics

It is the responsibility of every citizen to ignore dumb laws.

        — Ian Clarke - aka Sanity [http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=73217&cid=6588343]

Politics on the internet, it’s like jupiter’s great red spot, except made of feces.

        — cutsDwnSudoIntelects [http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/8llur]

One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.

        — Milton Friedman

Revolution is the opium of the intellectuals

        — Jerzy Peterkiewicz

The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive.

        — Thomas Sowell

The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them

        — George Orwell

Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have … The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases.

        — Thomas Jefferson

I heartily accept the motto, “That government is best which governs least”; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe– “That government is best which governs not at all”; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.

        — Henry David Thoreau

as Isaac Asimov put it (wording approximate): “If I must be ruled by larcenous bullies, I much prefer that they be located far away. Local bullies know far more about me and my doings than faraway bullies sitting in offices in Washington, and can oppress me far more effectively.”

        — Henry Spencer

Socialism doesn’t start with concentration camps …. Full employment is a threat, not a promise.

        — Maht

I want people to take thought about their condition and to recognize that the maintainence of a free society is a very difficult and complicated thing and it requires a self-denying ordinance of the most extreme kind. It requires a willingness to put up with temporary evils on the basis of the subtle and sophisticated understanding that if you step in to do something about them you not only may make them worse, you will spread your tenticles and get bad results elsewhere.

        — Milton Friedman

The society that puts equality before freedom will end up with neither. The society that puts freedom before equality will end up with a great measure of both.

        — Milton Friedman

Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.

        — Milton Friedman

I’m a bureaucrat, everything has to be negated at first.

        — Christoph Lohmann

Bureaucracy is stronger than physics.

        — Christoph Lohmann

21:55 [fgb] > ah, ok indymedia is a place where “zurdos” can be “zurdos” freely?

In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.

        — (Jerry) Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy

Even the striving for equality by means of a directed economy can result only in an officially enforced inequality - an authoritarian determination of the status of each individual in the new hierarchical order.

        — F.A. Hayek

Economic control is not merely control of a sector of human life which can be separated from the rest; it is the control of the means for all our ends. And whoever has sole control of the means must also determine which ends are to be served, which values are to be rates higher and which lower, in short, what men should believe and strive for.

        — F.A. Hayek

There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women.

        — Margaret Thatcher

There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.

        — John Adams, Journal 1772

All men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree

        — James Madison, speech at the Constitutional Convention, July 11, 1787.

All governments lie.

        — journalist I.F. Stone, addressing journalism students on the one truth they’d be well-advised always to recall.

Freedom includes the right to say what others may object to and resent… The essence of citizenship is to be tolerant of strong and provocative words.

        — John Diefenbaker

Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice… moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue.

        — Karl Hess, as Barry Goldwater’s head speechwriter

Liberty is the breath of progress.

        — Robert Ingersoll

The United States is a nation of laws, poorly written and randomly enforced.

        — Frank Zappa

Formerly we suffered from crimes; now we suffer from laws.

        — Publius Cornelius Tacitus

Probably all laws are useless; for good men do not want laws at all, and bad men are made no better by them.

        — Demonax - (Roman philosopher, circa 150 A.D.)

The more corrupt the republic, the more numerous the laws.

        — Cornelius Tacitus, 55-117 AD, Roman historian

It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow.

        — Alexander Hamilton

The more laws and order are made prominent, the more thieves and robbers there will be.

        — Lao Tsu

There is no logical basis for the prohibition of marijuana. $7.7 billion is a lot of money, but that is one of the lesser evils. Our failure to successfully enforce these laws is responsible for the deaths of thousands of people in Colombia. I haven’t even included the harm to young people. It’s absolutely disgraceful to think of picking up a 22-year-old for smoking pot. More disgraceful is the denial of marijuana for medical purposes.

        — Milton Friedman

The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.

        — Alexis De Tocqueville

The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.

        — Robert Conquest’s Second Law of Politics

The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.

        — HL Mencken

Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.

        — Mignon McLaughlin

The art of taking money from the few and votes from the many under the pretext of protecting the one from the other.

        — Sen. Matthew Quay (R-PA), quoted in Realigning America: Mckinley, Bryan, and the Remarkable Election of 1896 by R. Hal Williams.

Once genius is submerged by bureaucracy, a nation is doomed to mediocrity.

        —Richard Nixon

As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth’s final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.

        — Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri [1998], Commissioner Pravin Lal

A government with the policy to rob Peter to pay Paul can be assured of the support of Paul

        — George Bernard Shaw

When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.

        — P.J. O'Rourke

I would rather live in a society which treated children as adults than one which treated adults as children.

        — Lizard

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

One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.”

        — Plato

You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence.

        — Charles Austin Beard, historian

They came first for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak up because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant. And then they came for me and by that time no one was left to speak up.”

        — Rev. Martin Niemoeller, a Protestant minister in Nazi Germany, in 1945; from “Political Quotations”, Daniel B. Baker, ed.

When they took the fourth amendment, I was silent because I don’t deal drugs.

When they took the sixth amendment, I kept quiet because I know I’m innocent.

When they took the second amendment, I said nothing because I don’t own a gun.

Now they’ve come for the first amendment, and I can’t say anything at all.

        — Tim Freeman tsf@cs.cmu.edu

If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual.

        — Frank Herbert, The Dosadi Experiment

Virtually all reasonable laws are obeyed, not because they are the law, but because reasonable people would do that anyway. If you obey a law simply because it is the law, that’s a pretty likely sign that it shouldn’t be a law.

The U.S. Constitution may be flawed, but it’s a whole lot better than what we have now.

It’s dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.

If CON is the the opposite of PRO, does that mean that CONgress is the opposite of PROgress?

        — Gallagher

Since when is “public safety” the root password to the Constitution?

        — C. D. Tavares

The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else.

        — Fredric Bastiat, early French economist

I guess you will have to go to jail. If that is the result of not understanding the Income Tax Law, I will meet you there. We shall have a merry, merry time, for all our friends will be there. It will be an intellectual center, for no one understands the Income Tax Law except persons who have not sufficient intelligence to understand the questions that arise under it.

        — Senator Elihu Root of NY, 1913

They [The makers of the Constitution] conferred, as against the government, the right to be let alone - the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.

        — Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, 1928

Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficial … the greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.

        — Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, 1928

Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge where there is no river.

        — Nikita Khrushchev

The legacy of Democrats and Republicans approaches: Libertarianism by bankruptcy.”

        — Nick Nuessle, 1992

We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we may have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.

        — Stephen Schneider, environmental activist, in Discover, Oct. ‘89

The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this country is closely connected with this.”

        — Albert Einstein, “My First Impression of the U.S.A.”, 1921

I think the terror most people are concerned with is the IRS.

        — Malcolm Forbes, when asked if he was afraid of terrorism

Let the people decide through the marketplace mechanism what they wish to see and hear. Why is there this national obsession to tamper with this box of transistors and tubes when we don’t do the same for Time magazine?

        — Mark Fowler, FCC Chairman

Nothing can destroy a government more quickly than its failure to observe its own laws, or worse, its disregard of the charter of its own existence

        — U.S. Supreme Court Justice Tom C. Clark - Mapp vs. Ohio

The State must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation.

        — Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf”

No man has ever ruled other men for their own good.

        — George D. Herron

A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicity.

        — Thomas Jefferson

Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations - entangling alliance with none.

        — Thomas Jefferson

Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the forms of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.

        — Thomas Jefferson

That government is best which governs the least, because its people discipline themselves.

        — Thomas Jefferson

The care of every man’s soul belongs to himself. But what if he neglect the care of it? Well what if he neglect the care of his health or his estate, which would more nearly relate to the state. Will the magistrate make a law that he not be poor or sick? Laws provide against injury from others; but not from ourselves. God himself will not save men against their wills.

        — Thomas Jefferson

History I believe furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance, of which their political as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purpose.

        — Thomas Jefferson

It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.

        — Thomas Jefferson

The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.

        — Thomas Jefferson

You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer.

        — Abraham Lincoln

Prohibition… goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man’s appetite by legislation and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes… A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded.

        — Abraham Lincoln

There are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by the gradual and silent encroachment of those in power, than by violent and sudden usurpation.

        — James Madison

The sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of any of their number is self-protection.

        — John Stuart Mill, 1859

Taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor. Seizing the results of someone’s labor is equivalent to seizing hours from him and directing him to carry on various activities.”

        — Robert Nozick, Harvard philosopher

Alcohol didn’t cause the high crime rates of the ‘20s and '30s, Prohibition did. And drugs do not cause today’s alarming crime rates, but drug prohibition does.

Trying to wage war on 23 million Americans who are obviously very committed to certain recreational activities is not going to be any more successful than Prohibition was.

        — US District Judge James C. Paine, addressing the Federal Bar Association in Miami, November, 1991

Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.

        — William Pitt, 18 Nov 1783

Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’

        — Issac Asimov

Plea bargaining - where the innocent are more guilty, and the guilty more innocent!

The upswing is it does an awesome job padding those all important conviction stats for DAs and politicians!

        — CommentMan [http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/cck7a/c0ro0me]

The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.

        — Hannah Arendt

Liberal institutions straightway cease being liberal the moment they are soundly established: Once this is attained, no more grievous and more thorough enemies of freedom exist than liberal institutions.

        — Nietzsche

I am interested in politics so that one day I will not have to be interested in politics.

        — Ayn Rand

I oppose registration for the draft… because I believe the security of freedom can best be achieved by security through freedom.

        — Ronald Reagan

Unless we put medical freedom into the Constitution, the time will come when medicine will organize into an undercover dictatorship to restrict the art of healing to one class of men and deny equal privileges to others: The Constitution of this Republic should make a special privilege for medical freedom as well as religious freedom.

        — Dr. Benjamin Rush, signer of the Declaration of Independence

You can always rely on government to make the right decision, but only after it has exhausted every other conceivable alternative.

        — E. S. Savas, a management professor at Baruch College in New York

Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas?”

        — Joseph Stalin

It’s illegal to say to a voter “Here’s $100, vote for me.” So what do the politicians do? They offer the $100 in the form of Health Care, Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, Food Stamps, tobacco subsidies, grain payments, NEA payments, and jobs programs.

        — Don Farrar

We propose a five-word constitutional amendment: There shall be open borders. People are the great resource, and so long as we keep our economy free, more people means more growth, the more the merrier. Study after study shows that even the most recent immigrants give more than they take.

        — Wall Street Journal

Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.

        — George Washington

It is our true policy to steer clear of entangling alliances with any portion of the foreign world. The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is, in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible.

        — George Washington

Where is it written in the Constitution, in what section or clause is it contained, that you may take children from their parents and parents from their children, and compel them to fight the battle in any war in which the folly or the wickedness of government may engage it?

        — Daniel Webster

National Health Insurance means combining the efficiency of the Postal Service with the compassion of the I.R.S. …. and the cost accounting of the Pentagon.

        — Louis Sullivan/Connie Horner quoted by Novak in Forbes

Most of the presidential candidates' economic packages involve ‘tax breaks,’ which is when the government, amid great fanfare, generously decides not to take quite so much of your income. In other words, these candidates are trying to buy your votes with your own money.

        — Dave Barry

MTV may talk about lighting fires and killing children, but Janet Reno actually does something about it.

        — Spy Magazine

In Cyberspace, the First Amendment is a local ordinance.

        — John Perry Barlow

Relying on the government to protect your privacy is like asking a peeping tom to install your window blinds.

        — John Perry Barlow

Cryptography shifts the balance of power from those with a monopoly on violence to those who comprehend mathematics and security design.

        — Jacob Appelbaum

To err is human, but to really screw things up requires a design committee of bureaucrats.

        — Henry Spencer

They who can give up essential liberty for temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

        — Benjamin Franklin

If you can’t do, teach,

If you can’t teach, administrate,

If you can’t administrate, go into politics,

If you can’t get elected, go to work for the government.

It is sort of interesting that in our society this days we are very quick to apply the term ‘war’ to places where thare are no actual wars, and loath to apply the term ‘war’ when we are actually fighting wars.

        — Bruce Schneier

Socialism can only be put into practice only by methods which most socialists disapprove.

        — F.A. Hayek

Why is it that govt employees makes the best spouses? Because afterthey come back from work, they are not tired and they already readthe newspapers.

        — Julian Assange writting in Cypherpunks

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies, The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

        — C.S. Lewis, “God in the Dock”

Of course drugs need to be controlled, just as alcohol, tobacco, firearms, prescription drugs, food additives and indeed UN bureaucrats with massive budgets need to be controlled.

        — Matthew Engel [http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/486fb0d8-7ca3-11de-a7bf-00144feabdc0,dwp_uuid=a712eb94-dc2b-11da-890d-0000779e2340,print=yes.html]

I was struck by the similarities between the anti-drug movement and crack addicts. Both live in fear of ill-defined phantoms. They also tend to have short attention spans, be committed to repeating past mistakes and have a seeming inability to admit responsibility for the problems they create.

        — Tom Feiling

A drug is not bad. A drug is a chemical compound. The problem comes in when people who take drugs treat them like a license to behave like an asshole.

        — Frank Zappa

Societies without a reservoir of people who don’t follow the rules lack an important mechanism for societal evolution. Vibrant societies need a dishonest minority; if society makes its dishonest minority too small, it stifles dissent as well as common crime.

        — Bruce Schneier

The only freedom which counts is the freedom to do what some other people think to be wrong. There is no point in demanding freedom to do that which all will applaud. All the so-called liberties or rights are things which have to be asserted against others who claim that if such things are to be allowed their own rights are infringed or their own liberties threatened. This is always true, even when we speak of the freedom to worship, of the right of free speech or association, or of public assembly. If we are to allow freedoms at all there will constantly be complaints that either the liberty itself or the way in which it is exercised is being abused, and, if it is a genuine freedom, these complaints will often be justified. There is no way of having a free society in which there is not abuse. Abuse is the very hallmark of liberty.

        — Lord Chief Justice Halisham

So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men.

        — Voltaire

As a rule of thumb, anything particularly ridiculous in an otherwise reasonable context is probably due to a law.

        — TheWama - http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8kz6z/#c09mc23

I am a citizen, not of Athens, or Greece, but of the world.

        — Socrates (5th Century B.C.)

It is more important that innocence be protected than it is that guilt be punished, for guilt and crimes are so frequent in this world that they cannot all be punished. But if innocence itself is brought to the bar and condemned, perhaps to die, then the citizen will say, “whether I do good or whether I do evil is immaterial, for innocence itself is no protection,” and if such an idea as that were to take hold in the mind of the citizen that would be the end of security whatsoever.

        — John Adams

People are pissed off about the seemingly impossible goal of social mobility. their proposed solution is to take the wheels off the cart.

        — Stanley Lieber

Sisyphus only get the rock rolling job after the gods showed mercy, he was originally sentenced to an eternity of political debates.

        — aiju

Politicians like to panic, they need activity. It is their substitute for achievement.

        — Sir Humphrey Appleby

Programming

There 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.

        — C.A.R. Hoare, The 1980 ACM Turing Award Lecture

The computing scientist’s main challenge is not to get confused by the complexities of his own making.

        — E. W. Dijkstra

The cheapest, fastest, and most reliable components are those that aren’t there.

        — Gordon Bell

One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code.

        — Ken Thompson

When in doubt, use brute force.

        — Ken Thompson

Deleted code is debugged code.

        — Jeff Sickel

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.

        — Brian W. Kernighan and P. J. Plauger in The Elements of Programming Style.

The most effective debugging tool is still careful thought, coupled with judiciously placed print statements.

        — Brian W. Kernighan, in the paper Unix for Beginners (1979)

Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming.

        — Brian Kernighan

Beauty is more important in computing than anywhere else in technology because software is so complicated. Beauty is the ultimate defence against complexity.

        — David Gelernter

UNIX was not designed to stop its users from doing stupid things, as that would also stop them from doing clever things.

        — Doug Gwyn

If you’re willing to restrict the flexibility of your approach, you can almost always do something better.

        — John Carmack

And folks, let’s be honest. Sturgeon was an optimist. Way more than 90% of code is crap.

        — viro [http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0310.0/0870.html]

A data structure is just a stupid programming language.

        — R. Wm. Gosper

The essence of XML is this: the problem it solves is not hard, and it does not solve the problem well.

        — Phil Wadler, POPL 2003

A program that produces incorrect results twice as fast is infinitely slower.

        — John Osterhout

Life is too short to run proprietary software.

        — Bdale Garbee

I had a nightmare once in which I a had convinced a friend how wonderful C++ is. A while later he came back., and he was mad.[sic]

        — Robin Rosenberg

XML is like violence: if it doesn’t solve your problem, you aren’t using enough of it.

        — Heard from someone working at Microsoft

XML is like violence. Sure, it seems like a quick and easy solution at first, but then it spirals out of control into utter chaos.

        — Sarkos in reddit

Threads [and] signals [are] a platform-dependant trail of misery, despair, horror and madness.

        — Anthony Baxter [http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-July/]

Computers are about making life easier in much the same way that the Republican party is about fiscal responsibility and a culture of life.

        — mister_borogove [http://www.livejournal.com/users/jwz/536902.html?thread=9506374#t9506374]

All software sucks, be it open-source [or] proprietary. The only question is what can be done with particular instance of suckage, and that’s where having the source matters.

        — viro [http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0404.3/1344.html]

Mathematicians stand on each others' shoulders and computer scientists stand on each others' toes.

        — Richard Hamming

It’s not that Perl programmers are idiots, it’s that the language rewards idiotic behavior in a way that no other language or tool has ever done.

        — Erik Naggum, comp.lang.lisp

Out-of-band == should be on a separate channel…

        — Al Viro

It’s a curious thing about our industry: not only do we not learn from our mistakes, we also don’t learn from our successes.

        — Keith Braithwaite

Ethernet always wins.

        — Andy Bechtolsheim

The central enemy of reliability is complexity.

        — Geer et al.

Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.

        — Edsger W. Dijkstra

Beware of “the real world”. A speaker’s apeal to it is always an invitation not to challenge his tacit assumptions.

        — Edsger W. Dijkstra

UNIX is a junk OS designed by a committee of PhDs.

        — Dave Cutler

i’ve wondered whether Linux sysfs should be called syphilis

        — forsyth

A program is portable to the extent that it can be easily moved to a new computing environment with much less effort than would be required to write it afresh.

        — W. Stan Brown [http://groups.google.com/group/comp.std.c/msg/083fb09444dbbc76]

Programming graphics in X is like finding the square root of PI using Roman numerals.

        — Henry Spencer

Forward thinking was just the thing that made Multics what it is today.

        — Erik Quanstrom

The Eight Fallacies of Distributed Computing

Essentially everyone, when they first build a distributed application, makes the following eight assumptions. All prove to be false in the long run and all cause big trouble and painful learning experiences.

1. The network is reliable

2. Latency is zero

3. Bandwidth is infinite

4. The network is secure

5. Topology doesn’t change

6. There is one administrator

7. Transport cost is zero

8. The network is homogeneous

        — Peter Deutsch

From: rsc@plan9.bell-labs.com (Russ Cox)

Subject: Re: [9fans] design clairvoyance & the 9 way

Date: Thu, 8 May 2003 04:05:31 GMT

> What does tomorrow's unix look like?

I'm confident that tomorrow's Unix will look like today's Unix, only cruftier.

You want to make your way in the CS field? Simple. Calculate rough time of amnesia (hell, 10 years is plenty, probably 10 months is plenty), go to the dusty archives, dig out something fun, and go for it. It’s worked for many people, and it can work for you.

        — Ron Minnich

sFrom: Alexander Viro <viro math psu edu>

Subject: Re: ANNOUNCE: Linux Kernel ORB: kORBit

Date: Sat, 9 Dec 2000 00:39:36 -0500 (EST)

[...]

Yeah... "Infinitely extendable API" and all such. Roughly translated as "we can't live without API bloat". Frankly, judging by the GNOME codebase people who designed the thing [GNOME] are culturally incompatible with UNIX.

> What's wrong with perl?

It combines all the worst aspects of C and Lisp: a billion different sublanguages in one monolithic executable. It combines the power of C with the readability of PostScript.

> To me perl is the triumph of utalitarianism.

So are cockroaches. So is `sendmail'.

        — jwz [http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=33F4D777.7BF84EA3%40netscape.com]

From: ron minnich <rminnich@lanl.gov>

Subject: [9fans] microkernels

are they the O-O of the OS world? Always the promises ...

Subject: Re: BK, deltas, snapshots and fate of -pre...

From: Alexander Viro (viro@math.psu.edu)

Url: http://groups.google.com/group/fa.linux.kernel/msg/caede4c7fd703c4e

[...]

Sigh... When it comes to software there are three systems of beliefs.

One of them:

* Thou shalt know by your heart that all software sucks.

* Beware of those who say that their software does not suck, for they are either fools or liars.

* Beware of those who give you garments and do not allow to mend them, for sooner or later thou shalt find what needs mending.

* But beware also of those who give you badly rotten garments and say "Thou shalt prefer that above everything, for thou art allowed to mend it".

* Thou shalt not treat software as a living being, for it is not one.

* Choose a license of thine liking for sofware thou writest and do not blame those who choose differently for software they write.

* Know when to say "It can be mended, I shalt do that" and when to say "It is rotten beyond repair".

* Choose free over non-free when it is better or when thou art willing to fix what is broken.

* When shit happens, think how to fix it.

Another:

* All software wants to be free

* Thou shalt not use non-free software

* Thou shalt not mention non-free software

* Thou shalt make all thine software free

* Thou shalt choose free above working, even if free one is broken beyond repair

* When shit happens, add new features

and the last one:

* Our 3133t! K3wl! Software! Does Not Suck!!!

* Always choose our software above everything else

* When shit happens, we add new features

If you happen to believe in second variant, you have my condolence as long as you don't force your beliefs on everybody else. If you choose to emulate door-to-door pests^H^H^H^Hreachers - don't expect to be treated differently.

People do have a right to put their code under whatever license they like. Now, I won’t use the stuff I don’t have a source for unless I have exceptionally good reason to believe that authors of that stuff are among the few percents of programmers who can find their arse without outside help. But that has nothing to do with licensing or any moral considerations and everything to the fact that I know what kind of crap most of the software is.

        — Al Viro on linux-kernel

Linus Torvalds wrote: "Ehh.. Telling people "don't do that" simply doesn't work. Not if they can do it easily anyway. Things really don't get fixed unless people have a certain pain-level to induce it to get fixed."

Umm... How about the following: you hit delete on patches that introduce new ioctls, I help to provide required level of pain. Deal?

        — Al Viro on linux-kernel

With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not necessarily a good idea. It is hard to be sure where they are going to land, and it could be dangerous sitting under them as they fly overhead.

        — From RFC1925, R Callon, 1996.

In the same world where Vomit-Making System is elegant, SGI “designs” are and NT is The Wave Of Future™. Pardon me, but I’ll stay in our universe and away from the drugs of such power.

        — Al Viro on linux-kernel

> > Or even XML. Ouch! No need to throw things at me!

> > It seems they would be thrown! XML in kernel is too much. OpenOffice and...

They won't be thrown. They will be slowly driven under the nails, so that victim could experience the joy equal to that of dealing with XML.

        — Alexander Viro on linux-kernel

A Professor of Computer Science gave a paper on how he uses Linux to teach his undergraduates about operating systems. Someone in the audience asked 'Why use Linux rather than Plan 9?' and the professor answered: 'Plan 9 looks like it was written by experts; Linux looks like something my students could aspire to write'.

Computer: Your nominators and endorsers for the Kanai Award consistently characterized your work as simple yet powerful. How do you discover such powerful abstractions?

Ken Thompson: It is the way I think. I am a very bottom-up thinker. If you give me the right kind of Tinker Toys, I can imagine the building. I can sit there and see primitives and recognize their power to build structures a half mile high, if only I had just one more to make it functionally complete. I can see those kinds of things.

The converse is true, too, I think. I can’t from the building imagine the Tinker Toys. When I see a top-down description of a system or language that has infinite libraries described by layers and layers, all I just see is a morass. I can’t get a feel for it. I can’t understand how the pieces fit; I can’t understand something presented to me that’s very complex. Maybe I do what I do because if I built anything more complicated, I couldn’t understand it. I really must break it down into little pieces.

if you’re capable of understanding `finalised virtual hyperstationary factory class', remembering the Java class hierarchy, and all the details of the Java Media Framework, you are (a) a better man than i am (b) capable of filling your mind with large chunks of complexity, so concurrent programming should be simple by comparison. go for it.

ps. i made up the hyperstationary, but then again, it’s probably a design pattern.

        — forsyth

At first I hoped that such a technically unsound project would collapse but I soon realized it was doomed to success. Almost anything in software can be implemented, sold, and even used given enough determination. There is nothing a mere scientist can say that will stand against the flood of a hundred million dollars. But there is one quality that cannot be purchased in this way -and that is reliability. The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. It is a price which the very rich find most hard to pay.

        — C.A.R. Hoare

Vacuumware: n, software which was written specifically to fill a void in the industry, especially software which is successful more due to how well it fills that void than due to anything else, like usability or utility.

I believe it may have been Dennis Ritchie who said (about X) “Sometimes when you fill a vacuum, it still sucks.” X is a prime example of vacuumware, and in fact inspired the term.

[http://www.uta.fi/FAST/US8/PLAY/inklish.html]

I remarked to Dennis [Ritchie] that easily half the code I was writing in Multics was error recovery code. He said, “We left all that stuff out [of Unix]. If there’s an error, we have this routine called panic, and when it is called, the machine crashes, and you holler down the hall, ‘Hey, reboot it.’”

        — Tom Van Vleck [http://www.multicians.org/unix.html]

RMS is to Unix, like Hitler [was] to Nietzsche.

        — Federico Benavento

Unix is simple. It just takes a genius to understand its simplicity.

        — Dennis Ritchie

Most XML I’ve seen makes me think I’m dyslexic. it also looks constipated, and two health problems in one standard is just too much.

        — Charles Forsyth

PHP is a minor evil perpetrated and created by incompetent amateurs, whereas Perl is a great and insidious evil perpetrated by skilled but perverted professionals.

OAuth is the best that the wrong way of doing things can provide.

        — Mike Stay [http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-TBPekxc1dLNy5DOloPfzVvFIVOWMB0li?p=1006]

This ‘users are idiots, and are confused by functionality’ mentality of Gnome is a disease. If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it.

        — Linus Torvalds

{Ex-Cyber} some part of me desperately wants to believe that XML-RPC is some kind of elaborate joke, like a cross between Discordianism and IP Over Avian Carriers

The only places for icons is in a church, a burning church at that.

        — mhat

The key to performance is elegance, not battalions of special cases.

        — Jon Bentley and Doug McIlroy

Just because the standard provides a cliff in front of you, you are not necessarily required to jump off it.

        — Norman Diamond

Are you quite sure that all those bells and whistles, all those wonderful facilities of your so called powerful programming languages, belong to the solution set rather than the problem set?

        — Edsger W. Dijkstra

Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.

        — Bill Gates

The object-oriented model makes it easy to build up programs by accretion. What this often means, in practice, is that it provides a structured way to write spaghetti code.

        — Paul Graham

First, solve the problem. Then, write the code.

        — John Johnson

Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.

        — Alan Kay

Correctness is clearly the prime quality. If a system does not do what it is supposed to do, then everything else about it matters little.

        — Bertrand Meyer

Complexity kills. It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build and test, it introduces security challenges and it causes end-user and administrator frustration.

        — Ray Ozzie

If the designers of X Windows built cars, there would be no fewer than five steering wheels hidden about the cockpit, none of which followed the same principles – but you’d be able to shift gears with your car stereo. Useful feature that.

        — Marcus J. Ranum, DEC

A language that doesn’t have everything is actually easier to program in than some that do.

        — Dennis M. Ritchie

Mostly, when you see programmers, they aren’t doing anything. One of the attractive things about programmers is that you cannot tell whether or not they are working simply by looking at them. Very often they’re sitting there seemingly drinking coffee and gossiping, or just staring into space. What the programmer is trying to do is get a handle on all the individual and unrelated ideas that are scampering around in his head.

        — Charles M. Strauss

Haskell is faster than C++, more concise than Perl, more regular than Python, more flexible than Ruby, more typeful than C#, more robust than Java, and has absolutely nothing in common with PHP.

        — Autrijus Tang

You can’t trust code that you did not totally create yourself.

        — Ken Thompson

Object-oriented design is the roman numerals of computing.

        — Rob Pike

Not only is UNIX dead, it’s starting to smell really bad.

        — Rob Pike circa 1991

{ajh} I always viewed HURD development like the Special Olympics of free software.

cat came back from Berkeley waving flags

        — Rob Pike

We have persistant(sic) objects, they’re called files.

        — Ken Thompson

If you want to go somewhere, goto is the best way to get there.

        — Ken Thompson

The X server has to be the biggest program I’ve ever seen that doesn’t do anything for you.

        — Ken Thompson

A smart terminal is not a smartass terminal, but rather a terminal you can educate.

        — Rob Pike

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

        — Leonardo da Vinci

Increasingly, people seem to misinterpret complexity as sophistication, which is baffling—the incomprehensible should cause suspicion rather than admiration. Possibly this trend results from a mistaken belief that using a somewhat mysterious device confers an aura of power on the user.

        — Niklaus Wirth

Compatibility means deliberately repeating other people’s mistakes.

        — David Wheeler

[Like programmers] prostitutes also think they all suck.

And both, programmers and prostitutes, are right: they suck. The big difference is that prostitutes got the term “user-friendly” right.

        — yiyus [http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8y348/my_programming_quotes_file_was_well_received_when/c0aspwo]

The Purpose of Computing is Insight, Not Numbers.

        — This is the motto of the book Numerical Methods for Scientists and Engineers by Richard Hamming.

Every methodology I’ve come across has, at its kernel, a very small section labelled “do magic here”.

        — Katie [http://www.fysh.org/~katie/computing/methodologies.txt]

I recommend the linux people to call it “GNU / Linux” instead of “GNU/Linux”. never hurts to distance yourself from GNU.

        — mjl on #plan9-social

For the sinner deserves not life but death, according to the disk devices. For example, start with Plan 9, which is free of sin, the case is different from His perspective.

        — Mark V. Shaney

Trying to express implicit and fuzzy relationships in ways that are explicit and sharp doesn’t clarify the meaning, it destroys it.

        — Clay Shirky [http://www.shirky.com/writings/semantic_syllogism.html]

Unix has retarded OS research by 10 years and linux has retarded it by 20.

        — Dennis Ritchie as quoted by by Boyd Roberts in 9fans.

Any program that tries to be so generalized and configurable that it could handle any kind of task will either fall short of this goal, or will be horribly broken.

        — Chris Wenham

Nobody who uses XML knows what they are doing.

        — Chris Wenham

Debugging time increases as a square of the program’s size.

        — Chris Wenham

I guess it’s like smart compiler for dumb people, and dumb compiler for smart people. But then smart compiler gets too smart.. so neither dumb nor smart people can understand it.

        — fgb on compilers and gcc

in aeronautical circles, it’s said that the f4 is proof that given enough thrust even a brick will fly.

linux is the f4 of computing?

        — erik quanstrom

It seems to me more like you use foresight and pessimism to avoid getting into situations where you need to demonstrate exceptional programming ability.

        — mister_borogove speaking to jwz [http://jwz.livejournal.com/1096593.html]

Comparing a computer language to a human language is like comparing an operating system kernel to a popcorn kernel.

        — kryptkpr [http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9upno/c_is_frequently_reviled_both_by_those_who_never/c0eiyqu]

Hofstadter’s Law - It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.

My definition of an expert in any field is a person who knows enough about what’s really going on to be scared.

        — P. J. Plauger, Computer Language, March 1983

Every language has an optimization operator. In C++ that operator is ‘//’

        — Unknown

Nobody should start to undertake a large project. You start with a small trivial project, and you should never expect it to get large. If you do, you’ll just overdesign and generally think it is more important than it likely is at that stage. Or worse, you might be scared away by the sheer size of the work you envision. So start small, and think about the details. Don’t think about some big picture and fancy design. If it doesn’t solve some fairly immediate need, it’s almost certainly over-designed. And don’t expect people to jump in and help you. That’s not how these things work. You need to get something half-way useful first, and then others will say “hey, that almost works for me”, and they’ll get involved in the project.

        — Linus Torvalds

Theory is when you know something, but it doesn’t work. Practice is when something works, but you don’t know why. Programmers combine theory and practice: Nothing works and they don’t know why.

        — Unknown

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

        — Unknown

Q: What is the most often-overlooked risk in software engineering?

A: Incompetent programmers. There are estimates that the number of programmers needed in the U.S. exceeds 200,000. This is entirely misleading. It is not a quantity problem; we have a quality problem. One bad programmer can easily create two new jobs a year. Hiring more bad programmers will just increase our perceived need for them. If we had more good programmers, and could easily identify them, we would need fewer, not more.

        — David Parnas

Well over half of the time you spend working on a project (on the order of 70 percent) is spent thinking, and no tool, no matter how advanced, can think for you. Consequently, even if a tool did everything except the thinking for you – if it wrote 100 percent of the code, wrote 100 percent of the documentation, did 100 percent of the testing, burned the CD-ROMs, put them in boxes, and mailed them to your customers – the best you could hope for would be a 30 percent improvement in productivity. In order to do better than that, you have to change the way you think.

The best code is no code at all.

        — Unknown

Before software can be reusable it first has to be usable.

        — Unknown

Old programs read like quiet conversations between a well-spoken research worker and a well-studied mechanical colleague, not as a debate with a compiler. Who’d have guessed sophistication bought such noise?

        — Dick Gabriel

This is one of the reasons Lisp doesn’t get anywhere. The trend to promote features so clever that you stop thinking about your problem and start thinking about the clever features. CL’s loop is so powerful that people invented functional programming so that they’d never have to use it.

        — G_Morgan in reddit [http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/a481l/so_to_get_back_to_the_point_go_vs_algol68_tbh_i/c0fs2nk]

More computing sins are committed in the name of efficiency (without necessarily achieving it) than for any other single reason - including blind stupidity.

        — William A. Wulf

There is not now, nor has there ever been, nor will there ever be, any programming language in which it is the least bit difficult to write bad code.

Program testing can be a very effective way to show the presence of bugs, but is hopelessly inadequate for showing their absence.

        — Edsger W. Dijkstra

The competent programmer is fully aware of the limited size of his own skull. He therefore approaches his task with full humility, and avoids clever tricks like the plague.

        — Edsger W. Dijkstra

Parkinson’s Law - Otherwise known as the law of bureaucracy, this law states that…

“Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”

It has been said that the great scientific disciplines are examples of giants standing on the shoulders of other giants. It has also been said that the software industry is an example of midgets standing on the toes of other midgets.

        — Alan Cooper, About Face

Code never lies, comments sometimes do.

        — Ron Jeffries

What I cannot build, I do not understand.

        — Richard Feynman

If we’d asked the customers what they wanted, they would have said “faster horses”

        — Henry Ford

I (…) am rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand.

        — Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See

Programming is not a zero-sum game. Teaching something to a fellow programmer doesn’t take it away from you. I’m happy to share what I can, because I’m in it for the love of programming. The Ferraris are just gravy, honest!

        — John Carmack, from Michael Abrash' Graphics Programming Black Book.

I have found that the reason a lot of people are interested in artificial intelligence is the same reason a lot of people are interested in artificial limbs: they are missing one.

        — David Parnas

Once you’ve dressed and before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take at least one thing off.

        — Coco Chanel

When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.

        — R. Buckminster Fuller

I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.

        — Dwight D. Eisenhower

I will, in fact, claim that the difference between a bad programmer and a good one is whether he considers his code or his data structures more important. Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.

        — Linus Torvalds

Software is like entropy. It is difficult to grasp, weighs nothing, and obeys the second law of thermodynamics; i.e. it always increases.

A fool with a tool is a more dangerous fool.

        — u.

The best things are simple, but finding these simple things is not simple.

        — bill [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/58640/great-programming-quotes/1003525#1003525]

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

        — Laurence J. Peter

The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry.

        — Henry Petroski

Theory is when you know something, but it doesn’t work. Practice is when something works, but you don’t know why. Programmers combine theory and practice: Nothing works and they don’t know why.

Once a new technology starts rolling, if you’re not part of the steamroller, you’re part of the road.

        — Stewart Brand

Einstein argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer.

        — Fred Brooks

… the cost of adding a feature isn’t just the time it takes to code it. The cost also includes the addition of an obstacle to future expansion. … The trick is to pick the features that don’t fight each other.

        — John Carmack

With diligence it is possible to make anything run slowly.

        — Tom Duff

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in the opposite direction.

        — Albert Einstein

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

        — Ralph Waldo Emerson

For a sucessful technology, honesty must take precedence over public relations for nature cannot be fooled.

        — Richard Feynman

Comparing to another activity is useful if it helps you formulate questions, it’s dangerous when you use it to justify answers.

        — Martin Fowler

Simplicity carried to the extreme becomes elegance.

        — Jon Franklin

Software obeys the law of gaseous expansion - it continues to grow until memory is completely filled.

        — Larry Gleason

The unavoidable price of reliability is simplicity.

        — C.A.R. Hoare

The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.

        — Hans Hoffmann

Trying to outsmart a compiler defeats much of the purpose of using one.

        — Kernighan and Plauger, The Elements of Programming Style.

You’re bound to be unhappy if you optimize everything.

        — Donald Knuth

A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn’t even know existed can render your own computer unusable.

        — Leslie Lamport

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, Register Allocation in Optimizing Compilers

The proper use of comments is to compensate for our failure to express ourself in code.

        — Robert C. MartinClean Code

If you want a product with certain characteristics, you must ensure that the team has those characteristics before the product’s development.

        — Jim McCarthy and Michele McCarthy - Software for your Head

You can’t have great software without a great team, and most software teams behave like dysfunctional families.

        — Jim McCarthy

Testing by itself does not improve software quality. Test results are an indicator of quality, but in and of themselves, they don’t improve it. Trying to improve software quality by increasing the amount of testing is like trying to lose weight by weighing yourself more often. What you eat before you step onto the scale determines how much you will weigh, and the software development techniques you use determine how many errors testing will find. If you want to lose weight, don’t buy a new scale; change your diet. If you want to improve your software, don’t test more; develop better.

        — Steve McConnell Code Complete

Correctness is clearly the prime quality. If a system does not do what it is supposed to do, then everything else about it matters little.

        — Bertrand Meyer

Incorrect documentation is often worse than no documentation.

        — Bertrand Meyer

Software sucks because users demand it to.

        — Nathan Myhrvold

Unformed people delight in the gaudy and in novelty. Cooked people delight in the ordinary.

        — Erik Naggum

There’s no sense being exact about something if you don’t even know what you’re talking about.

        — John von Neumann

That’s the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.

        — Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle Oath of Fealty

Search all the parks in all your cities; you’ll find no statues of committees.

        — David Ogilvy

Good code is short, simple, and symmetrical - the challenge is figuring out how to get there.

        — Sean Parent

Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.

        — George Santayana

Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature!

        — G.B. Shaw

The only sin is to make a choice without knowing you are making one.

        — Jonathan Shewchuk

It is a painful thing to look at your own trouble and know that you yourself and no one else has made it.

        — Sophocles, Ajax

The primary duty of an exception handler is to get the error out of the lap of the programmer and into the surprised face of the user. Provided you keep this cardinal rule in mind, you can’t go far wrong.

        — Verity Stob

A notation is important for what it leaves out.

        — Joseph Stoy

An organisation that treats its programmers as morons will soon have programmers that are willing and able to act like morons only.

        — Bjarne Stroustrup

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

The most important single aspect of software development is to be clear about what you are trying to build.

        — Bjarne Stroustrup

The best is the enemy of the good.

        — Voltaire

As soon as we started programming, 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 discovers debugging, 1949

Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster.

        — Wirth’s law

The purpose of software engineering is to control complexity, not to create it.

        — Dr. Pamela Zave

I object to doing things that computers can do.

        — Olin Shivers

Simplicity – the art of maximizing the amount of work not done – is essential.

        — From the Agile Manifesto.

When you want to do something differently from the rest of the world, it’s a good idea to look into whether the rest of the world knows something you don’t.

Perilous to us all are the devices of an art deeper than that which we possess ourselves.

        — J.R.R. Tolkien

Complexity has nothing to do with intelligence, simplicity does.

        — Larry Bossidy

If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t matter how fast it doesn’t work.

        — Mich Ravera

Simplicity is hard to build, easy to use, and hard to charge for. Complexity is easy to build, hard to use, and easy to charge for.

        — Chris Sacca

… what society overwhelmingly asks for is snake oil. Of course, the snake oil has the most impressive names — otherwise you would be selling nothing — like “Structured Analysis and Design”, “Software Engineering”, “Maturity Models”, “Management Information Systems”, “Integrated Project Support Environments” “Object Orientation” and “Business Process Re-engineering” (the latter three being known as IPSE, OO and BPR, respectively).

        — Edsger W. Dijkstra — EWD 1175: The Strengths of The Academic Enterprise

They won’t tell you that they don’t understand it; they will happily invent their way through the gaps and obscurities.

        — V.A. Vyssotsky on software programmers and their views on specifications

In software, the most beautiful code, the most beautiful functions, and the most beautiful programs are sometimes not there at all.

        — Jon Bentley, Beautiful Code (O'Reilly), “The Most Beautiful Code I Never Wrote”

Computers make it easier to do a lot of things, but most of the things they make it easier to do don’t need to be done.

        — Andy Rooney

True glory consists in doing what deserves to be written; in writing what deserves to be read.

        — Pliny the Elder

The whole point of getting things done is knowing what to leave undone.

        — Oswald Chambers

Q: What is the difference between an object methodologist and a terrorist?

A: You can negotiate with the terrorist.

One Page Principle: A specification that will not fit on one page of 8.5x11 inch paper cannot be understood.

        — Mark Ardis

The whole HTML validation exercise is questionable, but validating as XHTML is flat-out masochism. Only recommended for those that enjoy pain. Or programmers. I can’t always tell the difference.

        — Jeff Atwood

When in doubt, leave it out.

        — Joshua Bloch

No code is faster than no code.

        — merb motto

As a rule, software systems do not work well until they have been used, and have failed repeatedly, in real applications.

        — Dave Parnas

OOP is to writing a program, what going through airport security is to flying.

        — Richard Mansfield

The problem with object-oriented languages is they’ve got all this implicit environment that they carry around with them. You wanted a banana but what you got was a gorilla holding the banana and the entire jungle.

        — Joe Armstrong

As a programmer, it is your job to put yourself out of business. What you do today can be automated tomorrow.

        — Doug McIlroy

IDE features are language smells.

        — Reg Braithwaite

PHP is [the] Sarah Palin of programming languages.

        — killerstorm [http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/b7j9v/debian_refuses_to_package_the_embedded_php/c0ldcqg]

A good way to have good ideas is by being unoriginal.

        — Bram Cohen

The comment about developers making work for themselves is also spot on. I answer a lot of programming questions, and the questions are always asked because the programmer has reached the end of a twisty maze of his own creation. Turn around, walk, spin around, and try again. You’ll find a better solution.

        — Jonathan Rockway in a Hacker News comment

a program is like a poem: you cannot write a poem without writing it. Yet people talk about programming as if it were a production process and measure “programmer productivity"in terms of "number of lines of code produced”.In so doing they book that number on the wrong side of the ledger: We should always refer to"the number of lines of code spent".

        — E. W. Dijkstra

it’s an old observation that in order to be useful hypothesis has to be falsifiable. Similar principle applies to design proposals - to be worth of any attention they have to be detailed enough to allow meaningful criticism.

What you have done so far is equivalent to coming to a hospital and saying “aseptic good, infection bad”. That would get pretty much the same reactions, varying from “yes, we know” to “do you have any specific suggestions?” and “stop wasting our time”[1].

In short: get lost and do not come back until you have something less vague.

[1] If you are insistent enough, you might also earn a free referral to psychiatrist.

        — Al Viro in lkml

These are some of the types of problems engineers at REAL software shops have to solve to be able to ship REAL product for REAL money. If you haven’t HAD to produce code like this yourself at some point in your carrier then you’ve lived a sheltered life.

Its disingenuous for you to get on your ivory tower to point and laugh.

Well, you see, after spending years cleaning up the excrements of self-styled “REAL engineers” it’s either get on the tower to point and laugh or get on the tower to point and shoot.

        — Al Viro in lkml

‘Layered approach’ is not a magic incantation to excuse any bit of snake oil. Homeopathic remedies might not harm (pure water is pure water), but that’s not an excuse for quackery. And frankly, most of the ‘security improvement’ crowd sound exactly like woo-peddlers.

        — Al Viro

The trick is to fix the problem you have, rather than the problem you want.

        — Bram Cohen

Security is a state of mind.

        — NSA Security Manual

Never attribute to funny hardware that which can be adequately explained by broken locking.

        — Erik Quanstrom

Things which any idiot could write usually have the quality of having been written by an idiot.

        — Bram Cohen

In programming the hard part isn’t solving problems, but deciding what problems to solve.

        — Paul Graham

[POSIX] unifying unix? more like formalizing historical design mistakes made by major vendors…

        — ttyv0

Do I really want to be using a language where memoize is a PhD-level topic?

        — Mark Engelberg about Haskell

The beauty of small and simple code is that you can bend or break the rules as long it stays small and simple. Rules allow people to write code without thinking. [And when] you dont think […] you get bloated code that just concatenates stupid patterns.

People stop thinking and questioning [and] then its just worshipping some rules without any pruporse.

        — Cinap Lenrek

If you start programming by learning perl you will just become a menace to your self and others.

        — egoncasteel

When there is no type hierarchy you don’t have to manage the type hierarchy.

        — Rob Pike

Programming languages should be designed not by piling feature on top of feature, but by removing the weaknesses and restrictions that make additional features appear necessary.

        — RnRS

Software efficiency halves every 18 months, compensating Moore’s Law.

        — May’s Law

So-called “smart” software usually is the worst you can imagine.

        — Christian Neukirchen

Such is modern computing: everything simple is made too complicated because it’s easy to fiddle with; everything complicated stays complicated because it’s hard to fix.

        — Rob Pike

It is not that uncommon for the cost of an abstraction to outweigh the benefit it delivers. Kill one today!

        — John Carmack

So much complexity in software comes from trying to make one thing do two things.

        — Ryan Singer

The standard rule is, when you’re in a hole, stop digging; that seems not to apply [to] software nowadays.

        — Ron Minnich

Languages that try to disallow idiocy become themselves idiotic.

        — Rob Pike

uriel: When I read “OMG (Object Management Group)” I think “Oh My God!”.

gobongo: Fitting because whenever someone suggests I use UML I think “Oh My God (is this guy on crack?)!”.

There’s nothing in computing that can’t be broken by another level of indirection.

        — Rob Pike

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work.

        — John Gall

“design patterns” are concepts used by people who can’t learn by any method except memorization, so in place of actual programming ability, they memorize “patterns” and throw each one in sequence at a problem until it works

        — Dark_Shikari

One of the big lessons of a big project is you don’t want people that aren’t really programmers programming, you’ll suffer for it!

        — John Carmack

Premature optimization, that’s like a sneeze. Premature abstraction is like ebola; it makes my eyes bleed.

        — Christer Ericson

Premature optimizations can be troublesome to revert, but premature generalizations are often near impossible.

        — Emil Persson

Premature optimization, that’s like a fart. Premature abstraction is like taking a dump on another developer’s desk.

        — Chris Eric

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

If you give someone a program, you will frustrate them for a day; if you teach them how to program, you will frustrate them for a lifetime.

        — David Leinweber (NOWS)

And don’t EVER make the mistake that you can design something better than what you get from ruthless massively parallel trial-and-error with a feedback cycle. That’s giving your intelligence much too much credit.

        — Linus (http://tinyurl.com/2kkl77)

Science

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool.

        — Richard Feynman, Caltech commencement address, 1974

HOMEOPATHY: turning water into money since 1810

        — Dr Aust

…those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded.

        — Herbert Spencer

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

        — Niels Bohr

Once you get a B.S., you think you know everything. Once you get an M.S., you realize you know nothing. Once you get a Ph.D., you realize no one knows anything!

        — unknown

The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

        — Carl Sagan.

Progress in science comes when experiments contradict theory.

        — Richard Feynman

It’s so easy to become mesmerized by the immediacy of a result that you don’t question its validity.

        — Naomi Karten

You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird… So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing – that’s what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.

        — Richard Feynman

The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.

        — Flannery O'Connor

When one is postulating correlations or causations extant in reality, one should always remember that the human brain is mainly a pattern recognition engine. And it is such a persistent pattern recognition engine that it often perceives patterns where none exist.

        — Jeff Walther

In science we kill our hypothesis instead of each other.

        — Jonathan Rauch paraphrasing Karl Popper.

The tree of research must be fed from time to time with the blood of bean-counters, for it is its natural manure.

        — Alan Kay

A foolish faith in authority is the greatest enemy of truth.

        — Einstein

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.

        — George Bernard Shaw

To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin”.

        — Cardinal Belleramine

Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.

        — Richard Feynman

You should not fool the laymen when you’re talking as a scientist… . I’m talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you’re maybe wrong, [an integrity] that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen.

        — Richard Feynman, Caltech commencement address, 1974

Science reserves the highest reward for those of you who disprove our most cherished beliefs. At any moment someone from any walk of life could come forward and be responsible for a complete revision of our view of everything.

        — Ann Druyan

George Stigler Nobel laureate and a leader of Chicago School was asked why there were no Nobel Prizes awarded in the other social sciences, sociology, psychology, history, etc. “Don’t worry”, Stigler said, “they have already have a Nobel Prize in …Literature”

        — Robert Kuttner, The Poverty of Economics, The Atlantic Monthly, Feb 1985, p. 79

Copying an idea from an author is plagiarism. Copying many ideas from many authors is… research!!

        — Phelson’s Law

Mathematics has no symbols for confused ideas.

        — George Stigler

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

        — Richard P. Feynman, minority report on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident

The experience of being proved completely wrong is salutory. No economist should be denied it, and none are. [This also applies to all scientists.]

        — J K Galbraith

As for string theory, it’s likely to unravel only when its practitioners begin to get bored with their lack of progress. Like the old Soviet Union, it will have to collapse from within. The publication of these two books is a hopeful sign that theoretical physics may have entered its Gorbachev ­era.

        — David Lindley in a review of “The Trouble with Physics” by Lee Smolin and “Not Even Wrong” by Peter Woit.

Research is the effort of the mind to comprehend relationships which no one has previously known, and in its finest exemplification it is practical as well as theoretical, trending always toward worthwhile relationships, demanding common sense as well as uncommon ability.

[S. Millman (Ed.), A History of Engineering and Science in the Bell System, Physical Sciences (1925-1980), Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc., 1983]

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.

        — Charles Darwin

Seek simplicity, and distrust it.

        — Alfred North Whitehead

If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn’t be called research, would it?

        — Albert Einstein

All models are wrong, but some are useful.

        — George Box

War and Violence

Violence is the last resort of the incompetent.

        — Isaac Asimov. “Bridle and Saddle” (aka “The Mayors” chapter, in Foundation, 1942

You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.

        — Jeannette Rankin

An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind.

        — Gandhi

Only the dead have seen the end of war.

        — Plato

I can imagine a planet where everyone lives in peace and there are no weapons, and then I imagine the looks on their faces as we invade their puny planet.