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quotes.fortune
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We have our choice,
between the mundane and the miraculous.
Demand the miraculous.
- Bruce Sterling,
Schismatrix
%
Fortitudine Vincimus
- Shackleton family motto
%
The flesh serves the will.
%
I notice that I am confused.
- Eleizer Yudkowsky
%
Are you dreaming?
%
Today is the day, and will never come again.
- KMFDM,
Today
%
In the absence of justice,
there will be no peace.
- KMFDM
%
Seit bereit, immer bereit.
%
Teachers can only show the way;
we must walk the path ourselves.
- Gautama Buddha
%
Life is an edge effect.
%
What are you going to do about it?
%
Our heaviest chains are of our own making.
%
One failure is expected,
two is unlucky coincidence,
three is enemy action.
%
No plan survives contact with the enemy.
- Field Marshall Helmuth von Moltke the Elder,
On Strategy
%
Programmer, program thyself.
%
Rules exist to make you stop and think before breaking them.
- Terry Pratchett,
Thief of Time
%
Have no favorite weapon.
- Miyamoto Musashi,
A Book of Five Rings
%
Step right up,
sign right here,
your name in blood.
Have no fear.
- KMFDM,
Looking for Strange
%
Can you quantify it?
%
What test could invalidate your hypothesis?
%
Make it do, or do without.
- Mormon Aphorism
%
Who would stop you if you tried?
%
The Way is in training.
- Miyamoto Musashi,
A Book of Five Rings
%
Do not think dishonestly.
- Miyamoto Musashi,
A Book of Five Rings
%
Sight is weak;
perception is strong.
- Miyamoto Musashi,
A Book of Five Rings
%
In every motion,
seek to cut the enemy.
- Miyamoto Musashi,
A Book of Five Rings
%
Observe the rising and falling timing in all things.
- Miyamoto Musashi,
A Book of Five Rings
%
If you know the Way broadly,
you will see it in everything.
- Miyamoto Musashi,
A Book of Five Rings
%
Do nothing which is of no use.
- Miyamoto Musashi,
A Book of Five Rings
%
Hard and useless things sometimes lead to hard and useful things.
This is why the hard and useless is worth doing.
%
If we never meddled in things we did not comprehend,
how would we ever gain comprehension?
%
The beginning and ending of the secret is unremitting study. Keep always on
your guard; never say an unnecessary thing: watch yourself and your companions
all the time: hear all that passes, search out what is going on beneath the
surface, read their characters, discover their tastes and their weaknesses and
keep everything you find out to yourself. Bury yourself in their circles, have
no interests and no ideas except the work in hand, so that your brain is
saturated with one thing only, and you realize your part deeply enough to
avoid the little slips that would counteract the painful work of weeks. Your
success will be proportioned to the amount of mental effort you devote to it.
- T.E. Lawrence, "of Arabia"
%
Self-discipline is not the opposite of freedom.
Freedom lets us choose our aims;
discipline lets us achieve them.
- Daniel Ingram,
Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha
%
Break the loop of habit, time for your return.
- Covenant,
Monochrome
%
Birds in little cages all believe in freedom.
- Covenent,
Monochrome
%
If you're surprised, you weren't paying attention.
%
Hope is not a valid basis for sound engineering or reliable systems...
but it is a prerequisite for getting anything done.
%
You have exactly as much autonomy as you exercise.
%
If you believe in good faith that inaction imperils the mission,
then it is your duty to act.
%
Politics is gambling for high stakes with other peoples' money.
- Chancellor Otto von Bismarck
%
You must weigh the cost of waiting for better information
against the expected utility of that information.
%
One's enemies can be counted on more than one's friends.
- Chancellor Otto von Bismarck
%
Nothing will ever be attempted
if all objections must first be overcome.
- Samuel Johnson
%
Better to be a hammer than an anvil.
- Chancellor Otto von Bismarck
%
Following the conventional wisdom
usually means losing in a conventional way.
- Dominic Cummings
%
Good people, good ideas, good machines...
in that order!
- Colonel John Boyd
%
If you must fail, fail loudly and fail boldly.
- Jeremy Rohr
%
All bleeding eventually stops.
- Joshua Goller, MD
%
What is it that a man dare not do?
- Lord Walter Scott of Buccleuch to Queen Elizabeth
after breaking a fellow Scotsman out of one of her prisons
%
Luck is a bonus that follows careful planning; it's never free.
- Robert Heinlein,
Gulf
%
Man is not a rational animal;
he is a rationalizing animal.
- Robert Heinlein,
Gulf
%
Blessed is he that expecteth nothing,
for he shall be gloriously surprised.
- G.K. Chesterton,
Heretics
%
There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject;
the only thing that can exist is a disinterested person.
- G.K. Chesterton,
Heretics
%
Exactly at the instant when hope ceases to be reasonable,
it begins to be useful.
- G.K. Chesterton,
Heretics
%
Drink because you are happy,
but never because you are miserable.
- G.K. Chesterton,
Heretics
%
When your house is on fire,
you use everything available to carry water,
but you don't start designing new pumps.
- Josef Stalin,
on engineering in wartime,
as relayed by Alexei Kilichenkov
%
Education is a weapon
whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands
and at whom it is aimed.
- Josef Stalin
%
The real problem in speech is not precise language.
The problem is clear language.
- Richard Feynman
%
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself...
and you are the easiest person to fool.
- Richard Feynman
%
Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.
- Richard Feynman
%
What I cannot create, I do not understand.
Know how to solve every problem that has been solved.
- Richard Feynman,
last writings
%
If we make good things, it is not only to the credit of science;
it is also to the credit of the moral choice which led us to good work.
- Richard Feynman
%
The best way to teach is to have no philosophy,
to be chaotic and confusing,
in the sense that you use every possible way of doing it.
- Richard Feynman
%
Excess is excrement.
- Ursula K. Le Guin,
The Dispossessed
%
The good idea, as usually happens in large organizations,
percolated up from the bottom rather than trickling down from the top.
- Freeman Dyson,
on innovation in bombing techniques by the RAF during WW2
%
History shows again and again
how nature points out the folly of man.
- Blue Oyster Cult,
Godzilla
%
No work, no food.
%
As if governed by Newton’s First Law of Motion,
an institution will resist
any change in its current direction.
- Warren Buffett,
on irrational organizations
%
Just as work expands to fill available time,
corporate projects or acquisitions
will materialize to soak up available funds.
- Warren Buffett,
on irrational organizations
%
Any business craving of the leader,
however foolish, will be quickly supported
by detailed rate-of-return and strategic studies
prepared by his troops.
- Warren Buffett,
on irrational organizations
%
The behavior of peer companies,
whether they are expanding, acquiring,
setting executive compensation or whatever,
will be mindlessly imitated.
- Warren Buffett,
on irrational organizations
%
All models are wrong, but some are useful.
- George Box
%
Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations.
- John von Neumann
%
If you get a tough job, one that is hard,
and you haven’t got a way to make it easy,
put a lazy man on it, and after 10 days
he will have an easy way to do it.
- Clarence Bleicher of Chrysler Automotive,
1947 testimony to the Senate
%
Those who are clever and industrious I appoint to the General Staff.
Use can under certain circumstances be made of those who are stupid and lazy.
The man who is clever and lazy qualifies for the highest leadership posts.
He has the requisite nerves and the mental clarity for difficult decisions.
But whoever is stupid and industrious must be got rid of,
for he is too dangerous.
- General Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord,
On Selecting Officers
%
Never stay up late to do something
you wouldn't be willing to get up early to do.
%
He who hesitates is lost.
%
Better to ask forgiveness than permission.
%
To the silent and wise, does ill come seldom
- Odin,
The Hovamol, S6
%
A better burden, may no man bear
for wanderings wide than wisdom;
worse food for the journey, he brings not afield
than an over-drinking of ale.
- Odin,
The Hovamol, S11
%
Wealth is as swift as a winking eye;
of friends the falsest it is.
- Odin,
The Hovamol, S76
%
Cattle die, and kinsmen die,
and soon we die ourselves;
One thing now, that never dies:
the fame of a dead man's deeds.
- Odin,
The Hovamol, S78
%
A little sand has a little sea,
and small are the minds of men.
Though all men are not equal in wisdom,
yet half-wise only are all.
- Odin,
The Hovamol, S53
%
Away from his arms, in an open field,
a man should not fare on foot;
for never he knows, when the need for a spear,
shall arise on a distant road.
- Odin,
The Hovamol, S38
%
A measure of wisdom, each man shall have,
but never too much let him know;
for the wise man's heart, is seldom happy,
if wisdom too great he has won.
- Odin,
The Hovamol, S55
%
Let no man the fate, before him see,
for so is he freest from sorrow.
- Odin,
The Hovamol, S56
%
Much remains undone, for the morning sleeper;
for the swift is wealth half-won.
- Odin,
The Hovamol, S59
%
Tell one thy thoughts, but beware of two;
all know what is known to three.
- Odin,
The Hovamol, S63
%
Fire for men, is the fairest gift,
and power to see the sun;
health as well, if a man may have it,
and a life not stained with sin.
- Odin,
The Hovamol, S68
%
I bid thee be wary, but never fearful.
- Odin,
The Hovamol, S131
%
These three years of work in isolation, when I was thrown onto my own
resources, following guidelines which I myself had spontaneously invented,
instilled in me a strong degree of confidence, unassuming yet enduring, in my
ability to do mathematics, which owes nothing to any consensus or to the
fashions which pass as law....By this I mean to say: to reach out in my own
way to the things I wished to learn, rather than relying on the notions of
the consensus, overt or tacit, coming from a more or less extended clan of
which I found myself a member, or which for any other reason laid claim to be
taken as an authority....It is in this gesture of "going beyond," to be
something in oneself rather than the pawn of a consensus, the refusal to stay
within a rigid circle that others have drawn around one—it is in this
solitary act that one finds true creativity. All others things follow as a
matter of course.
- Alexander Grothendieck,
Recoltes et Semailles, "How to be alone"
%
If you want to succeed, you have to do something crazy or stupid.
All the smart ideas are already being worked on by lots of people.
- Ned Williamson
%
The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making,
the more subject it will be to corruption pressures
and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes
it was intended to monitor.
- Donald Campbell,
Assessing the Impact of Planned Social Change
%
Fare thee well! Our fates we shun not.
- Sigurth Sigmundsson,
on receiving the prophecy of his death
%
I can simulate anything... to some degree.
I am dubious that you've given me the right equations.
I am dubious everywhere.
I'm dubious that I've got the right answers...
but we must simulate.
- Richard Hamming
%
The greater the difference in rank between people, president to peon,
the greater the degree of willful misunderstanding.
- Richard Hamming
%
If what you're working on is not important,
and it's not likely to lead to important things,
why are you working on it?
- Richard Hamming,
You and Your Research
%
The guy who works the hardest doesn't win.
The guy who works on the right problem
at the right time in the right way wins.
Nothing else counts.
- Richard Hamming,
You and Your Research
%
Change does not mean progress,
but progress requires change.
- Richard Hamming,
You and Your Research
%
Mathematics is created for man by man, and it can be changed by man.
- Richard Hamming
%
Study your successes, not your failures.
If you study your successes, you learn how to succeed.
If you study your failures, you learn how to fail.
- Richard Hamming,
You and Your Research
%
I ain't afraid of nothing.
- Claude Shannon,
as quoted by Richard Hamming,
You and Your Research
%
A poor solution to the right problem
is better than a great solution to the wrong problem.
- Richard Hamming
%
Optimization in the small does not produce optimization in the large.
- Richard Hamming
%
[When using measurements for organizational decision-making]
there is a constant tendency to go for something which is measured easily,
rather than something which is relevant.
- Richard Hamming
%
The popularity of a form of measurement has nothing to do
with its reliability or accuracy.
Nothing!
- Richard Hamming
%
The problem with cosmology is that you only have one sample,
you're supposed to explain how it happened,
and you haven't any power to conduct experiments.
Cosmology is a very interesting science,
if you consider it a science.
- Richard Hamming
%
Most people in the field will ignore contradictions, will dismiss them,
will do anything at all but face them.
It's only by noticing the contradictions and building them up
that you have a chance of making the big change.
- Richard Hamming
%
We didn't convert them; we outlived them.
- Max Planck,
on the opponents of quantum mechanics
%
I am not in the slightest interested in doing problems that you can do.
What I'm interested in using machines for is solving the problems you can't do.
The real problem is, what can man and machine do together,
and not in competition.
- Richard Hamming
%
Keeping an open mind, that everything is possible,
is not satisfactory.
You have to put some probabilities to it,
and those are hard.
- Richard Hamming
%
No data is any good.
- Richard Hamming
%
The Buxton Index of an entity (person or organization) is defined as the
length of the period, measured in years, over which the entity makes its
plans... Close cooperation between entities with very different Buxton
indices invariably fails and leads to moral complaints about the partner.
- Edsger Djikstra,
The Strengths of the Academic Enterprise
%
If you believe what the manufacturer says,
you deserve what you get.
- Richard Hamming
%
Because of the normal distribution of talents and drive in the world,
a depressingly large percentage of organizational processes have been
designed to deal with people of moderate ability, motivation, and trust.
We can easily see this in most walks of life today, but also astoundingly in
corporate, university, and government research.
- Alan Kay,
The Power of the Context
%
In most processes today, and sadly in most important areas of technology research,
the administrators seem to prefer to be completely in control of mediocre
processes to being "out of control" with superproductive processes.
They are trying to "avoid failure" rather than trying to "capture the heavens".
- Alan Kay,
The Power of the Context
%
One committed Error-33 by putting any externally controlled system,
on one's critical path...
If you can build your own tools, languages, and operating systems,
then you absolutely should
because the leverage that can be obtained
(and often the time not wasted
in trying to fix other people's not quite right tools)
can be incredible.
- Alan Kay,
The Power of the Context
%
The child needs models: to understand the city
he may use the organism model:
it must eat, breathe, excrete, defend itself, etc.
Not a very good model, but useful enough.
The metabolism of a real organism he can understand,
in turn, by comparison with an engine.
But to model his own self he cannot use
the engine or the organism or the city...
nothing will serve at all but the computer
with its programs and their bugs.
- Marvin Minsky,
Turing Award Lecture
%
There is a real conflict between the logician's goal
and the educator's.
The logician wants to minimize the variety of ideas,
and doesn't mind a long, thin path.
The educator (rightly) wants to make the paths short
and doesn't mind (in fact, prefers)
connections to many other ideas.
And he cares almost not at all
about the directions of the links.
- Marvin Minsky,
Turing Award Lecture
%
There are no true terminal values;
only proximal values blown out of proportion.
- Nick Land, paraphrased
%
I will do the best I can with what I got...
You don't blame the system.
You do at each course
the best you can given the circumstances.
- Richard Hamming,
You and Your Research
%
He mourned mankind, and the blindness of man, who thought the cosmos had
rules and limits that would shelter them from their own freedom.
There were no shelters. There were no final purposes.
Freedom, and futility, were absolute.
- Bruce Stirling,
Schismatrix
%
What a man is afraid to do,
he does while possessed.
- Keith Johnstone,
Impro
%
Hope clouds observation.
- Frank Herbert,
Dune
%
Without change,
something sleeps inside us,
and seldom awakens.
The sleeper must awaken.
- Frank Herbert,
Dune
%
Freedom is never very safe.
- Ursula K. Le Guin,
The Dispossessed
%
A dying culture inevitably exhibits personal rudeness.
- Robert Heinlein,
Friday
%
Ecology is the science of understanding consequences.
- Frank Herbert
%
Western man has assumed that all you need for any problem is enough force,
power, and that there is no problem which won't submit to this approach,
even the problem of our own ignorance.
- Frank Herbert
%
If you develop any psychological weapon sufficiently to destroy an enemy,
you will yourself be destroyed by it.
It's a two-edged sword without a handle.
- Frank Herbert
%
Tribal organization is a natural organization of mankind.
We tend to fall into it, given any chance at all.
- Frank Herbert
%
Seid gehorsam, doch nicht ohne Freimut.
%
We will not be bound.
- Bentusi
%
Mehr sein als scheinen.
- Field Marshall Helmuth von Moltke the Elder
%
The systems programmer lives in a world without law...
He has seen the comments in the kernel source that say
DOESN'T WORK LOL
and instead of lolling he has wept.
- James Mickens,
The Night Watch
%
Browsers are too complex to be trusted.
Unfortunately, youth is wasted on the young,
and the current generation of software developers is convinced
that browsers need more features, not fewer.
- James Mickens,
To Wash It All Away
%
The nature of the hero is struggle, sacrifice, and tragedy.
The nature of the divine is ease, laughter, and lightness of feet.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
%
Those who cannot compute, program.
%
You can domesticate programmers the way beekeepers tame bees.
You can't exactly communicate with them,
but you can get them to swarm in one place and when they're not looking,
you can carry off the honey.
- Orson Scott Card,
How Software Companies Die
%
I have not yet begun to fight.
- Captain John Paul Jones,
when asked to surrender the USS Bonhomme Richard
%
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.
You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.
- Gall's Law
%
Attachment
to any attribute of oneself,
one's personality,
one's ambitions,
one's relationships
or sensory experiences,
or equally any aversion to these,
will prove limiting.
- Liber Null
%
Much of the excitement that we get out of our work
is that we don't really know what we're doing.
- Edsger Djikstra
%
Nearly every complex solution to a programming problem
that I have looked at carefully
has turned out to be wrong.
- Brent Welch
%
Never put off until run-time what you can do at compile-time.
- D. Gries
%
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
- Knuth
%
The biggest difference between time and space
is that you can't reuse time.
- Merrick Furst
%
Testing can show the presence of bugs, but not their absence.
- Edsger Djikstra
%
The question of whether a computer can think
is just like the question
of whether submarines can swim.
- Edsger Djikstra
%
The use of anthropomorphic terminology
when dealing with computing systems
is a symptom of professional immaturity.
- Edsger Djikstra
%
There was a mysterious rite of initiation
through which almost every member of the team passed.
The term that the old hands used for this rite was 'signing up.'
By signing up for the project you agreed
to do whatever was necessary for success.
You agreed to forsake, if necessary, family, hobbies, and friends
if you had any of these left
(and you might not, if you had signed up too many times before).
- Tracy Kidder,
"The Soul of a New Machine"
%
To understand a program,
you must become both the program and the machine.
- Alan Perlis,
Epigrams in Programming
%
"Virtual" is short for "isn't".
Virtual memory isn't memory,
virtual machines aren't machines,
and virtual private networks aren't private networks.
- Ari Krakauer
%
You can tune a filesystem,
but you can't tuna fish.
- tunefs man page
%
I did not rule Russia.
Ten thousand clerks ruled Russia.
- Tsar Alexander the Great,
on his deathbed
%
Management is what one does
to provide sound leadership to
those those below one's self
on the org chart.
Micromanagement, on the other hand,
is all that takes place above
one's self on the org chart.
- Paul Berenson
%
Do what you have to do before what you want to do.
- Jim Davis
%
No task is beneath anyone if it needs done.
- Sue Davis
%
To do anything less than your best is unacceptable.
- Sue Davis
%
Eat when you can,
drink when you can,
and sleep when you can,
because you never know
when your next chance will be.
- Jim Davis
%
Leadership is the art of getting people
to do things they don't want to do,
and to like it.
- Jim Davis
%
You cannot decline the burdens of empire
and still expect to share its honors.
- Pericles,
as quoted by Thucidydes,
History of the Peloponnesian War
%
Liberty preserved by your efforts will
easily recover what we have lost, while,
the knee once bowed, even what you have
will pass from you.
- Pericles,
as quoted by Thucidydes,
History of the Peloponnesian War
%
Retaliation is only honorable between equals.
- Thucidydes,
History of the Peloponnesian War
%
Zeal is always at its height
at the commencement of an undertaking.
- Thucidydes,
History of the Peloponnesian War
%
Seamanship, just like anything else, is a matter of art,
and will not admit of being taken up occasionally
as an occupation for times of leisure;
on the contrary, it is so exacting
as to leave leisure for nothing else.
- Pericles,
as quoted by Thucidydes,
History of the Peloponnesian War
%
All government -
indeed, every human benefit and enjoyment,
every virtue and every prudent act -
is founded on compromise and barter.
- Edmund Burke
%
Frugality is founded on the principle that all riches have limits.
- Edmund Burke
%
A temporary patch will very likely be permanent.
- John Gall,
General Systemantics
%
Any large system is going to be operating in failure mode most of the time.
- John Gall,
General Systemantics
%
A large system,
produced by expanding the dimensions of a smaller system,
does not behave like the smaller system.
- John Gall,
General Systemantics
%
Systems tend to malfunction conspicuously