worksafe.fortune

We have our choice,
between the mundane and the miraculous.
 
Demand the miraculous.
 
  - Bruce Sterling,
    Schismatrix
%
Fortitudine Vincimus
 
  - Shackleton family motto
%
Are you dreaming?
%
Today is the day, and will never come again.
 
  - KMFDM,
    Today
%
Seit bereit, immer bereit.
%
Life is an edge effect.
%
What are you going to do about it?
%
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
%
What test could invalidate your hypothesis?
%
Make it do, or do without.
 
  - Mormon Aphorism
%
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
%
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
%
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
%
If you're surprised,
you weren't paying attention.
%
Politics is gambling for high stakes with other peoples' money.
 
  - Chancellor Otto von Bismarck
%
%
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!
 
  - Col. John Boyd
%
If you must fail,
fail loudly and fail boldly.
 
  - Jeremy Rohr
%
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
%
When hope ceases to be reasonable,
it begins to be useful.
 
  - G.K. Chesterton,
    Heretics
%
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
%
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
%
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
%
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
%
To the silent and wise, does ill come seldom.
 
  - Odin,
    The Hovamol, S6
%
Wealth is as swift as a winking eye;
of friends the falsest it is.
 
  - Odin,
    The Hovamol, S76
%
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
%
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
    ("Campbell's Law")
%
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
%
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
%
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
%
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
%
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
%
What a man is afraid to do,
he does while possessed.
 
  - Keith Johnstone,
    Impro
%
Hope clouds observation.
 
  - 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
%
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.
%
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
%
Those who cannot compute, program.
%
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
%
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
%
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
%
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
just after their greatest triumph.
 
  - John Gall,
    General Systemantics
%
Positive feedback in a large system is a dangerous thing.
Even though a system may function very poorly,
it can still expand to fill the known universe,
and positive feedback only encourages that tendency.
 
  - John Gall,
    General Systemantics
%
Cycles may be found everywhere, wherever systems exist.
In fashion, skirts go up and down, neckties become wider or thinner.
In politics, the mood of the nation swings left or right.
Sunspots advance or retreat, economic indicators rise or decline.
 
The pragmatic student neither exhorts nor deplores,
but merely notes the waste of energy involved
in pushing the wrong way against such trends.
 
  - John Gall,
    General Systemantics
%
The chart is not the patient.
 
  - John Gall,
    General Systemantics
%
Designers of systems tend to design ways
for themselves to bypass the system.
 
  - Tom Rohe,
    as quoted by John Gall,
    General Systemantics
%
Exploitation theorems:
1) If a system can be exploited, it will be.
2) Any system can be exploited.
 
  - John Gall,
    General Systemantics
%
There are three kinds of lies:
Lies, damn lies, and documentation.
%
In preparing for battle,
I have always found that
plans are useless,
but planning is indispensable.
 
  - General Dwight Eisenhower
%
The most important thing in life is to be free to do things.
There are two ways to ensure that freedom:
you can be rich,
or you can reduce your needs to zero.
 
  - Col. John Boyd
%
One day you will come to a fork in the road and you're going to have to make a decision.
 
If you go that way, you can be somebody.
You will have to make compromises, but you will be a member of the club
and you will get promoted and you will get good assignments.
 
Or you can go this way and you can do something -
something for your country and your Air Force and for yourself.
If you decide you want to do something,
you may not get promoted and you may not get the good assignments
and you certainly will not be a favorite of your superiors.
But you won't have to compromise yourself...
And your work might make a difference.
 
To be someone or to do something...  Which way will you go?
 
  - Col. John Boyd
%
Make a design decision and document it.
 
  - The Operating Systems TA's Refrain
%
For a successful technology,
reality must take precedence over public relations,
for nature cannot be fooled.
 
  - Richard Feynman,
    on the Space Shuttle program
%
The great thing about waiting until the last day to do something
is that you only have to spend one day on it.
 
  - David Brumley
%
A human being should be able to change a diaper,
plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship,
design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts,
build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying,
take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone,
solve equations, analyze a new problem,
pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal,
fight efficiently, and die gallantly.
 
Specialization is for insects.
 
  - Robert Heinlein,
    Time Enough for Love
%
There comes a time in the life of every human when
he or she must decide to risk life, fortune, and
sacred honor upon an outcome dubious.
 
  - Robert Heinlein,
    Stranger in a Strange Land
%
A thousand reasoned opinions are never equal
to one case of diving in and finding out.
 
  - Robert Heinlein,
    Time Enough for Love
%
Respect for laws is a pragmatic matter.
 
  - Robert Heinlein,
    Time Enough for Love
%
The human race divides politically into
those who want people to be controlled
and those who have no such desire.
 
The former are idealists acting from highest motives
for the greatest good of the greatest number.
 
The latter are surly curmudgeons,
suspicious and lacking in altruism.
 
But they are more comfortable neighbors
than the other sort.
 
  - Robert Heinlein,
    Time Enough for Love
%
Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny.
 
  - Robert Heinlein,
    Time Enough for Love
%
Abstract design is alright - for wallpaper or linoleum.
But *art* is the process of evoking pity and terror.
 
  - Robert Heinlein,
    Stranger in a Strange Land
%
"Audacity, always audacity" is the soundest principle of strategy.
 
  - Robert Heinlein,
    Stranger in a Strange Land
%
Victory covereth a multitude of sins.
%
You have to be very comfortable
gaining and keeping a small advantage...
Holding a small advantage is more important than
gaining a large advantage or even a quick victory.
 
  - Kenny Ang, StarCraft 2 Grandmaster
%
If you want to win, if that's your intention,
then you need to leave behind
whatever mental baggage you have that would prevent you
from making the moves that actually help you win.
 
  - David Sirlin,
    Playing to Win
%
Clinging is the great error of men.
A man who strikes without thought of his action
can cut God.
 
  - Meti's Sword Manual
%
The weak swordsman clings to victory.
He thinks of his life, his obligations,
the outcome of the battle,
his hatred for his opponent,
his training, his pride in his mastery.
By doing so, he is an imperfect vessel
for the fires of Will.
 
  - Meti's Sword Manual
%
She is the Wielder of Names.
By names she cuts the world as she pleases.
 
  - The Old King,
    Kill Six Billion Demons

Is that the right name?
Have you cut the world along the right lines?
%
All non-trivial abstractions are, to some degree, leaky.
 
  - Joel Spolsky
%
Never appeal to a man's "better nature".
He may not have one.
Invoking his self-interest gives you more leverage.
 
  - Robert Heinlein,
    Time Enough for Love
%
If a nation values anything more than freedom,
it will lose its freedom;
and the irony of it is that
if it values money or comfort more,
it will lose that, too.
 
  - W. Somerset Maugham
%
Local prohibitions cannot block advances
in military and commercial technology...
Democratic movements for local restraint
can only restrain the world's democracies,
not the world as a whole.
 
  - K. Eric Drexler
%
Even the very wise cannot see all ends.
 
  - Gandalf,
    The Fellowship of the Ring,
    on non-invertible operations
%
See that bird?...
If you know all the names of the bird,
you still know nothing about the bird.
You only know something about people:
what they call the bird.
 
  - Richard Feynman
%
Sucking at something is the first step
to becoming sorta good at something.
 
  - Jake the Dog,
    Adventure Time
%
Moderation is for monks.
 
  - Robert Heinlein,
    Time Enough for Love
%
Can I interest you in a friendly wager?
%
We must employ only the best:
Amateurs, not time-servers.
 
  - Charles Stross,
    Accelerando
%
It is useless work that darkens the heart.
 
  - Ursula K. Le Guin,
    The Dispossessed
%
No society can change the nature of existence.
We can't prevent suffering.
This pain and that pain, yes, but not Pain.
 
  - Ursula K. Le Guin,
    The Dispossessed
%
So he worked.
He lost weight; he walked light on the earth.
Lack of physical labor, lack of variety of occupation,
lack of social interaction,
none of these appeared to him as lacks, but as freedom.
He was the free man: he could do what he wanted to do
when he wanted to do it for as long as he wanted to do it.
And he did. He worked. He work/played.
 
  - Ursula K. Le Guin,
    The Dispossessed
%
Brotherhood begins in shared pain.
 
  - Ursula K. Le Guin,
    The Dispossessed
%
If you evade the suffering
you also evade the chance of joy.
Pleasure you may get, or pleasures,
but you will not be fulfilled.
 
  - Ursula K. Le Guin,
    The Dispossessed
%
Perpetual growth is the philosophy of cancer.
%
Make each program do one thing well.
 
  - Douglas McIlroy,
    as quoted in
    The Art of Unix Programming
%
Design and build software, even operating systems,
to be tried early, ideally within weeks.
Don't hesitate to throw away the clumsy parts
and rebuild them.
 
  - Douglas McIlroy,
    as quoted in
    The Art of Unix Programming
%
Use tools in preference to unskilled help
to lighten a programming task,
even if you have to detour to build the tools
and expect to throw some of them out
after you've finished using them.
 
  - Douglas McIlroy,
    as quoted in
    The Art of Unix Programming
%
When in doubt, use brute force.
 
  - Ken Thompson,
    as quoted in
    The Art of Unix Programming
%
Shame on the man of cultivated taste
who permits refinement
to develop into fastidiousness
which unfits him for doing
the rough work of a workaday world.
 
  - Theodore Roosevelt,
    Citizenship in a Republic
%
The average citizen must be a good citizen
if our republics are to succeed...
It behooves us to do our best to see that
the standard of the average citizen is kept high;
and the average cannot be kept high unless
the standard of the leaders is kept very much higher.
 
  - Theodore Roosevelt,
    Citizenship in a Republic
%
The problem with being too busy to read
is that you learn by experience...
ie, the hard way.
 
  - General James Mattis
%
Doctrine is the last refuge
of the unimaginative.
 
  - General James Mattis
%
They started right out
telling everybody how great they were.
Pretty soon they got to believing it themselves.
And they have been busy ever since
proving they were right.
 
  - Gunnery Sergeant Walter Holzworth,
    on the US Marine Corps, 1935
%
He who sleeps on the floor
cannot fall out of bed.
 
  - Turkish proverb
%
The most general solution
is rarely the best solution
to any particular problem.
%
Don't blame the rational agents;
blame the incentive structure.
 
  - Ice-T,
    on defector problems,
    paraphrased
%
If you want to get to know truth,
you often have to entertain falsehood.
%
Art is a game and games have their rules.
 
  - Piet Mondriaan,
    De Stijl V
%
Life and repose, united and one,
are nothing but life without an exterior aim,
i.e. life for its own sake,
life lived for and by itself...
in other words, playing.
The one and continuous deed of creation is a game...
We humans play as well.
 
  - Piet Mondriaan,
    as quoted in The New Image of the World
%
Assume incompetent users and competent adversaries.
%
It's easy to blame memory corruption
for something you don't understand.
 
  - Alexandre Rebert
%
By the way you lead your life from day to day
you prepare yourself for success or you don't,
and when the lightning strikes
you are either ready, or you're not.
 
  - Richard Hamming,
    You and Your Research
%
The one guide I think you can follow is,
whatever I do, I am going to do well.
 
  - Richard Hamming,
    You and Your Research
%
What you think are good working conditions are not...
If you work with your door closed,
you won't be interrupted, you'll get your work done.
If you work with your door open,
people come by and stop and chat...
but those who work with their doors shut
don't know what to work on...
They always seem to work on slightly the wrong problem.
 
  - Richard Hamming,
    You and Your Research
%
I was trying to learn how to be great,
so I studied great people.
 
  - Richard Hamming,
    You and Your Research
%
One day I said to myself,
Hamming, you believe the machine can do anything.
Why don't you try to make it do the programming?
The net effect was that I was put immediately
right on the frontier of programming.
 
What appeared to be a defect [lack of programmers]
became an asset.
 
  - Richard Hamming,
    You and Your Research
%
You don't give a person a chance to work on something great
if they haven't already demonstrated greatness.
The onus is on you to demonstrate greatness,
and then you'll get the opportunities...
I had to do error-correcting codes at home on my own time.
 
  - Richard Hamming,
    You and Your Research
%
You only have one life to lead,
as far as any of us know.
Why shouldn't it be the life you want to lead,
instead of whatever happens to you?
 
  - Richard Hamming,
    You and Your Research
%
I'm a revivalist preacher...
Repent your idle ways, get down,
and be somebody worth being...
 
I've told you how to succeed,
you have no excuse for not doing
better than I did.
 
  - Richard Hamming,
    You and Your Research
%
The proof of a system's value is in its existence.
 
  - Alan Perlis,
    Epigrams in Programming
%
One can't proceed from the informal
to the formal by formal means.
 
  - Alan Perlis,
    Epigrams in Programming
%
Is it possible that software is not like anything else,
that it is meant to be discarded:
that the whole point is to see it as a soap bubble?
 
  - Alan Perlis,
    Epigrams in Programming
%
Computers process numbers, not symbols.
We measure our understanding (and control)
by the degree to which we can arithmetize an activity.
 
  - Alan Perlis,
    Epigrams in Programming
%
Perhaps if we wrote programs from childhood on,
as adults we'd be able to read them.
 
  - Alan Perlis,
    Epigrams in Programming
%
The computer is the perfect bureaucrat:
it has no empathy, and makes no exceptions.
%
I hate computers.
 
  - Tyler Nighswander,
    Spring Break 2012
%
You shouldn't trust intelligent programmers.
We can think up such good arguments
for convincing ourselves and each other
of the utterly absurd.
 
Especially don't believe us
when we promise to repeat
an earlier success,
only bigger and better.
 
  - C.A.R. Hoare,
    Turing Award Lecture
%
The Soviet Army has a completely different approach
to the problems of supply from that adopted in the West -
one which avoids many headaches...
A Soviet soldier is not issued with a sleeping bag,
and does not need one.
He can be left unfed for several days.
All that he needs is ammunition,
and this solves many problems...
Provisions, spare parts, etc. are, quite simply,
not supplied.
 
  - Victor Suvorov,
    Inside the Soviet Army, 1982
%
How can I be a logician before I'm a human being?
 
  - Ludwig Wittgenstein,
    letter to Bertrand Russell
%
Designing a program is art.
Implementing a program is engineering.
Debugging a program is science.
%
The root cause of bad software is impatience.
 
  - Tim Becker
%
It is bad for troopers and officers
to have likes and dislikes.
 
  - Miyamoto Musashi,
    A Book of Five Rings
%
You should not copy others,
but use weapons which you can handle properly.
 
  - Miyamoto Musashi,
    A Book of Five Rings
%
I dislike fixedness in both long swords and hands.
Fixedness means a dead hand.
Pliability is a living hand.
 
  - Miyamoto Musashi,
    A Book of Five Rings
%
The primary thing when you take a sword in your hands
is your intention to cut the enemy, whatever the means.
Whenever you parry, hit, spring, strike...
you must cut the enemy in the same movement...
If you think only of hitting, springing, striking...
you will not be able to actually cut him.
More than anything, you must be thinking of
carrying your movement through to cutting him.
 
  - Miyamoto Musashi,
    A Book of Five Rings

What is your intention
when you take the keyboard in your hands?
%
You overlook the genuine practice of virtue,
and seek for what is merely written.
 
  - Diogenes, to Hegesias,
    when asked to loan him a book
%
Diogenes replied to one
who had been asserting that
there was no such thing as motion
by getting up and walking away.
 
  - Diogenes Laertius,
    The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers
    Book 6, The Cynics
%
Build libraries, not frameworks.
 
  - George Hotz,
    DEFCON 24
%
Better not to begin.
But once begun,
best to finish.
 
  - Zen proverb
%
The man who is really serious,
with the urge to find out what truth is,
has no style at all.
He lives only in what is.
 
  - Bruce Lee,
    Tao of Jeet Kune Do
%
The stage of sophistication, the mechanical stage,
begins when a person starts his training.
He is taught... the scientific knowledge of combat,
but unfortunately his original self and sense of freedom
are lost, and his action no longer flows by itself...
His mind tends to freeze at different moments
for calculations and analysis...
He might be called "intellectually bound".
 
  - Bruce Lee
%
Do not be concerned with escaping safely.
 
  - Bruce Lee
%
Use only that which works,
and take it from any place you can find it.
 
  - Bruce Lee
%
Do not deny the classical approach,
simply as a reaction,
or you will have created another pattern
and trapped yourself there.
 
  - Bruce Lee,
    The Tao of Jeet Kune Do
%
Do it once to learn it,
twice to master it,
thrice to grow tired of it.
Then automate it.
%
Fight the man, not the sword.
 
  - Dr. Kem Fronabarger
%
What is steel
compared to the hand that wields it?
 
  - Thulsa Doom,
    Conan the Barbarian,
    1982
%
Most of us are too close to the idea of progress
to take cognizance of the fact that this belief
belongs only to a small part of recorded history.
 
  - Norbert Wiener,
    Cybernetics and Society
%
We are not the stuff that abides,
but patterns that perpetuate ourselves.
 
  - Norbert Wiener,
    Cybernetics and Society
%
The best model of a cat
is another, or preferably the same, cat.
 
  - Norbert Wiener
%
Mathematics, which most of us see
as the most factual of all sciences,
constitutes the most colossal metaphor imagineable,
and must be judged,
aesthetically as well as intellectually
in terms of the success of that metaphor.
 
  - Norbert Wiener
%
The world of the future will be
an even more demanding struggle
against the limitations of our intelligence,
not a comfortable hammock
in which we can lie down
to be waited upon by our robot slaves.
 
  - Norbert Wiener,
    Cybernetics and Society
%
Knowledge isn't power.
Knowledge is a necessary precondition
for the effective exercise of power.
 
Our inability to predict
limits our ability to control.
%
Food is fuel.
 
  - Sue Davis
%
Practice doesn't make perfect.
Practice makes permanent.
So take your practice seriously.
 
  - Jim Davis
%
No ill will come of diversions
as long as strict limits are placed on them.
 
  - Takuan Soho,
    The Unfettered Mind
%
Ten times a day must you overcome yourself.
 
  - Friedrich Nietzsche,
    Thus Spoke Zarathustra,
    The Chairs of Virtue
%
What is great in man is that
he is a bridge and not an end.
 
  - Friedrich Nietzsche,
    Thus Spoke Zarathustra,
    Prologue
%
What is most difficult, O heroes,
asks the spirit that would bear much,
that I may take it upon myself
and exult in my strength?
 
  - Friedrich Nietzsche,
    Thus Spoke Zarathustra,
    The Three Metamorphoses
%
It is not your sin,
but your moderation that cries to heaven.
 
  - Friedrich Nietzsche,
    Thus Spoke Zarathustra,
    Prologue
%
It's very likely that... if every error
had to be caught, explained, and corrected,
a system of the complexity of a living organism
would not run for a millisecond.
Such a system is so well-integrated that
it can operate across errors.
An error in it does not in general indicate
a degenerative tendency.
 
  - John von Neumann,
    Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata,
    Lecture 4
%
To apply the philosophy [of error-handling]
underlying natural automata to artificial automata
we must understand complicated mechanisms better than we do,
we must have more elaborate statistics about what goes wrong,
and we must have much more perfect statistical information
about the milieu in which the mechanism lives than we do now.
 
  - John von Neumann,
    Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata,
    Lecture 4
%
The ability of a natural system to survive
in spite of a high incidence of error...
probably requires a very high flexibility
and ability of the automaton to watch itself
and reorganize itself. And this probably requires
a very considerable autonomy of parts.
 
  - John von Neumann,
    Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata,
    Lecture 4
%
To speed up, slow down.
 
  - Chuck Norris, to Bruce Lee,
    as relayed in
    The Secret Power Within
%
To live content with small means,
to seek elegance rather than luxury,
and refinement rather than fashion,
to be worthy, not respectable,
and wealthy, not rich,
to study hard, think quietly,
talk gently, act frankly;
to bear all cheerfully, do all bravely,
await occasions, never hurry.
 
  - Bruce Lee,
    Letters
%
Philosophy is itself the disease
which it seeks to cure:
the wise man does not pursue wisdom,
but lives his life.
 
  - Bruce Lee,
    Striking Thoughts
%
There are no limits.
There are plateaus,
but you must not stay there,
you must go beyond them.
If it kills you, it kills you.
 
  - Bruce Lee
%
The four sicknesses of Kendo:
surprise, fear, doubt, hesitation
%
Contra nihilism:
 
If nothing matters,
does it matter that nothing matters?
%
He was warrior and mystic,
ogre and saint,
the fox and the innocent,
chivalrous, ruthless,
less than a god,
more than a man.
 
  - Frank Herbert,
    Dune
%
Arrakis teaches the attitude of the knife -
chopping off what's incomplete and saying,
"Now it's complete, because it's ended here."
 
  - Frank Herbert,
    Dune
%
Parting with friends is a sadness.
But a place is only a place.
 
  - Frank Herbert,
    Dune
%
Once men turned their thinking over to machines
in the hope that this would set them free.
But that only permitted other men with machines
to enslave them.
 
  - Frank Herbert,
    Dune
%
Every experience carries its lesson.
 
  - Frank Herbert,
    Dune
%
And always, he fought the temptation
to choose a clear, straight course,
warning "That path leads ever down
into stagnation."
 
  - Frank Herbert,
    Dune
%
The price we paid was the price
men have always paid for
achieving a paradise in this life -
we went soft, we lost our edge.
 
  - Frank Herbert,
    Dune
%
The secret to usable software
is not discoverability,
not documentation,
not consistency;
it's preview and undo.
 
  - ddarius,
    as relayed by lambdabot,
    as relayed by shachaf
%
If programs are buildings,
a program written for one man by himself
is usually a bachelor pad:
perfect for him,
but rarely suitable for polite company.
%
There are many out-of-the-way things
that it is well to know,
but one should never boast of them.
 
  - The Thousand and One Arabian Nights,
    The Tale of the Second Qalandar
%
You doubtless imagine that
I have acquired all the wealth and luxury
that you see me now enjoy
without difficulty or danger,
but this is far indeed from being the case.
I have only reached this happy state
after having suffered for years
every possible kind of toil and danger.
 
  - Sindbad,
    The Thousand and One Arabian Nights
%
Early is on time,
on time is late.
 
  - Jeremy Rohr
%
When the ten thousand things arise,
the wise man refuses them not.
He quickens, but owns not.
He acts, but claims not.
Merit he accomplishes,
but he does not dwell on it.
Since he does not dwell on it,
it will never leave him.
 
  - Tao Te Ching,
    2.3
%
Never forget:
when your weapons are dulled,
your ardour dampened,
your strength exhausted,
and your treasure spent,
other chieftains will spring up
to take advantage of your extremity.
Then no man, no matter how wise,
will be able to avert the consequences
that must ensue.
 
  - Sun Tzu,
    The Art of War,
    on indecisive wars
%
When you capture spoils from the enemy,
they must be used as rewards,
so that all your men may have
a keen desire to fight,
each on his own account.
 
  - Sun Tzu,
    The Art of War
%
There may be seeming disorder,
and yet no real disorder at all.
Amid chaos and confusion,
your army may be without head or tail,
yet it will be proof against defeat...
Hiding order beneath the cloak of disorder
is simply a question of subdivision.
 
  - Sun Tzu,
    The Art of War
%
If he sends reinforcements everywhere,
he will everywhere be weak.
 
  - Sun Tzu,
    The Art of War
%
There are armies that must not be attacked,
positions that must not be contested,
commands of the sovereign that must not be obeyed.
 
  - Sun Tzu,
    The Art of War
%
If, in the midst of difficulties, we
are always ready to seize an advantage,
we may extricate ourselves from misfortune.
 
  - Sun Tzu,
    The Art of War
%
There are five dangerous faults that may affect a general...
Recklessness, cowardice, delicacy of honor, a hasty temper,
and oversolicitude for his men.
 
  - Sun Tzu,
    The Art of War
%
Vacillation and fussiness are the surest means
of sapping the confidence of an army.
 
  - Sun Tzu,
    The Art of War
%
Place your army in deadly peril,
and it will survive;
plunge it into desperate straits,
and it will come through in safety.
 
  - Sun Tzu,
    The Art of War
%
If they can face death,
they can achieve anything.
 
  - Sun Tzu,
    The Art of War
%
Be resolute but not boastful.
 
  - Tao Te Ching,
    30.3
%
With beautiful words one can sell.
With honest conduct one can do still more.
 
  - Tao Te Ching,
    62.2
%
If they think you're technical, go crude.
If they think you're crude, go technical.
I'm a very technical boy.
So I decided to get as crude as possible.
These days, though,
you have to be pretty technical
before you can even aspire to crudeness.
 
  - William Gibson,
    Johnny Mnemonic
%
The thing about giving people what they want is,
you only get a short time to do it
before it becomes illegal.
 
  - Mark Stanley,
    Freefall, 27 Nov 2017
%
How can we expect righteousness to prevail
when there is hardly anyone
willing to give himself up individually
to a righteous cause?
 
  - Sophie Scholl,
    possible last words
%
When others are greedy, be fearful.
When others are fearful, be greedy.
 
  - Warren Buffett
%
20 percent of the code
has 80 percent of the errors.
Find them, fix them!
 
  - Lowell Jay Arthur
%
Ninety percent of everything is crap.
 
  - Theodore Sturgeon,
    Sturgeon's Revelation
%
If you've never missed a flight,
you're spending too much time in airports.
 
  - Umesh Vazirani,
    as relayed by Scott Aaronson
%
The tool that is so dull
that you cannot cut yourself on it
is unlikely to be sharp enough
to be either useful or helpful.
 
  - John Tukey
%
Whatever your hand finds to do,
do it with all your might,
for in the realm of the dead,
where you are going,
there is neither working not planning
nor knowledge nor wisdom.
 
  - Ecclesiastes 9:10
%
The race is not to the swift
or the battle to the strong,
nor does food come to the wise,
or wealth to the brilliant,
or favor to the learned;
but time and chance
happen to them all.
 
  - Ecclesiastes 9:11
%
If a ruler's anger rises against you,
do not leave your post;
calmness can lay great offenses to rest.
 
  - Ecclesiastes 10:4
%
A person can do nothing better
than to eat and drink
and find satisfaction in their own toil.
 
  - Ecclesiastes 2:24
%
All toil and all achievement
spring from one person's envy of another.
 
  - Ecclesiastes 4:4
%
It is better not to make a vow
than to make one and not fulfill it.
 
  - Ecclesiastes 5:5
%
The more the words,
the less the meaning.
 
  - Ecclesiastes 6:11
%
Wisdom is a shelter
as money is a shelter,
but the advantage of knowledge is this:
wisdom preserves those who have it.
 
  - Ecclesiastes 7:12
%
When the sentence for a crime
is not quickly carried out,
people's hearts are filled
with schemes to do wrong.
 
  - Ecclesiastes 8:11
%
Whoever watches the wind will not plant;
whoever watches the clouds will not reap.
 
  - Ecclesiastes 11:4
%
Sow your seed in the morning
and at evening let your hands be not idle,
for you do not know which will succeed,
whether this or that,
or whether both will do equally well.
 
  - Ecclesiastes 11:6
%
Of making many books there is no end,
and much study wearies the body.
 
  - Ecclesiastes 12:12
%
Every rule has its reason.
%
Speak to the point or be still.
 
  - Odin,
    The Hovamol, S17
%
Who knows what is good or bad?
 
  - Jim Davis
%
This too shall pass.
 
  - Jim Davis
%
Life, as in evolving replicators,
expands to consume all resources available.
%
The height of cultivation runs to simplicity.
Half-way cultivation runs to ornamentation.
 
  - Bruce Lee,
    Tao of Jeet Kune Do
%
The point is the doing,
rather than the accomplishments.
 
  - Bruce Lee,
    Tao of Jeet Kune Do
%
Understanding the problem
dissolves the problem.
 
  - Bruce Lee,
    Tao of Jeet Kune Do
%
Many a martial artist likes "more",
likes "something different",
not knowing the truth and the way
is exhibited in the simple everyday movements,
because it is here that they miss it.
If there is any secret,
it is missed by seeking.
 
  - Bruce Lee,
    Tao of Jeet Kune Do
%
Instead of trying to do everything well,
do perfectly those things
of which you are capable.
 
  - Bruce Lee,
    Tao of Jeet Kune Do
%
Trust, but verify.
 
  - Russian proverb
%
The goal of good parenting
is self-sufficient children.
 
  - Sue Davis,
    23 December 2017
%
When ignorance is combined with borrowed money,
you get interesting outcomes.
 
  - Warren Buffett,
    as relayed by Daniel Pecaut in
    University of Berkshire-Hathaway
%
To think about what *will* happen
versus *when*
is a far more efficient way to behave.
 
  - Charlie Munger,
    as relayed by Daniel Pecaut in
    University of Berkshire-Hathaway
%
What is needed
is not quick information
but good information.
 
  - Warren Buffett, 1994,
    on the internet,
    as relayed by Daniel Pecaut in
    University of Berkshire-Hathaway
%
Don't ask the barber
if you need a haircut.
 
  - Daniel Greenberg
%
What's the sense of getting rich
if you discard associations you enjoy?
 
  - Warren Buffett,
    as relayed by Daniel Pecaut in
    University of Berkshire-Hathaway
%
The failure rate
of all great civilizations
is 100%.
 
  - Charlie Munger,
    as relayed by Daniel Pecaut in
    University of Berkshire-Hathaway
%
To have money cascading in
on people who sit in front of computer screens
is a reliable source of craziness.
 
  - Charlie Munger, 1993,
    as relayed by Daniel Pecaut in
    University of Berkshire-Hathaway
%
The fact that you are being obsoleted
does not mean that you should go
into the successor business.
 
  - Warren Buffett,
    as relayed by Daniel Pecaut in
    University of Berkshire-Hathaway
%
Financial disasters come about
because stupid decisions in financial companies
are not accompanied by immediate pain.
Instead, people give you more money.
Seeing this, competitors indulge
in mindless imitation.
Thus, when failure comes, it is huge.
 
  - Warren Buffett, 1991,
    as relayed by Daniel Pecaut in
    University of Berkshire-Hathaway
%
Work for people you admire.
 
  - Warren Buffett,
    as relayed by Daniel Pecaut in
    University of Berkshire-Hathaway
%
To become a champion
requires a condition of readiness
that causes the individual
to approach with pleasure
even the most tedious practice.
 
  - Bruce Lee,
    Tao of Jeet Kune Do
%
Take advantage of a common tendency
to "reach" with spent tools.
 
  - Bruce Lee,
    Tao of Jeet Kune Do
%
Train yourself to cut down
unnecessary choices...
minimize yourself naturally.
 
  - Bruce Lee,
    Tao of Jeet Kune Do
%
One of the greatest adjustments the novice athlete must make...
is to overcome the natural tendency to try too hard -
to hurry, strain, press...
The body performs better when the athlete lets it go
than when he tries to drive it.
When the athlete is running as fast as he can,
he should not feel as though he ought to be running faster.
 
  - Bruce Lee,
    Tao of Jeet Kune Do
%
The attitude, "You can win if you want it badly enough,"
means that the will to win is constant...
Such an attitude can be developed only if winning
is closely tied to the practitioner's ideals and dreams.
 
  - Bruce Lee,
    Tao of Jeet Kune Do
%
The real competitor is the one 
who gives all he has, all the time.
 
  - Bruce Lee,
    Tao of Jeet Kune Do
%
If you are afraid of something,
seek it out.
%
Crude, therefore cost-effective,
but also side-effective.
%
The aim of programming
is not liberation from programming.
 
  - Cubedrone
%
To accept defeat -
to learn to die -
is to be liberated from it.
 
  - Bruce Lee,
    Striking Thoughts
%
I want to make movies, 
beautiful movies.
I've pursued that goal 
for more than 50 years...
But I don't think I've yet
fully grasped what a movie is.
 
  - Akira Kurosawa
%
No one grows old by living,
only by losing interest in living.
 
  - Fortune cookie
%
Only when you abandon all hope
will you be free.
 
  - Unknown,
    often misattrib. to Gautama Buddha
%
100% is the wrong reliability target
for basically everything
(pacemakers and anti-lock brakes
being notable exceptions).
 
  - Benjamin Treynor Sloss,
    Site Reliability Engineering
%
Roughly 70% of outages
are due to changes in a live system
[ie, updates]
 
  - Benjamin Treynor Sloss,
    Site Reliability Engineering
%
Choosing too many indicators
makes it hard to pay 
the right level of attention
to the indicators that matter.
 
  - Chris Jones,
    Site Reliability Engineering
%
Automation is a force multiplier,
not a panacea.
 
  - Niall Murphy,
    Site Reliability Engineering
%
You know what went wrong?
You let your programmers do things
which you yourself do not understand.
 
  - Andrew St. Johnston,
    to C.A.R. Hoare,
    as relayed in
    Hoare's Turing Award Lecture
%
At first I hoped that
such a technically unsound project
would collapse, but I soon realized
that it was doomed to success.
Almost anything in software
can be implemented, sold, and
even used given enough determination...
But there is one quality which cannot
be purchased in this way -
and that is reliability.
The price of reliability is
the pursuit of utmost simplicity.
It is a price which the very rich
find most hard to pay.
 
  - C.A.R. Hoare,
    Turing Award Lecture
%
Every new line of code written is a liability.
 
  - Max Leubbe,
    Site Reliability Engineering
%
Are you playing to avoid a loss,
or to make a gain?
%
Keep a history of outages.
There is no better way to learn
than to document what has broken in the past.
 
  - Corey Adam Baye,
    Site Reliability Engineering
%
You can't fix people,
but you can fix systems and processes.
 
  - John Lunney and Sue Leuder,
    Site Reliability Engineering
%
In any bureaucratic organization,
there are two kinds of people:
those devoted to the nominal aims of the organization,
and those devoted to the organization itself.
In every case, the second group 
will gain and keep control of the organization.
It will write the rules and control promotions.
 
  - Jerry Pournelle,
    The Iron Law of Bureaucracy,
    paraphrased
%
All great events hang by a hair.
The man of ability
takes advantage of everything
and neglects nothing
that can give him
a chance of success.
 
  - Napoleon Bonaparte
%
I can no longer obey;
I have tasted command,
and I cannot give it up.
 
  - Napoleon Bonaparte
%
I never was truly my own master
but was always ruled by circumstances.
 
  - Napoleon Bonaparte, 1816
%
Those who are free from common prejudices
acquire others.
 
  - Napoleon Bonaparte,
    Memoirs
%
The greater the man,
the less he is opinionated -
he depends on events and circumstances.
 
  - Napoleon Bonaparte,
    Political Aphorisms
%
Impatience is a great obstacle to success;
he who treats everything with brusqueness
gathers nothing,
or only immature fruit which will never ripen.
 
  - Napoleon Bonaparte
%
Destiny urges me to a goal
of which I am ignorant.
Until that goal is attained
I am invulnerable, unassailable.
When Destiny has accomplished her purpose in me,
a fly will suffice to destroy me.
 
  - Napoleon Bonaparte
%
The best way to keep one's word
is not to give it.
 
  - Napoleon Bonaparte
%
The division of labor,
which has brought such perfection to mechanical industries,
is altogether fatal when applied to productions of the mind.
 
  - Napoleon Bonaparte
%
Laws which are consistent in theory
often prove chaotic in practice.
 
  - Napoleon Bonaparte
%
It is inherent in us
to desire to generalize,
when we ought, on the contrary,
to guard ourselves very carefully
from this tendency.
 
  - Napoleon Bonaparte
%
Unhappy the general
who comes on the field of battle
with a system.
 
  - Napoleon Bonaparte
%
When one has taken the offensive,
it is necessary to maintain it
to the last extremity.
 
  - Napoleon Bonaparte
%
The most desirable quality in a soldier
is constancy under fatigue;
valor is only secondary.
 
  - Napoleon Bonaparte
%
It is unwise to make education too cheap.
If everything is provided freely,
there is a tendency
to put no value on anything.
 
  - Dwight Eisenhower
%
Leadership consists of nothing
but taking responsibility
for everything that goes wrong
and giving your subordinates credit
for everything that goes well.
 
  - Dwight Eisenhower
%
It is a good thing
for an uneducated man
to read books of quotations...
They make you anxious
to read the authors
and look for more.
 
  - Winston Churchill,
    My Early Life
%
"Just one more"
is a most powerful lie,
for both good and ill.
%
Live dangerously;
take things as they come;
dread naught,
all will be well.
 
  - Winston Churchill
%
The world looks with awe upon a man
who appears unconcernedly indifferent
to home, money, comfort, rank, or even power or fame.
The world feels not without a certain apprehension,
that here is some one outside its jurisdiction...
some one strangely enfranchised, untamed...
 
  - Winston Churchill,
    on T.E. Lawrence, "of Arabia"
%
The problems of victory
are more agreeable
than those of defeat,
but they are no less difficult.
 
  - Winston Churchill, 1942
%
Broadly speaking,
short words are best,
and the old words,
when short,
are best of all.
 
  - Winston Churchill
%
If you make 10,000 regulations,
you destroy all respect for the law.
 
  - Winston Churchill
%
I felt... that all my past life
had been but a preparation
for this hour and for this trial.
 
  - Winston Churchill,
    on his appointment to Prime Minister
%
Applying a force multiplier unskillfully
just multiplies the mess.
%
Si vis pacem, para bellum.
 
  - Publius Flavius Vegetius,
    De Re Militari
%
Clarity is better than cleverness.
 
  - Eric Scott Raymond,
    The Art of Unix Programming
%
Design for simplicity;
add complexity
only where you must.
 
  - Eric Scott Raymond,
    The Art of Unix Programming
%
Distrust all claims for "one true way".
 
  - Eric Scott Raymond,
    The Art of Unix Programming
%
Prototype before polishing.
Get it working before you optimize it.
  
  - Eric Scott Raymond,
    The Art of Unix Programming
%
Design for the future,
because it will be here
sooner than you think.
 
  - Eric Scott Raymond,
    The Art of Unix Programming
%
If once you have paid him the Dane-geld,
you never get rid of the Dane.
 
  - Rudyard Kipling,
    Dane-Geld
%
Checking assumptions hold via testing
is always a good thing
if you want those assumptions
to be stable...
Using a test process as a substitute
for thinking about design is not.
 
  - James Koppel,
    26 Jan 2018
%
Hardly any man is clever enough
to know all the evil he does.
 
  - François de La Rochefoucauld,
    Maximes, 269
%
There hardly exist faults
which are not more pardonable
than the means by which
one tries to hide them.
 
  - François de La Rochefoucauld,
    Maximes, 411
%
All animals are under stringent selection pressure
to be as stupid as they can get away with.
 
  - Richerson and Boyd,
    Not By Genes Alone
%
Never put off until tomorrow
what you can do still today.
 
  - Solitary Experiments,
    Epiphany
%
The perfection of a ship's beauty
is that nothing should be there
for only beauty's sake.
 
  - John MacGregor,
    as relayed in
    The Annapolis Book of Seamanship
%
We are never safe at sea,
whether we are professionals or amateurs...
My goal is to sail error-free...
but I know this is impossible...
Time on the water, training,
humility, and constant vigilance
are the keys to being 'safer'...
Knowing you're never safe also helps.
 
  - Brad Avery,
    as relayed in
    The Annapolis Book of Seamanship
%
Study hard what interests you the most
in the most irreverent, undisciplined,
and original manner possible.
 
  - Richard Feynman
%
What good is power
if you're too wise to use it?
 
  - Ursula K. Le Guin,
    A Wizard of Earthsea
%
He knew now,
and the knowledge was hard,
that his task had never been
to undo what he had done,
but to finish what he had begun.
 
  - Ursula K. Le Guin,
    A Wizard of Earthsea
%
It is dangerous, that power...
it must follow knowledge,
and serve need.
 
  - Ursula K. Le Guin,
    A Wizard of Earthsea
%
He had learned the price of the game,
which is the peril of losing one's self...
The longer a man stays in a form not his own,
the greater this peril.
 
  - Ursula K. Le Guin,
    A Wizard of Earthsea
%
As a man's real power grows
and his knowledge widens,
ever the way he can follow
grows narrower,
until at last he chooses nothing,
but does only and wholly
what he must do.
 
  - Ursula K. Le Guin,
    A Wizard of Earthsea
%
Nobody ever figures out
what life is all about,
and it doesn't matter.
Explore the world.
Nearly everything is interesting
if you go into it deeply enough.
Work as hard and as much as you want to
on the things you like the best.
Don't think about what you want to be,
but what you want to do.
Keep up some kind of minimum with other things
so that society doesn't stop you
from doing anything at all.
 
  - Richard Feynman
%
Even bad apples make good liquor.
 
  - Amy Stewart,
    The Drunken Botanist
%
Always listen, never obey.
 
  - Martin Jambon,
    Universal Career Advice
%
Successful people are not the most intelligent,
but those who use their intelligence
for the most critical decisions.
 
  - Martin Jambon,
    Universal Career Advice
%
The essence of intelligence
is that you can become familiar with anything.
Don't waste your talent.
 
  - Martin Jambon,
    26 Oct 2017
%
Fast software is a discipline...
If your code is ten times slower
than it should be,
I think it shows that you do not care,
not really.
 
  - Daniel Lemire
    16 Nov 2017
%
The ends dictate the means.
%
The bulk of human knowledge
is organized around causal,
not probabilistic relationships,
and the grammar of probability calculus
is insufficient for capturing those relationships.
 
  - Judea Pearl,
    Bayesianism and Causality
%
There are generally two ways to write bad tests.
One is to miss cases and not be rigorous enough.
This is what happens when developers chase code coverage
without actually thinking about what they're testing...
The other is to test too much and be too specific...
 
The code should not follow the tests,
nor the tests the code.
They should both follow the design.
 
  - James Koppel,
    The Design of Software is a Thing Apart
%
When you choose technology,
you have to ignore
what other people are doing,
and consider only what will work the best.
This is especially true at a startup...
If you do everything
the way the average startup does it,
you should expect average performance...
Average performance means
you'll go out of business.
 
  - Paul Graham,
    Beating the Averages
%
Planning is a necessary evil.
It is a response to risk;
the more dangerous an undertaking,
the more important it is
to plan ahead.
 
  - Paul Graham,
    ANSI Common LISP
%
The code path you never use
is the code path that doesn't work.
 
  - Mike Ulrich,
    Site Reliability Engineering
%
The law has everywhere a tendency
to lag behind the facts of life.
 
  - Louis Brandeis
%
We want good government,
not because it is good business,
but because it is dishonorable
to submit to a bad government.
 
  - Louis Brandeis,
    1903
%
If we desire respect for the law,
we must first make the law respectable.
 
  - Louis Brandeis,
    1912
%
In frank expression of conflicting opinion
lies the greatest promise of wisdom...
and in suppression lies ordinarily
the greatest peril.
 
  - Justice Louis Brandeis,
    Dissent in Gilbert v. Minnesota,
    1920
%
At the foundation of our civil liberty
lies the principle which denies to government officials
an exceptional position before the law
and which subjects them to the same rules of conduct
that are commands to the citizen.
 
  - Justice Louis Brandeis,
    Dissent in Burdeau v. McDowell,
    1921
%
A wall is by no means
an advantage to a city... it usually causes
a soft habit of soul in the inhabitants,
by inviting them to take refuge within it
instead of repelling the enemy.
 
  - Plato,
    Laws, Book 6
%
Effective organization is thwarted
by the desire for instant and dramatic change.
 
  - Saul Alinsky,
    Rules for Radicals
%
It is especially dangerous to enslave men
in the minor details of life...
I should be inclined to think freedom
less necessary in great things
than in little ones,
if it were possible to be secure of the one
without possessing the other.
 
  - Saul Alinsky,
    Rules for Radicals
%
Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women;
when it dies there, no constitution,
no law, no court can even do much to help it.
 
  - Justice Learned Hand,
    The Spirit of Liberty
%
There is no surer way
to misread any document
than to read it literally.
 
  - Justice Learned Hand,
    Giuseppe v Walling, 1944
%
The mark of a free man
is that ever-gnawing inner uncertainty
as to whether or not he is right.
 
  - Justice Learned Hand,
    as relayed by Saul Alinsky,
    in Rules for Radicals
%
The solution of each problem
inevitably creates a new one.
 
  - Saul Alinsky,
    Rules for Radicals

What will the next problem be?
%
In formal logic,
a contradiction is the signal of a defeat;
but in the evolution of real knowledge
it marks the first step... towards victory.
 
  - Alfred North Whitehead,
    Science and the Modern World, 1925
%
Most people do not accumulate
a body of experience.
Most people go through life
undergoing a series of happenings,
which pass through their systems
undigested.
 
  - Saul Alinsky,
    Rules for Radicals
%
With very rare exceptions,
the right things are done
for the wrong reasons.
It is futile to demand
that men do the right thing
for the right reason.
 
  - Saul Alinsky,
    Rules for Radicals
%
My policy is to have no policy.
 
  - Abraham Lincoln,
    as relayed by
    David Herbert Donald
%
Unless conclusions can be supported
by explicit (and ordinarily quantitative) analysis
they should be labeled conjectures.
 
  - Kahn and Mann,
    Techniques of Systems Analysis
%
I have two kinds of problems:
the urgent and the important.
The urgent are not important,
and the important are never urgent.
 
  - President Dwight Eisenhower,
    speech at Northwestern,
    1954
%
There is no code faster than no code.
 
  - Kevlin Henney,
    2001 ACCU Keynote
%
All problems in computer science
can be solved by
another level of indirection,
except for the problem
of too many layers of indirection.
 
  - Kevlin Henney,
    reply to David Wheeler
%
Optimism is an occupational hazard of programming.
 
  - Kent Beck,
    Extreme Programming Explained
%
Our predecessors solved the easy problems.
At Bell Labs we solved somewhat harder ones.
But we left the really hard ones for you.
 
  - Richard Hamming,
    The Art of Doing Science and Engineering,
    paraphrased
%
History is very rarely reported accurately.
 
  - Richard Hamming,
    The Art of Doing Science and Engineering
%
Don't ever try to get a human
to do something reliably.
 
  - Richard Hamming,
    The Art of Doing Science and Engineering
%
If you will steal for me, you will steal from me.
 
  - Theodore Roosevelt,
    Citizenship in a Republic
%
The appearance of conforming gets you a long way.
 
  - Richard Hamming,
    You and Your Research
%
"Beta" is synonymous with "buggy",
"new" with "unproven",
and "early adopter" with "crash test dummy".
 
  - Hacknot,
    paraphrased
%
There is a long history
of people wanting to know
without the pain
of actually learning.
 
  - Richard Hamming,
    Computer-Aided Instruction
%
That which you learn from others,
you can use to follow.
That which you learn for yourself,
you can use to lead.
 
  - Richard Hamming,
    Computer-Aided Instruction
%
Thinking about security
is like thinking about
where to ride your motorcycle:
the safe places are no fun,
and the fun places are not safe.
 
  - James Mickens,
    This World of Ours
%
A library is a tool.
A framework is a way of life.
 
  - James Curran,
    stackoverflow
%
Carpe per diem:
seize the pay.
 
  - Jim Davis
%
There is a world of difference
between loyalty and obedience.
%
Every gift carries an obligation.
%
Tool development is only useful up to a point,
after which it becomes a self-indulgent distraction
from the task at hand.
 
  - Hacknot
%
There are no silver bullets,
be they technological or methodological.
 
  - Hacknot
%
But still I am the Cat who walks by himself,
and all places are alike to me.
 
  - Rudyard Kipling,
    Just-So Stories
%
Always be prepared to admit
that a decision you've made was incorrect...
Be open and honest about
what you do and don't know.
 
  - Hacknot,
    advice to tech leads
%
Sell not virtue to purchase wealth,
nor liberty to purchase power.
 
  - Benjamin Franklin,
    Poor Richard's Almanack,
    1738
%
Distrust and caution
are the parents of security.
 
  - Benjamin Franklin,
    Poor Richard's Almanack,
    1733
%
We learn by chess
the habit of not being discouraged
by present bad appearances
in the state of our affairs,
the habit of hoping 
for a favorable change,
and that of persevering
in the search of resources.
 
  - Benjamin Franklin,
    The Morals of Chess,
    1786
%
Moderate your desire
for victory over your opponent,
and be pleased with one [victory]
over yourself.
 
  - Benjamin Franklin,
    The Morals of Chess,
    1786
%
To become wise,
one must wish to have certain experiences
and run, as it were, into their gaping jaws.
This is, of course, very dangerous;
many a wise guy has been swallowed.
 
  - Friedrich Nietzsche,
    The Wanderer and His Shadow,
    Kaufmann's translation,
    Epigram 298
%
I think well of all skepticism
to which I may reply:
"Let us try it."
But I no longer want to hear anything
of all those things and questions
which do not permit experiments.
 
  - Friedrich Nietzsche,
    The Gay Science,
    Epigram 51
%
Whoever knows he is deep,
strives for clarity;
whoever would like to appear deep...
strives for obscurity.
 
  - Friedrich Nietzsche,
    The Gay Science,
    Epigram 173
%
What an epoch experiences as an evil
is usually an untimely echo
of what was formerly experienced as good -
the atavism of a more ancient ideal.
 
  - Friedrich Nietzsche,
    Beyond Good and Evil,
    Epigram 149
%
If your program doesn't have any bugs,
it probably doesn't do anything interesting.
%
Excess and deficiency are equally at fault.
 
  - Sayings of Confucius,
    11.16
%
Recognize no inescapable necessity.
 
  - Sayings of Confucius,
    9.4
%
Give praise to the day at evening,
to beer when it is drunk,
to a man on his funeral pyre,
to code when it is deprecated.
 
  - Odin,
    The Hovamol, S81
    paraphrased
%
A man has made at least a start
on discovering the meaning of human life
when he plants shade trees
under which he knows full well
he will never sit.
  
  - Elton Trueblood,
    The Life We Prize
%
Are these the right primitives for this problem?
%
Learn when young,
act when grown.
 
  - Chinese proverb,
    relayed in Monkey,
    Waley's translation
%
Heaven favors, where virtue rules.
 
  - Chinese proverb,
    relayed in Monkey,
    Waley's translation
%
Programming:
applied math,
or applied poetry?
%
You are probably too young to know,
but the empire is always in some kind of peril.
 
  - Allan Quatermain,
    The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
%
Organizational skills beat algorithmic wizardry...
The number one most important skill
is how to keep a tangle of features
from collapsing under the weight
of its own complexity.
  
  - James Hague
%
In irregular war,
if two men are together,
one is being wasted...
Our ideal was to make action
a series of single combats...
Our value depended entirely
on our quality,
not on our quantity.
 
  - T.E. Lawrence "of Arabia",
    Anatomy of a Revolt
%
The aim [of discipline]
is to render the unit a unit,
and the man a type,
in order that their effort
should be calculable...
The deeper the discipline,
the lower the individual efficiency.
 
  - T.E. Lawrence "of Arabia",
    Anatomy of a Revolt
%
In the last resort we would be compelled
to the desperate course of blood...
but as cheaply as possible for ourselves,
since the Arabs were fighting for freedom,
a pleasure only to be tasted by a man alive.
 
  - T.E. Lawrence "of Arabia",
    Anatomy of a Revolt
%
Even in human organizations,
the formal hierarchy exists only on paper;
the real flesh-and-blood organization
has many inter-part relations
other than the lines of formal authority.
 
  - Herbert Simon,
    The Architecture of Complexity
%
If there are important systems...
that are complex without being hierarchic,
they may to a considerable extent
escape our observation
and our understanding.
 
  - Herbert Simon,
    The Architecture of Complexity
%
Most things are only weakly connected
to most other things;
for a tolerable description of reality,
only a tiny fraction of all possible
interactions need to be taken into account.
 
  - Herbert Simon,
    The Architecture of Complexity
%
Fixed fortifications are monuments
to the stupidity of man.
 
  - General George Patton
%
Never tell people how to do things.
Tell them what to do,
and they will surprise you
with their ingenuity.
 
  - General George Patton,
    War as I Knew It
%
There is a great deal of talk
about loyalty from the bottom to the top.
Loyalty from the top down
is even more necessary,
and much less prevalent.
 
  - General George Patton,
    War as I Knew It
%
Always do everything you ask
of those you command.
 
  - General George Patton
%
Americans love to fight, traditionally.
 
  - General George Patton,
    speech to the 3rd Army
%
However successful he was
as a corps commander,
he had not learned to command himself.
 
  - General Omar Bradley,
    on Patton
%
When the archer misses
the center of the target,
he turns round
and seeks the cause of failure
in himself.
 
  - Confucius,
    The Doctrine of the Mean
%
Velocity (n):
The rate at which bugs are being added to a program
%
Micro your macro.
 
  - Winter,
    Starcraft 2 Grandmaster
%
Writing a mock for your tests
is a lot like telling a lie,
in that you then have to keep telling lies
to maintain the facade.
 
  - Carolina Zarate,
    paraphrased
%
"Better" is the enemy of "good".
 
  - Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design
%
The ability to improve a design
occurs primarily at the interfaces.
This is also the prime location
for screwing it up.

  - Shea's Law,
    Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design
%
A bad design with a good presentation
is doomed eventually.
A good design with a bad presentation
is doomed immediately.
 
  - Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design
%
Half of everything you hear in a classroom is crap.
Education is figuring out which half is which.
 
  - Larrabee's Law,
    Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design
%
To get an accurate estimate...
multiply the initial time estimates by pi,
and slide the decimal point
on the cost estimates one place to the right.
 
  - von Tiesenhausen's Law of Program Management,
    Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design
%
You can't get to the moon
by climbing successively taller trees.
 
  - Mo's Law of Evolutionary Development,
    Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design
%
The back-end management held the belief,
the more we left Hamming alone,
the more he'd worry about what should be done,
the more likely he was to do the right thing.
 
  - Richard Hamming,
    You and Your Research
%
The essential prerequisite
for building an expert system
is to have an expert.
 
  - Fred Brooks,
    No Silver Bullet
%
Much of the essence
of building a program
is in fact the debugging
of the specification.
 
  - Fred Brooks,
    No Silver Bullet
%
Software entities are more complex
for their size than perhaps any other human construct,
because no two parts are alike...
If they are, we make the two similar parts into one...
In this respect software systems differ profoundly
from computers, buildings, or automobiles,
where repeated elements abound.
 
  - Fred Brooks,
    No Silver Bullet
%
Software people are not alone in facing complexity.
Physics deals with terribly complex objects...
The physicist labors on, however, in a firm faith
that there are unifying principles to be found...
No such faith comforts the software engineer.
 
  - Fred Brooks,
    No Silver Bullet
%
The reality of software is not embedded in space.
Hence it has no ready geometric representation.
 
  - Fred Brooks,
    No Silver Bullet
%
Program verification does not mean
error-proof programs...
Mathematical proofs can also be faulty...
Verification might reduce the program-testing load,
[but] cannot eliminate it.
 
  - Fred Brooks,
    No Silver Bullet
%
Philosophers come in two kinds:
those who produce post-facto
justifications for existing beliefs,
and those who corrupt the youth.
%
The ability to update
is a requirement for security.
 
  - Ricky Zhou,
    12 August 2018
%
Learning without doing is wasted.
 
  - Derek Sivers
%
To write better then everybody else,
you have to want to write better
than everybody else.
You must take an obsessive pride
in the smallest details of your craft.
 
  - William Zinsser,
    On Writing Well
%
You who handle poverty badly
will handle riches equally badly.
 
  - John Steinbeck,
    The Winter of Our Discontent
%
Maybe not having time to think
is not having the wish to think.
 
  - John Steinbeck,
    The Winter of Our Discontent
%
If left to your own devices,
you are going to engineer
all the fun out of your lives.
 
  - Mark Stanley,
    Freefall, 21 August 2018
%
You should know everything in this -
but don't read it!
 
  - David Kazhdan,
    to his students,
    on math textbooks
%
Code written in haste
is written in error.
%
Coherent systems are inherently unstable.
 
  - John Ousterhout
%
The greatest performance improvement of all
is when a system goes
from not-working to working.
 
  - John Ousterhout
%
Plan to throw one [prototype] away;
you will, anyhow.
 
  - Fred Brooks,
    The Mythical Man-Month
%
If it's a core business function -
do it yourself, no matter what.
 
  - Joel Spolsky,
    In Defense of Not-Invented-Here
%
It is a disgrace to grow old
through sheer carelessness
before seeing what manner of man you may become
by developing your bodily strength
and beauty to their highest limits.
 
  - Socrates,
    as relayed by Xenophon,
    Memorabilia
%
States long separated tend to join,
states long joined tend to separate.
 
  - Romance of the Three Kingdoms,
    paraphrased
%
Do not call up
that which you cannot put down.
 
  - H.P. Lovecraft,
    The Case of Charles Dexter Ward,
    paraphrased
%
All language is based on meat.
Do not let the sophists fool you.
 
  - Michael Kirkbride,
    36 Lessons of Vivec,
    Sermon Twenty-Seven
%
When action grows unprofitable,
gather information;
when information grows unprofitable,
sleep.
 
  - Ursula K. Le Guin
%
Go to bed;
tired is stupid.
 
  - Ursula K. Le Guin,
    A Wizard of Earthsea
%
Efficiency and excellence
are mutually exclusive.
 
  - Greg Nuckols,
    paraphrased
%
A society adapts to facts,
or doesn't survive.
 
  - Robert Heinlein,
    The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
%
One might define adulthood
as the age at which
a person learns that he must die...
and accepts his sentence undismayed.
 
  - Robert Heinlein,
    The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
%
Better a little too much
than a little too little
but better a little too little
than much too much.
%
He who knows
only his own side of the case
knows little of even that.
 
  - John Stuart Mill,
    On Liberty
%
With a sufficient number of users of an API,
it does not matter what you promise in the contract:
all observable behaviors of your system
will be depended on by somebody.
 
  - Hyrum's Law
%
Organizations which design systems
are constrained to produce designs
which are copies of the communication structure
of the organization itself.
 
  - Conway's Law,
    paraphrased
%
It always takes longer than you expect,
even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.
 
  - Douglas Hofstadter,
    Hofstadter's Law
%
Courses don't make experts.
Experience makes experts.
%
When we stop expecting [hard] things from ourselves,
our expectations of other people go down as well.
 
  - Mark Rippetoe,
    Strong Enough?
%
Intentionally placing yourself in the position
of having to complete a task
when you don't know if you can
is the single best way of preparing
to be in that position unintentionally.
 
  - Mark Rippetoe,
    Strong Enough?
%
There's nothing new under the sun,
but there are lots of old things
that we don't know.
 
  - Ambrose Bierce,
    as relayed by Mark Rippetoe,
    in Strong Enough?
%
The great events of history
are often due to secular changes
in the growth of population
and other fundamental economic causes,
which, escaping by their gradual character
the notice of contemporary observers,
are attributed to the follies of statesmen
or the fanaticism of atheists.
 
  - John Maynard Keynes,
    The Economic Consequences of the Peace
%
A man about to speak the truth
should keep one foot in the stirrup.
 
  - Mongolian Proverb
%
If your desires are not great,
a little will seem much to you;
for small appetites
make poverty equivalent to wealth.
 
  - Democritus
%
Thrift and fasting are beneficial;
so too is expenditure at the right time...
A life without festival
is a long road without an inn.
 
  - Democritus
%
To live badly is not to live badly,
but to spend a long time dying.
People are fools who yearn for long life
without having pleasure in long life.
People are fools who hate life
yet wish to live through fear of death.
 
  - Democritus
%
Enjoy the blessing of strength
while you have it,
and do not bewail it
when it is gone.
 
  - Cicero,
    On Old Age
%
For it is certain that we must die,
and, for aught we know, this very day.
Therefore, since death threatens every hour,
how can he who fears it
have any steadfastness of soul?
 
  - Cicero,
    On Old Age
%
There is nothing so absurd
that it has not been said
by some philosopher.
 
  - Cicero,
    On Divination
%
Not to know what happened
before you were born
is to be a child forever.
 
  - Cicero,
    Orator Ad M. Brutum
%
In order to command well,
we should know how to submit.
He who submits with good grace
will eventually become worthy
of command.
 
  - Cicero,
    On The Laws
%
In a time of war,
the law falls silent.
 
  - Cicero,
    Pro Milone
%
[The wise man] rejects pleasures
to secure greater pleasures,
or else he endures pains
to avoid worse pains.
 
 - Cicero,
   The Ends of Good and Evil
%
Anger ought to be far from us,
for nothing is able to be done rightly
nor judiciously with anger.
 
  - Cicero,
    On Duties
%
We are not born for ourselves alone;
a part of us is claimed by our nation,
another part by our friends.
 
  - Cicero,
    On Duties
%
He was never less at leisure
than when at leisure,
nor less alone than when alone.
 
  - Cato the Elder,
    on Scipio Africanus,
    as reported by Cicero,
    in On Duties
%
We may indulge in sport and jest...
only when we have satisfied the claims
of our earnest, serious task.
 
  - Cicero,
    On Duties
%
Honorable things,
not secretive things,
are sought by good men.
 
  - Cicero,
    On Duties
%
Few are those who wish
to be endowed with virtue
rather than to seem so.
 
  - Cicero,
    Laelius on Friendship
%
For such is the work of philosophy:
it cures souls,
draws off vain anxieties,
confers freedom from desires,
drives away fears.
 
  - Cicero,
    Tusculan Disputations
%
No one can be happy without virtue.
 
  - Cicero,
    On The Nature of the Gods
%
And if I claim to be a wise man,
it surely means that I don't know.
 
  - Kansas,
    Carry On Wayward Son
%
[I would rather be]
an outstanding sergeant
than just another officer.
 
  - Sergeant Major Daniel Daly,
    declining commission
%
They will test you
until you have the proper tendencies of a hero.
There is a world that is sleeping
and you must guard against it.
 
  - Michael Kirkbride,
    36 Lessons of Vivec,
    Sermon Six
%
Any game for sufficient stakes
is probably rigged.
%
There are no dangerous weapons;
there are only dangerous men.
 
  - Robert Heinlein,
    Starship Troopers
%
Happiness consists of getting enough sleep.
Just that, nothing more.
 
  - Robert Heinlein,
    Starship Troopers
%
The best things in life
are beyond money;
their price is
agony and sweat and devotion.
 
  - Robert Heinlein,
    Starship Troopers
%
If it has to be done, a man
shoots his own dog himself;
he doesn't hire a proxy
who may bungle it.
 
  - Robert Heinlein,
    Starship Troopers
%
When everything is done
with a normal mind,
with no intention
of accomplishing anything,
then everything goes smoothly
and effortlessly.
 
  - Yagyu Munenori,
    The Sword and the Mind
%
Polish the gem of your mind
by discipline and cultivation
so it remains unscathed,
resign to sickness,
discard the mind,
whatever you do, do freely.
 
  - Yagyu Munenori,
    The Sword and the Mind
%
A snowflake
on a red-hot furnace!
 
  - Takeda Shingen,
    almost last words,
    on the human condition
%
When one misreads the facts,
one loses.
 
  - Yagyu Munenori,
    The Sword and the Mind
%
The gods and buddhas
also began with a vow.
 
  - Yamamoto Tsunetomo,
    Hagakure
%
Respect the gods and buddhas
but do not count on them.
 
  - Miyamoto Musashi,
    Dokkodo
%
I rarely have many failures.
If I'm baking a cake and it fails,
it becomes a pudding.
 
  - Cliff Crozier
%
Time spent on reconnaissance
is seldom wasted.
 
  - Cliff Crozier
%
I teach the No
to all that makes weak -
that exhausts.
I teach the Yes
to all that strengthens,
that stores up strength,
that justifies
the feeling of strength.
 
  - Friedrick Nietzsche,
    The Will To Power,
    Kaufmann's translation,
    54
%
As you become successful in your field,
and further internalize the habits
that are necessary to be successful,
it's clear that many of these things
are easy to do,
it's just that people
don't want to do them.
 
  - Jonathan Blow,
    HackerNews comments,
    23 Nov 2017
%
Experience is what you get
when you didn't get what you wanted.
 
  - Randy Pausch,
    Last Lecture
%
The intelligence manifest in an artifact
is simply the amount of human thought
that has been externalized into it.
Refinement, on the other hand,
is a measure of the amount of work
that has gone into it.
 
  - Venkatesh Rao,
    The Return of the Barbarian
%
The useless men are those
who never change with the years.
 
  - J.M. Barrie,
    The Little Minister
%
The enlightend are those
uneaten by the world.
 
  - Michael Kirkbride,
    36 Lessons of Vivec,
    Sermon Twenty-One
%
The first meaning is always hidden.
 
  - Michael Kirkbride,
    36 Lessons of Vivec,
    Sermon Twenty-Seven
%
You're better off being approximately right
than precisely wrong.
 
  - John Tukey, paraphrased
    in The Motley Fool Investment Guide
%
Two ways to fail:
doing what you shouldn't,
and not doing what you should.
The former is more dramatic,
the latter more common.
%
Insecure code is an externality.
%
It is more from carelessness about truth
than from intentional lying,
that there is so much falsehood
in the world.
 
  - Samuel Johnson
%
The only end of writing
is to enable readers
to better enjoy life,
or better to endure it.
 
  - Samuel Johnson
%
Tomorrow's action! Can that hoary wisdom,
borne down with years, still dote upon tomorrow?
That fatal mistress of the young, the lazy,
the coward, and the fool, condemned to lose
a useless life in waiting for tomorrow,
to gaze with longing eyes upon tomorrow
till interposing death destroys that prospect.
Strange! That this general fraud from day to day
should fill the world with wretches undetected.
The soldier, labouring through a winter's march,
still sees tomorrow dressed in robes of triumph;
still to the lover's long-expecting arms
tomorrow brings the visionary bride.
But thou, too old to hear another cheat,
learn, that the present hour alone is man's.
 
  - Samuel Johnson,
    The Tragedy of Irene,
    Act 3, Scene 2
%
The greatest pleasure he knew
was to do a good action by stealth,
and to have it found out by accident.
 
  - Okakura Kakuzo,
    The Book of Tea
%
Art is of value
only to the extent
that it speaks to us.
 
  - Okakura Kakuzo,
    The Book of Tea
%
[Primeval man] entered the realm of art
when he perceived the subtle use
of the useless.
 
  - Okakura Kakuzo,
    The Book of Tea
%
It has been said that
a man at ten is an animal,
at twenty a lunatic,
at thirty a failure,
at forty a fraud,
and at fifty a criminal.
 
  - Okakura Kakuzo,
    The Book of Tea
%
The man who never looks into a newspaper
is better informed than he who reads them;
inasmuch as he who knows nothing
is nearer to truth than he whose mind
is filled with falsehoods and errors.
He who reads nothing will still learn
the great facts,
and the details are all false.
 
  - Thomas Jefferson,
    Letter to John Norvell,
    1807
%
Winter doesn't truly start
till you're sure
that spring will never come.
 
  - James Richardson,
    By The Numbers
%
Nothing takes forever,
but so many things
take longer than we have.
 
  - James Richardson,
    By The Numbers
%
When you think in words,
are you sure
it's your own voice you hear?
 
  - James Richardson,
    By The Numbers
%
This is a typical trouble of many models.
They may be quite satisfactory
for answering one kind of question
and yet misleading
when used for other questions.
 
  - Kahn and Mann,
    Techniques of Systems Analysis
%
The rich, having paid their money,
just want the expected to happen...
The poor, on the contrary,
should lead a reckless life.
It is only by great good luck
that they can do anything at all...
Their salvation lies
in increasing the fluctuation,
in making the situation
chancy and uncertain.
 
  - Kahn and Mann,
    Techniques of Systems Analysis
%
I delight in being useful
to both myself and to others.
 
  - Gautama Buddha,
    Lalitavistara Sutra,
    21.135
%
If everyone likes it,
it must be looked in to.
If everyone dislikes it,
it must be looked in to.
 
  - Sayings of Confucius,
    15.28
%
Man can make System great;
it isn't System which makes man great.

  - Sayings of Confucius,
    15.29
%
When a society is perishing,
the wholesome advice to give
to those who would restore it
is to call it to the principles
from which it sprang.
 
  - Pope Leo XIII,
    Rerum Novarum
%
The law must not undertake more,
nor proceed further, than is required
for the remedy of the evil
or the removal of the mischief.
 
  - Pope Leo XIII,
    Rerum Novarum

Is the same true of programs?
%
Men always work harder and more readily
when they work on that which belongs to them.
 
  - Pope Leo XIII,
    Rerum Novarum
%
I couldn't claim to be smarter
than sixty-five other guys --
but the average of sixty-five other guys,
certainly!
 
  - Richard Feynman,
    Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman
%
I don't know what's the matter with people:
they don't learn by understanding;
they learn by some other way --
by rote, or something.
Their knowledge is so fragile!
 
  - Richard Feynman,
    Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman
%
After the war, every summer
I would go traveling by car...
One year, ... I thought,
"This summer,
instead of going to a different place,
I'll go to a different field."
 
  - Richard Feynman,
    Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman
%
I've very often made mistakes in my physics by
thinking the theory isn't as good as it really is,
thinking that there are lots of complications
that are going to spoil it --
an attitude that anything can happen,
in spite of what you're pretty sure should happen.
 
  - Richard Feynman,
    Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman
%
Fear is extraordinarily contagious.
 
  - Warren Buffet,
    Interview with Wall Street Journal
%
[He] began to suffer from the computer disease
that anybody who works with computers
now knows about.
It's a very serious disease
and it interferes completely with the work.
The trouble with computers
is that you play with them.
 
  - Richard Feynman,
    Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman
%
I have developed
a very powerful sense of social irresponsibility
as a result of von Neumann's advice.
It's made me a very happy man ever since.
 
  - Richard Feynman,
    Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman
%
We don't do anything just for a prize
but when a check like this comes our way,
we cash it.
 
  - Red Whittaker
%
What is the truth?
Tell me if you know
and I will not believe you.
Things are never
what they seem.
Clean gloves hide dirty hands.
 
  - Trevor Goodchild,
    Aeon Flux, Ep 7
%
What they think of you
is so fantastic
it's impossible to live up to.
You have no responsibility
to live up to it!
 
  - Richard Feynman,
    to himself while shaving,
    Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman
%
What I've always wanted
would be bad for me,
so I've decided
I can't accept your offer.
 
  - Richard Feynman,
    on too much money,
    Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman
%
A point at the edge
of the range of the data...
isn't very good,
because if it was,
they'd have another point
further along.
 
  - Richard Feynman,
    Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman
%
When I first became interested
in beta decay,...
I never looked at the original data;
I only read the reports,
like a dope...
I'll never make that mistake again,
reading the experts' opinions.
 
  - Richard Feynman,
    Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman
%
To sell a drawing
is not to make money,
but to be sure that it's in the home
of someone who really wants it.
 
  - Richard Feynman,
    Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman
%
In education, you increase differences.
If someone's good at something,
you try to develop his ability,
which results in differences,
or inequalities...
Is this ethical?
 
  - Richard Feynman,
    Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman
%
Never try to fake out, deceive, or fool
the people under you...
The troops can smell BS
from a mile away.
 
  - Hal Moore,
    On Leadership
%
There's always one more thing
you can do to influence a situation
in your favor.
And after that,
there's one more thing.
 
  - Hal Moore,
    On Leadership
%
If he thinks he might lose...
then he has already lost...
He must have and display
the will to prevail.
 
  - Hal Moore,
    On Leadership
%
Don't take the initiative
just for the sake
of taking the initiative.
 
  - Hal Moore,
    On Leadership,
    paraphrased
%
Live life
as hard as you can live it.
Be strong and train hard
and take a great big bite
every single day
until you fall over dead.
 
  - Mark Rippetoe,
    Ask Rip #35
%
Paradise destroys the weak of will
less painfully than adversity,
but no less surely.
%
Without conflicting requirements,
where would the fun be in life?
%
Kernel development is good for the soul.
 
  - Mike Halcrow
%
You can control any meeting
with a well-designed agenda.
 
  - Hal Moore,
    On Leadership
%
If anyone under me fails,
the fault is at least half mine.
 
  - Hal Moore,
    On Leadership
%
I believed that we would prevail.
And we did.
But we paid the price.
 
  - Hal Moore,
    Speech to Nat'l Press Club,
    2007
%
How am I to find the conditions
under which I will make the contributions
that are most uniquely mine?
 
  - B.F. Skinner,
    as relayed by Robert Epstein in
    Skinner as Self-Manager
%
Sorcery,
though a useful skill
and full of aesthetic delights
for the philosopher,
in itself put no beans on the table.
 
  - Marion Zimmer Bradley,
    Thieves' World
%
The less we use our power,
the greater it will be.
 
  - Thomas Jefferson,
    Letter to Thomas Leiper,
    12 June 1815
%
There is surely no more reliable way
to kill enthusiasm and interest
in a subject
than to make it a mandatory part
of the school curriculum.
 
  - Paul Lockhart,
    A Mathematician's Lament
%
Soyez réglé dans votre vie
et ordinaire comme un bourgeois,
afin d’être violent et original
dans vos oeuvres.
 
  - Gustave Flaubert,
    Letter to Madame Tennant,
    1876
%
Exuberance is better than taste;
the desert is better than pavement;
and a savage is surely better
than a hairdresser!
 
  - Gustave Flaubert,
    Sentimental Education,
    1869
%
Do not read as children do,
to enjoy themselves, nor,
as the ambitious do,
to educate themselves.
No, read to live.
 
  - Gustave Flaubert,
    Letters to Mme. Leroyer de Chantepie,
    1857
%
To be stupid, selfish, and in good health
are three requirements for happiness,
though if stupidity is lacking,
all is lost.
 
  - Gustave Flaubert,
    Letters to Mm. Colet,
    1846
%
That an idea is old and forgotten,
does not mean that it is obsolete.
%
Soudain le fou rire le prend
et il efface tout
 
  - Jacques Prevert,
    Le Cancre
%
There has never been a democracy yet,
that did not commit suicide.
 
  - John Adams,
    Letter to John Taylor,
    17 December 1814
%
If I knew how to do it,
I would have done it.
 
  - Thomas Garnier
%
A unit test is a proof,
and a mock is an
"assume for the sake of argument."
Consider carefully what must be proven.
%
Ravens fly for the pleasure of it,
and playfully enjoy
the fullness of their ability.
 
  - Konrad Lorenz
%
Where should we start our rounds?
The place that worries us the most,
of course.
 
  - Gorobei and Kambei,
    Seven Samurai
%
All farmers ever do
is worry.
Whether the rain falls,
the sun shines,
or the wind blows...
All they know is fear.
 
  - Village Elder,
    Seven Samurai
%
Kids work harder than adults.
But only if you treat them
like adults.
 
  - Heihachi,
    Seven Samurai
%
I was once your age, you know.
Hone your skills,
then go to war and do great things.
Then become lord
of your own castle and domain.
But as you dream those dreams,
before you know it,
your hair will turn as grey as mine!
By that time, you've lost your parents
and you're all alone.
 
  - Kambei,
    Seven Samurai
%
The fish that gets away
looks bigger than it really is.
 
  - Shichiroji,
    Seven Samurai
%
Men seem to prefer
sorrow over joy.
They're forever
seeking out suffering
and rejecting peace.
 
  - Tango,
    Ran
%
In a mad world,
only the mad are sane.
 
  - Kyoami,
    Ran
%
Don't be afraid to take small jumps -
instead, do be afraid to stop improving.
 
  - Mark Rippetoe,
    Starting Strength
%
A design document exists
to explain a decision,
so that future developers
know when the reasons
no longer apply.
%
Endure.
In enduring,
grow strong.
 
  - Da'akon,
    Planescape: Torment
%
When all you are is a nail,
everything looks like a hammer.
 
  - Mark Davis,
    24 December 2019
%
If something seems horribly inefficient
for its nominal purpose,
then its nominal purpose is probably not
its true purpose.
%
It's easy to be a saint in paradise.
But [they] do not live in paradise.
 
  - Captain Sisco,
    Star Trek DS9,
    The Maquis Part 2
%
Two types of typologies:
Type 1 typologies,
and typologies with descriptive type-names.
%
Google takes mediocre ideas
and then implements them
better than I ever would.
 
  - Ned Williamson,
    paraphrased
%
Never learn web development,
unless you wouldn't mind
being your team's sole
web developer,
and doing nothing else
for the rest of your career.
 
  - Alex Bugosh,
    paraphrased
%
The standard human condition
is ignorance and stupidity.
 
  - Charlie Munger,
    Yahoo Finance Interview,
    9 May 2019
%
If you're a politician
in a democracy,
of course you want people
to print money and spend it,
and of course it's not a good idea.
 
  - Charlie Munger,
    Yahoo Finance Interview,
    9 May 2019
%
You live long enough,
a lot of good things happen,
and a lot of bad things happen.
 
  - Charlie Munger,
    Yahoo Finance Interview,
    9 May 2019
%
The chief advantage Berkshire's had...
is that we've avoided
pompous bureaucratic systems.
We've tried to give power
to very talented people
and let them make
very quick decisions.

  - Charlie Munger,
    Yahoo Finance Interview,
    9 May 2019
%
These big bureaucracies,
they think the work is done
if you get it out of your inbox
and into somebody else's inbox.
That is not getting it done.

  - Charlie Munger,
    Yahoo Finance Interview,
    9 May 2019
%
If everybody's in a big
committee meeting all day,
at the end of the day
you're worn out
and you haven't done anything.

  - Charlie Munger,
    Yahoo Finance Interview,
    9 May 2019
%
I don't care whether
the cat is black or white,
I care if it catches mice.
 
  - Unknown,
    relayed by Charlie Munger,
    Yahoo Finance Interview,
    9 May 2019
%
There are a whole lot of things
I don't think about
and one of them
is companies that are losing
2 or 3 billion dollars a year
and going public.

  - Charlie Munger,
    Yahoo Finance Interview,
    9 May 2019
%
A politician is in the business
of howling about something,
trying to create a sense of outrage.

  - Charlie Munger,
    Yahoo Finance Interview,
    9 May 2019
%
Have you ever thought about moving to Singapore, Charlie?
No, but I'd like to move some of Singapore's results
in to the United States.

  - Charlie Munger,
    Yahoo Finance Interview,
    9 May 2019
%
I think meetings work better
if they're spontaneous.
If we were scripting things,
I don't think people would like it.

  - Charlie Munger,
    Yahoo Finance Interview,
    9 May 2019
%
My senior officers could tell
I thought they were wrong
and I tried to hide it
and they could still tell...
It was not a milieu
where I was going to succeed.

  - Charlie Munger,
    on his time in the Army,
    Yahoo Finance Interview,
    9 May 2019
%
It was a combination
of luck and skill.
That's what all good records are.

  - Charlie Munger,
    Yahoo Finance Interview,
    9 May 2019
%
It takes 20 years
to build a reputation
and five minutes
to ruin it.
 
  - Warren Buffett
%
Virtue without liberty remains a help,
while liberty without virtue is a hindrance.
%
You must take away
every aspect of him
which originally seemed
fierce and indestructible...
You must diminish and crush
his spirit with affection,
all the while maintaining
your grip on his sword arm.
In this way,
kindness is the greatest cruelty.
 
  - Au Vam,
    Kill Six Billion Demons,
    King of Swords 10-142
%
Libraries are like tombs
and people only worry
about the races at the circus.
Nothing worth mention
is being done for Rome.
 
  - Ammianus Marcellinus,
    Res Gestae,
    ~391 AD
%
One mischief always introduces another.
These terrors and apprehensions
of the people led them into a thousand
weak, foolish, and wicked things.
 
  - Daniel Defoe,
    A Journal of the Plague Year
%
A man needs a little madness,
or else he never dares cut the rope,
and be free.
 
  - Zorba the Greek
%
Woe to him
who cannot free himself
from Buddhas, Gods,
Motherlands, and Ideas.
 
  - Nikos Kazantzakis
%
People get too used to convenience.
They think convenience is better.
They throw out what's truly good.
 
  - Akira Kurosawa,
    Dreams,
    The Village of Water Wheels
%
They always think they can make something better.
Especially scientists.
They may be smart, but most don't understand
the heart of nature.
They only invent things that in the end
make people unhappy.
Yet they're so proud of their inventions.
What's worse, most people are too.
They view them as if they were miracles.
They worship them.
 
  - Akira Kurosawa,
    Dreams,
    The Village of Water Wheels
%
Most struggles,
whatever they're really about,
will be cast
as struggles between ideas.
 
  - Paul Graham,
    What You Can't Say
%
The best way to protect
your position in this world
is to do nothing at all.
 
  - Narrator,
    Ikiru
%
Misfortune
teaches us the truth.
 
  - Mephistopheles,
    Ikiru
%
We only realize how beautiful life is
when we face death.
And even then,
few of us realize it.
 
  - Mephistopheles,
    Ikiru
%
No...  it's not too late.
It's not hopeless.
Even there [in the office
where I wasted 30 years of my life],
there's something I can do.
I just have to find the will.
 
  - Kanji Watanabe,
    Ikiru
%
I can't afford to hate people.
I haven't got that kind of time.
 
  - Kanji Watanabe,
    Ikiru
%
Let us refuse to say
that which we do not think.
 
  - Alexander Solzhenitsyn,
    Live Not By Lies
%
Not spending more than we collect in revenue
has been a guiding principle
from which no Singapore finance minister
has departed except in a recession.
 
  - Lee Kuan Yew,
    From Third World to First
%
Singaporeans need to take these gyrations with equanimity,
neither euphoric when relations are good
nor despondent when relations turn bad.
We need steady nerves, stamina, and patience,
while quietly standing up for our rights.
 
  - Lee Kuan Yew,
    on relations with Malaysia,
    From Third World to First
%
The opportunities for graft were immense
because many banks and large companies
were insolvent and depended on
government rescue schemes,
opening them to pressure.
 
  - Lee Kuan Yew,
    on Indonesia under Habibie,
    From Third World to First
%
This was the Thai way,
never a brutal, total confrontation
if a compromise was possible.
 
  - Lee Kuan Yew,
    From Third World to First
%
I do not believe
that democracy necessarily leads to development.
I believe that what a country needs to develop
is discipline
more than democracy.
 
  - Lee Kuan Yew,
    speech to 18th Philippine Business Conf.,
    as relayed in From Third World to First
%
Sometimes doing it right
is more important
than doing it well...
but sometimes doing it badly
is worse than
not doing it at all.
 
  - Schlock Mercenary,
    18 October 2017
%
Bad news propagates
at the maximum speed of the medium,
unless a delay
would make the bad news worse.
 
  - Schlock Mercenary,
    28 January 2018
%
If you look closely at the present,
you can find loose bits of the future
just lying around.
 
  - Schlock Mercenary,
    11 March 2018
%
A true apology
must exist without
the expectation of forgiveness.
 
  - Schlock Mercenary,
    24 December 2018
%
Lots of moving parts,
but I prefer that to something
designed to require no maintenance...
"Needs no maintenance" is a lie.
When entropy finally exposes the lie,
nobody knows how to do the maintenance.
 
  - Schlock Mercenary,
    17 April 2019
%
Pride goeth before the unemployment.
 
  - Schlock Mercenary,
    9 January 2013
%
"We don't use money"
is not the same as
"everything is free."
 
  - Schlock Mercenary,
    16 January 2013
%
"Safe" is overrated.
The only people who want you to feel safe
are your enemies.
 
  - Schlock Mercenary,
    28 December 2015
%
Telepresence feels like the first breath
of never getting any fresh air again.
 
  - Schlock Mercenary,
    23 February 2016
%
It is not a method,
it is not a system.
Teaching is not a science,
it is an art,
you cannot put it really
in a system,
but you can have
an attitude to it.
 
  - George Polya,
    Teaching Us A Lesson,
    1966
%
Teaching is
giving opportunity to the students
to discover things
by themselves...
if they wish to learn it, really
they have to discover it.
 
  - George Polya,
    Teaching Us A Lesson,
    1966
%
First, guess.
Then, prove.
All great discoveries
were made in this style.
 
  - George Polya,
    Teaching Us A Lesson,
    1966
%
Finished mathematics consists of proofs.
But mathematics in the making
consists of guesses.
 
  - George Polya,
    Teaching Us A Lesson,
    1966
%
It is a very important part of life,
to be a good guesser.
 
  - George Polya,
    Teaching Us A Lesson,
    1966
%
The less you know the easier
to make a wild guess.
But educated guessing,
reasonable guessing,
that is something else.
 
  - George Polya,
    Teaching Us A Lesson,
    1966
%
You should be suspicious in life, you see.
So if I ask you about five planes,
you should have asked yourself,
why does he ask just five?
Why not four? Why not six?
 
  - George Polya,
    Teaching Us A Lesson,
    1966
%
Problems in life,
even in science,
they are often
incompletely stated.
You have to find out
what the real question is.
 
  - George Polya,
    Teaching Us A Lesson,
    1966
%
You can guess.
What you should not do
that you believe your own guesses,
you see.
Oh, you believe in it a little,
otherwise you would not have guessed it,
and that is sound, that is healthy,
but believing completely what you guess,
well,
that is the standpoint of savages,
not of educated people.
So you doubt it, and that's not enough,
that you doubt it,
you have to test your guesses.
 
  - George Polya,
    Teaching Us A Lesson,
    1966
%
Keep always an important difference:
this is a fact, this is a guess.
This distinction should be very clear
in your mind.
 
  - George Polya,
    Teaching Us A Lesson,
    1966
%
Thoughtlessness
is the natural state of things,
and thinking
is probably the biggest mistake
of amateurs.
 
  - Meti ten Ryo,
    Kill Six Billion Demons
%
I was trying to decide what to do
and one thing that seemed interesting to do
was mathematics,
but there were other people
who were good at mathematics,
very good,
and in mathematics there's no point
in being second best.
 
  - Marvin Minsky,
    MIT Infinite History Interview
%
I noticed that most people work on something,
they do something wonderful,
and then they get stuck...
The best thing is, if you've done something,
you should be ashamed of it
instead of proud of it.
 
  - Marvin Minsky,
    MIT Infinite History Interview
%
What students should learn from their teachers
is how they work,
not the subject they're teaching.
 
  - Marvin Minsky,
    MIT Infinite History Interview
%
Nobody knows how
they think about things.
 
  - Marvin Minsky,
    MIT Infinite History Interview
%
Usually to get anything done,
you have to convince a lot of people
and make a plan and so forth.
But I've worked with a few of these people
[Feynman, McCarthy, Selfridge, Fredkin]
who say, well if that's a good idea,
maybe we can do it tonight
instead of next year.
So until the 1980s, I never
wrote a proposal.
 
  - Marvin Minsky,
    MIT Infinite History Interview
%
None of the large companies
ever did very much for computers.
It was all hackers here and there
and their ideas gradually filtered up.
 
  - Marvin Minsky,
    MIT Infinite History Interview
%
I was always trying to find
the simplest way to solve a problem.
 
  - Marvin Minsky,
    MIT Infinite History Interview
%
Progress comes from taking a complicated thing
with behavior you can't understand
and gradually breaking it down.
 
  - Marvin Minsky,
    MIT Infinite History Interview
%
If I do something myself
and other people admire it,
I regard it as, well,
I couldn't have done it
unless it was obvious.
So that's another way
not to get stuck.
If you have a theory
and it turns out to be wrong,
great.
Now is a chance
to do something better.
 
  - Marvin Minsky,
    MIT Infinite History Interview
%
You don't manage people,
you manage things.
You lead people.
 
  - Adm. Grace Hopper
%
Of all skill,
part is infused in precept,
and part is obtained by habit.
 
  - Samuel Johnson
%
Never complain,
never explain.
 
  - Benjamin Disraeli
%
Never explain -
your friends do not need it,
and your enemies
will not believe you anyway.
 
  - Elbert Hubbard
%
Vague beginnings invite chaotic endings.
 
  - Edward P.J. Corbett,
    Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student
%
I've seen since then many times,
where simulations are run
and many many answers are obtained,
and it doesn't make much sense.
Frequently, fewer answers,
better understood,
are much better.
 
  - Richard Hamming,
    Simulation Lecture 1
%
We are in danger,
by using these simulations,
and by using these formulas
that you get from other people,
of going back
to Medieval scholasticism.
 
  - Richard Hamming,
    Simulation Lecture 1
%
Drunkenness
isn't in the wine.
 
  - Ol' Rubberlegs,
    Dance of the Drunken Mantis
%
Eat alone and starve,
drink alone and die.
 
  - Beggar So,
    Dance of the Drunken Mantis
%
Whenever we express ourselves ill,
there is, besides the mismanagement of language,...
some mistake in our manner of conceiving the subject.
Embarrassed, obscure, and feeble sentences
are generally, if not always, the result of
embarrassed, obscure, and feeble thought.
 
  - Hugh Blair,
    as quoted in
    Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student
%
The devil knows more because he's old
than because he's the devil.
 
  - Mexican proverb,
    relayed by Steve Solomon
    in Gardening When It Counts
%
The best fertilizer of all
is the feet of the gardener.
 
  - Proverb,
    relayed by Steve Solomon
    in Gardening When It Counts
%
Blessed is the stressor,
for without the stressor
there is no adaptation,
and without adaptation,
there is only stagnation
and decline.
%
There is a direct relationship
between the size of the crowd
you are trying to impress
and the number of bad decisions
you'll make in the process.
 
  - Steve Jeck,
    From the Quarry,
    on solitude
%
We find many who study
but few who are wise.
 
  - Hugh of Saint Victor,
    as relayed by Steve Jeck,
    From the Quarry,
    on subtance and rhetoric
%
It is absurd to hold that
a man ought to be ashamed
of being unable to defend himself
with his limbs,
but not of being unable to defend himself
with speech and reason,
when the use of rational speech
is more distinctive of a human being
than the use of his limbs.
 
  - Aristotle,
    Rhetoric
%
There's a funny thing that happens
when you know the correct answer.
It throws you when you get
a different answer that's not wrong.
 
  - Mark Stanley,
    Freefall, 10 November 2014
%
The urge to do something
during an emergency is very strong.
It takes training and discipline
to do nothing.
 
  - Mark Stanley,
    Freefall, 24 October 2014
%
People are always ready to volunteer
how they could have done things better
after the risks have been taken
and the problem's been solved.
 
  - Mark Stanley,
    Freefall, 1 August 2012
%
Sometimes I think people
invent new forms of math
because it's the only way
to show other people
what you're thinking about.
 
  - Mark Stanley,
    Freefall, 31 August 2011
%
With great power
comes great responsibility,
and who wants that?
 
  - Mark Stanley,
    Freefall, 20 May 2009
%
Are all engineers as paranoid as you?
 
  - Mark Stanley,
    Freefall, 15 May 2009
%
My boss says robots aren't as fun
to yell at. As long as we have that,
there will always be a need
for human employees.
 
  - Mark Stanley,
    Freefall, 13 June 2008
%
The key to surviving being on-call
is being able to wake up
enough to solve the problem,
but not so much
that you can't get back to sleep.
 
  - Mark Stanley,
    Freefall, 14 May 2004
%
It's traditional
for software to be buggy.
People wouldn't know what to do
with a program that worked
right out of the box.
 
  - Mark Stanley,
    Freefall, 9 October 2002
%
Dwell on the past
and you'll lose an eye.
Forget the past,
and you'll lose both eyes.
 
  - Russian proverb
%
Every man always has
a dozen glib little reasons
why he is right
not to sacrifice himself.
 
  - Alexander Solzhenitsyn,
    The Gulag Archipelago,
    Book 1
%
As a general rule, people,
even the wickedest,
are much more naive
and simple-hearted
then we suppose.
And we ourselves are, too.
 
  - Fyodor Dostoevsky,
    The Brothers Karamazov
%
These young men unhappily fail to understand
that the sacrifice of life is, in many cases,
the easiest of all sacrifices,
and that to sacrifice, for instance,
five or six years of their seething youth
to hard and tedious study...
such a sacrifice is utterly beyond
the strength of many of them.
 
  - Fyodor Dostoevsky,
    The Brothers Karamazov
%
Deliberate lightly
when deciding
on weighty matters.
 
  - Nabeshima Naoshige,
    O-Kabegaki
%
To be incorruptible
is to participate in divinity.
 
  - Clement of Alexandria,
    Stromata, Book 5
%
All those who have read anything
of the rationalism of the moderns
know that their Reason is a sad thing.
But even their unreason is sad.
 
  - G.K. Chesterton,
    Heretics
%
About what subjects
can one make jokes
except serious subjects?
 
  - G.K. Chesterton,
    Heretics
%
This is
the whole essence of decadence,
the effacement of five people
who do a thing for fun
by one person
who does it for money.
 
  - G.K. Chesterton,
    Heretics
%
The most significant thing about any citizen
is his artistic attitude towards a holiday
and his moral attitude towards a fight -
that is, his way of accepting life
and his way of accepting death.
 
  - G.K. Chesterton,
    Heretics
%
Turning ten nations into one empire
may happen to be as feasible as
turning ten shillings into one half-sovereign.
Also it may happen to be as preposterous as
turning ten terriers into one mastiff.
The question in all cases is not a question
of union or absence of union,
but of identity or absence of identity.
 
  - G.K. Chesterton,
    Heretics
%
The military man
gains the civil power
in proportion
as the civilian man
loses the military virtues.
 
  - G.K. Chesterton,
    Heretics
%
This at least seems to me
the main problem for philosophers...:
How can we contrive
to be at once astonished at the world
and yet at home in it?
 
  - G.K. Chesterton,
    Orthodoxy
%
Any one setting out to dispute anything
ought always to begin by saying
what he does not dispute.
Beyond stating what he proposes to prove
he should always state
what he does not propose to prove
 
  - G.K. Chesterton,
    Orthodoxy
%
Imagination does not breed insanity.
Exactly what does breed insanity is reason.
Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do.
Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers...
The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens.
It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens
into his head. And it is his head that splits.
 
  - G.K. Chesterton,
    Orthodoxy
%
It is the happy man who does the useless things;
the sick man is not strong enough to be idle.
 
  - G.K. Chesterton,
    Orthodoxy
%
Don't show the manager everything.
 
  - Steve Benting,
    Manager
%
The modern world is full
of the old Christian virtues gone mad.
The virtues have gone mad because
they have been isolated from each other
and are wandering alone.
 
  - G.K. Chesterton,
    Orthodoxy
%
War made the state,
and the state made war.
 
  - Charles Tilly
%
It is very hard for a man
to defend anything of which
he is entirely convinced.
 
  - G.K. Chesterton,
    Orthodoxy
%
Let beliefs fade fast and frequently,
if you wish institutions to remain the same.
 
  - G.K. Chesterton,
    Orthodoxy
%
Reform implies form.
It implies that we are trying to shape the world
in a particular image; to make it something
that we see already in our minds.
Evolution is a metaphor from mere automatic unrolling.
Progress is a metaphor from merely walking along a road -
very likely the wrong road.
But reform is a metaphor for reasonable and determined men:
it means that we see a certain thing out of shape
and we mean to put it into shape.
And we know what shape.
 
  - G.K. Chesterton,
    Orthodoxy
%
Man must have just enough faith in himself
to have adventures,
and just enough doubt of himself
to enjoy them.
 
  - G.K. Chesterton,
    Orthodoxy
%
It is a good exercise to try...
to express any opinion one holds
in words of one syllable.
 
  - G.K. Chesterton,
    Orthodoxy
%
If I collapse,
then I will know what my limits are.
But I want to try.
 
  - Masatoshi Obara,
    Ultramarathoner
%
Figure out what you want to do,
then find someone to pay you to do it.
%
If you put your head in the mouth of the lion,
you cannot complain if one day he bite if off,
eh?
 
  - Hercule Poirot,
    The Lost Mine
%
The best medicine
is a victory.
 
  - Yokozuna Hakuho Sho
%
If I tell you
[the answer to your questions],
you won't have learned anything.
 
  - Ron Swanson
%
I'd rather have a guy I have to hold back by the belt
than some listless drag-ass I have to pull along.
 
  - Col. David Hackworth
%
In this we are somewhat approaching the work of art.
That is, it isn't constrained to please.
 
  - Marcello Gandini,
    on designing the Lamborghini Countach
%
I never thought it was a legendary thing.
It was just a bunch of ne'er-do-wells
who didn't have anything better to do.
 
  - One of the 1975 Cannonball Run drivers
%
Complexity expands to fill
the intelligence allotted.
%
The thing I have noticed is that
when the anecdotes and the data disagree,
the anecdotes are usually right.
There is something wrong
with the way you are measuring.
 
  - Jeff Bezos
%
Takes a certain stubborn pride
to keep on living
in a place like this.
 
  - Bastion, narrator
%
There is nothing so permanent
as a temporary government program,
but a "temporary pay cut
until things get better" comes close.
 
  - Mark Stanley,
    Freefall, 11 March 2022
%
He who has no conventional vices
has likely made a vice of virtue.
%
When I find a bet I like,
a lot of my research
is aimed at deciding
how much I like it.
The more I like it,
the more I bet on it.
 
  - Michael Kochan
%
A good security org should be about
helping devs accomplish their goals
safely.
 
  - Matt Van Gundy (paraphrased)
%
I tell you naught for your comfort,
Yea, naught for your desire,
Save that the sky grows darker yet
And the sea rises higher.
 
Night shall be thrice night over you,
And heaven an iron cope.
Do you have joy without a cause,
Yea, faith without a hope?
 
  - G.K. Chesterton,
    The Ballad of the White Horse
%
And he set to rhyme his ale-measures,
And he sang aloud his laws,
Because of the joy of the giants,
The joy without a cause.
 
The King went gathering Wessex men,
As grain out of the chaff
That few that were alive to die,
Laughing, as littered skulls that lie
After lost battles turn to the sky
An everlasting laugh.
 
  - G.K. Chesterton,
    The Ballad of the White Horse
%
If something is inevitable,
the only course of action is
to figure out how to profit from it.
 
  - Mark Stanley,
    Freefall, 25 July 2022
%
Are you reacting,
or are you responding?
%
On the average, only those prisoners could keep alive who...
had lost all scruples in their fight for existence...
The best of us did not return.
 
  - Viktor Frankl,
    Man's Search for Meaning
%
When my life was once endangered by a climbing accident,
I felt only one sensation at the critical moment: curiosity,
curiosity as to whether I should come out of it alive
or with a fractured skull or some other injuries...
At this time one cultivated this state of mind
as a means of protection.
 
  - Viktor Frankl,
    Man's Search for Meaning
%
It is not the physical pain which hurts the most...
it is the mental agony caused by the injustice,
the unreasonableness of it all.
 
  - Viktor Frankl,
    Man's Search for Meaning
%
It was the incorrigible optimists
who were the most irritating companions.
 
  - Viktor Frankl,
    Man's Search for Meaning
%
Suffering completely fills
the human soul and conscious mind,
no matter whether
the suffering is great or little.
 
  - Viktor Frankl,
    Man's Search for Meaning
%
I generally answered
all kinds of questions truthfully.
But I was silent about anything
that was not expressly asked for.
 
  - Viktor Frankl,
    Man's Search for Meaning
%
He remembered a film he had seen
in which a man was portrayed
who waited for death
in a courageous and dignified way.
The boy had thought it
a great accomplishment
to meet death so well.
 
  - Viktor Frankl,
    Man's Search for Meaning
%
A man who could not see the end of his "provional existence"
was not able to aim at an ultimate goal in life.
He ceased living for the future...
Therefore the whole structure of his inner life changed.
 
  - Viktor Frankl,
    Man's Search for Meaning
%
Life is like being at the dentist.
You always think that the worst is yet to come,
and yet it is already over.
 
  - Otto von Bismarck,
    as relayed by
    Viktor Frankl in
    Man's Search for Meaning
%
Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life,
no aim, no purpose, and therefore no point
in carrying on.
He was soon lost.
 
  - Viktor Frankl,
    Man's Search for Meaning
%
Seaworthiness includes
the skipper’s character, skill, and planning.
 
  - Kirkland Sailing Club,
    Member Guidelines
%
'tis equal wrong
if a man speed on a guest who is loathe to go,
and if he keep back one who is eager to be gone.
 
  - Menelaus,
    to Telemachus,
    The Odyssey, 15.48
%
If any man's heart and spirit bid him,
let him go forth and sleep...
But we two will drink and feast in the hut,
and will take delight each in the other's grievous woes...
For in after time a man finds joy even in woes,
whosoever has suffered much, and wandered much.
 
  - Eumaeus the swineherd,
    to disguised Odysseus,
    The Odyssey, 15.380
%
First step of security is inventory.
 
  - Felix Gröbert
%
The stricter the laws, the larger the bribes.
 
  - Wu Lanxiu,
    as relayed by Stephen Platt,
    in Imperial Twilight
%
Trade with China is our only object;
conquest there would be as dangerous as defeat,
and commerce never prospers
where force is used to sustain it.
 
  - James Graham,
    First Lord of the Admiralty, 1831
    as relayed by Stephen Platt,
    in Imperial Twilight
%
I can't spare this man;
he fights!
 
  - Lincoln,
    in defense of Grant
%
You do not examine legislation
in the light of the benefits
it will convey if properly administered,
but in the light of the wrongs it would do
and the harms it would cause
if improperly administered.
 
  - Lyndon B. Johnson,
    as relayed by George R. Whittington
%
[Faith is believing] that
things will work out as they should
providing we do what we should.
 
  - John Wooden,
    TED Talk
%
You can be out in the storm,
but don't let the storm get in you.
 
  - Doug of the SV Seeker,
    Anchoring Heresy
%
The ocean is ths safest place on the planet -
but the shore will ruin you.
 
  - Ken Neumeyer,
    Sailing the Farm
%
I'd rather have a well-stocked sailboat
and the ability to sail it anywhere in the world
than money in a bank that might fail,
a job from which I might be laid off,
a government pension that could dry up,
insurance policies, etc.
 
  - Ken Neumeyer,
    Sailing the Farm
%
If all this seems too expensive,
then get a smaller boat.
It is better to have a small boat
that lasts forever
than a big one you can't keep up
that becomes dangerously ill-maintained.
 
  - Ken Neumeyer,
    Sailing the Farm
%
The wise course isn't always moral,
and the moral course isn't always wise.
%
A man who is not afraid of the sea
will soon be drowned.
 
  - J.M. Synge,
    The Aran Islands
%
Fullness makes dullness.
A little hunger keeps sharp.
%
If you must brag,
brag when it's done,
not just begun.
%
As a software engineer,
writing new code
should be your last resort.
 
  - Titus Winters,
    paraphrased
%
Don't buy the plane ticket home
until you can see the destination dock.
 
  - Captain Dave,
    /r/sailing
%
What is always very surprising to the beginner
is that there is almost always far more time than he expects
before an immobile boat drifts into trouble...
This excepts oncoming ships in narrow channels
and fast tides or strong winds.
In *average* conditions frenzied activity
is scarcely ever required...
The questions to ask in this sort of emergency are
"How long have I got?" and "Have I got long enough?"
Thereafter, singlemindedness with an occasional look around
to check that your time estimate was correct.
 
  - Des Sleightholme,
    Better Boat Handling
%
A wise man never motors close
to the windward side of a fixed object
if he can avoid doing so -
nor does he pass close upstream of it.
 
  - Des Sleightholme,
    Better Boat Handling
%
The most common learning disability
is thinking that you already understand the material.
 
  - Paul McKenney,
    Is Parallel Programming Hard, And, If So,
    What Can You Do About It?
%
If there be any among us who
would wish to dissolve this Union,
or to change its republican form,
let them stand undisturbed as monuments
of the safety with which error
of opinion may be tolerated,
where reason is left free to combat it.
 
  - Thomas Jefferson,
    First Inaugural Address,
    4 March 1801
%
Having banished from our land
that religious intolerance
under which mankind so long bled and suffered,
we have yet gained little
if we countenance a political intolerance,
as despotic, as wicked,
and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions.
 
  - Thomas Jefferson,
    First Inaugural Address,
    4 March 1801
%
With all these blessings, what more is necessary
to make us a happy and a prosperous people?
Still one thing more, fellow citizens,
a wise and frugal government,
which shall restrain men from injuring one another,
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...
 
  - Thomas Jefferson,
    First Inaugural Address,
    4 March 1801
%
A committee is a device
for diffusing blame
for the upcoming failure.
%
When we ask a human,
we're not getting an answer.
We're getting a hint.
 
  - Mark Stanley,
    Freefall, 15 May 2024
%
What creates excellence
is not that people are good at something,
but [that] people care enough
to be good at something...

What creates error-free performance
is not that people are good at it,
but that definitions are tight enough
that "error" is well-defined,
and people care about the errors.
 
  - Venkatesh Rao,
    Survival of the Mediocre Mediocre
%
Fit and fittest are not the same thing.
In the gap between the two lies
the definition of mediocrity.
To pursue mediocrity is
to procrastinate on optimizing
for the current fitness function
because it might change at any time.
 
  - Venkatesh Rao,
    Survival fo the Mediocre Mediocre
%