Favourite quotes
Apparently we are too much trained to disregard differences in scale, to treat them as "gradual differences that are not essential". We tell ourselves that what we can do once, we can also do twice and by induction we fool ourselves into believing that we can do it as many times as needed, but this is just not true! A factor of a thousand is alreay beyond our powers of imagination!
Edsger W. Dijkstra, Notes on Structured programming, august 1969
Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other.
Benjamin Franklin
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
R. Buckminster Fuller
Dealing with failure is easy: Work hard to improve. Success is also easy to handle: You've solved the wrong problem. Work hard to improve.
Alan Perlis
People who read Cosmopolitan magazine are very different from those who do not.
Donald Berry, Statistics: A Bayesian Perspective
Premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming.
Donald Knuth
Many who burnt heretics in the ordinary way of their business were otherwise excellent people.
G. M. Trevelyan, Bias in History
He became an object of ridicule in 1993 when a paper published an intercepted phone call in which he told his lover Camilla Parker Bowles he wanted to be reincarnated as her tampon.
Reuters story, on Prince Charles
However little television you watch, watch less.
David McCullough
Get the important things right.
N. P. Collingwood
There exists no politician in India daring enough to attempt to explain to the masses that cows can be eaten.
Indira Gandhi
When there's a gap between someone doing her job and doing the right thing, then management has failed.
Seth Godin
If you accidentally end up inside vi, you can quit it by pressing Escape, colon (:), q (q), bang (!) and pressing return.
FreeBSD Tips
The sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinion of others, to do so would be wise, or even right... The only part of the conduct of anyone, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.
Unknown