# Last edited on 2011-06-24 17:45:00 by stolfi 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- The restriction of knowledge to an elite group destroys the spirit of society and leads to its intellectual impoverishment. -- Albert Einstein 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Philosophy is written in this grand book - I mean universe - which stands continuously open to our gaze, but which cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles and other geometric figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one is wandering about in a dark labyrinth. -- Galileo (1623) 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Why should someone who knows something conceal it? -- Sumerian proverb 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Wandering in a vast forest at night, I have only a faint light to guide me. A stranger appears and says to me: 'My friend, you should blow out your candle in order to find your way more clearly.' This stranger is a theologian. -- Diderot, c1762 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Si Dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait l'inventer. -- Voltaire (1768) 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear. -- Thomas Jefferson 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- The real problem isn't whether machines think but whether people do. -- B.F. Skinner 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking. -- Martin Heidegger "Being and Time" 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- The problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created them. -- Albert Einstein 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- [Men] yearn for the prestige which accrues to the man who presides over meetings, and this leads them to convoke assemblages not because there is business to be done, but because it is necessary to create the impression that business is being done. Such meetings are more than a subsitute for action. They are widely regarded as action. -- John Kenneth Galbraith 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance. -- unknown 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education. -- Bertrand Russell 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. -- Albert Einstein 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- You can't expect a boy to be depraved until he has been to a good school. -- H. H. Munro (Saki) (1870-1916) 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- I never think of the future. It comes soon enough. --Albert Einstein 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Life is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel. -- Horace Walpole 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- There are three great branches of science: theory, experiment, and computation. -- Lloyd Trefethen 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-1882 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words. -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds -- Ralph Waldo Emerson 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it. -- A. A. Milne, "The House at Pooh Corner" 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- To live is like to love--all reason against it, and all healthy instinct for it. -- Samuel Butler 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented hell. -- Bertrand Russell 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo. -- H.G. Wells (1885-1946) 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time. -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Sin is geographical. -- Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. -- Jesus of Nazareth (ca. 1-33 AD), quoted by John the Apostle 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- To see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour. -- William Blake 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Upon those who step into the same rivers, different and again different waters flow. -- Heraclitus 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- The Moving Finger writes, and, having writ, Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it. -- Omar Khayyam (1040-1131), /Rubayat/ (tr. E. Fitzgerald) 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Old age is the most unexpected of things that can happen to a man. -- Trotsky 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne. -- Chaucer 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Make it as simple as possible, but not simpler. -- Albert Einstein 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple. -- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- The Church says that the world is flat but I know that it is round for I have seen its shadow on the moon and I have more faith in a shadow than in the Church. -- Ferdinand Magellan (?!) 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us. -- Bill Watterson (Calvin and Hobbes) 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- I'm a born-again atheist. -- Gore Vidal 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- This crime called blasphemy was invented by priests for the purpose of defending doctrines not able to take care of themselves. -- Robert Ingersoll 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. -- Galileo Galilei 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- He that cannot reason is a fool; he that will not is a bigot; he that dare not is a slave. -- Andrew Carnegie, 1835-1919 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities. -- Voltaire 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Anything that calls itself "science" probably isn't. -- John Searle 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it. -- Albert Einstein 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- I do not believe in immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it. -- Albert Einstein 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so. -- Adolf Hitler 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- You say you're supposed to be nice to the Episcopalians and the Presbytarians and the Methodists and this, that, and the other thing. Nonsense. I don't have to be nice to the spirit of the Antichrist. -- Pat Robertson, founder of the Christian Coalition 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion. -- George Washington 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- I believe with all my heart that one cannot be America's president without a belief in God, without the strength that your faith gives you. -- George Bush, to convention of National Religious Broadcasters 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Which is it, is man one of God's blunders or is God one of man's? -- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900) 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh. -- Voltaire 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- The gods too are fond of a joke. -- Aristotle (384-322 BC) 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Be not simply good; be good for something. -- Thoreau 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Every man is guilty of all the good he didn't do. -- Voltaire 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- No good deed goes unpunished. Clare Boothe Luce 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- You have to make the good out of the bad because that is all you have got to make it out of. -- Robert Penn Warren 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- I always wondered why somebody doesn't do something about that. Then I realized I was somebody. -- Lily Tomlin 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- As altas tôrres, que fundei no vento, Levou, em fim, o vento que as sostinha; Do mal que me ficou a culpa é minha, Pois sôbre cousas vãs fiz fundamento. -- Luís de Camões 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- The more one is hated, I find, the happier one is. -- Louis Ferdinand Celine 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at without result. -- Winston Churchill (1874-1965) 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Tuvo a todo el mundo en poco; fue el espantajo y el coco del mundo, en tal coyuntura, que acreditó su ventura morir cuerdo, y vivir loco. --Cervantes, /Don Quixote/ 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Mas, certo, ó D. Quixote, ainda foi clemente Contigo a sorte, ao pôr nesse teu cérebro oco O brilho da Ilusão do espírito doente; Porque há cousa pior: é o ir-se a pouco e pouco Perdendo, qual perdeste, um ideal ardente E ardentes ilusões - e não se ficar louco! -- Euclides da Cunha, /D. Quixote/ 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Sem a loucura o que é o homem Mais que a besta sadia, Cadáver adiado que procria? -- Fernando Pessoa 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence. -- Napoleon 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- I can forgive Alfred Nobel for having invented dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- He who cannot understand a glance will not understand a lengthy explanation. -- Mário Quintana 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- To state a theorem and then to show examples of it is literally to teach backwards. -- E. Kim Nebeuts 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Rules of teaching: 1. Know what you are teaching. 2. Know a little more than what you are teaching. -- G. Polya, /How to Solve It/ 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Science is not truth; it is a method for diminishing ignorance. -- Unknown 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Scientific research consists in seeing what everyone else has seen, but thinking what no one else has thought. -- A. Szent-Gyorgyi 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants. -- Isaac Newton 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Vision is the art of seeing things invisible. -- Jonathan Swift 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." -- George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair), Preface to /Animal Farm/ (1946) 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves. -- Henry David Thoreau 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- You can always tell a good idea by the enemies it makes. -- Rick Cook, /Wizardry Compiled/ 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Non mi piace/Tutto quello che dico, Ho paura/Mi sento nemico -- Lucio Dalla 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- You can tell a clever man by his answers. You can tell a wise man by his questions. --Mahfouz Naguib 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last. -- Winston Churchill 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong. -- Voltaire 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- In the fight between you and the world, back the world. -- Frank Zappa ( -Dec 4, 1993) 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Oh God, how do the world and heavens confine themselves, when our hearts tremble in their own barriers! Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749-1832) 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast - It keeps him young. -- Konrad Lorenz 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- When a true genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in confederacy against him. -- Jonathan Swift 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Spinoza is the noblest and the most lovable of the great philosophers. Intellectually, some others have surpassed him, but ethically he is supreme. As a natural consequence, he was considered during his lifetime and for a century after his death, a man of appalling wickedness. -- Bertrand Russell 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- To be great is to be misunderstood. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- The world is divided into two sects: Those with religion but no brains And those with brains but no religion -- Abu 'l-Ala al-Maarri. c1200 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- The believer always hears what he wants to hear, no matter what the prophet actually says. -- Joseph Schumpeter 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind - that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking. -- H.L. Mencken (1880--1956) 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- A arvore berra e voce pensa que o som vem da motosserra. -- Tereziano 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Progress might have been all right once but it has gone on too long. -- Ogden Nash (1902-1971) 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- "Men have become the tools of their tools" -- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity. -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955) 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal. -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955) 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron. -- Dwight Eisenhower, April 16, 1953 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today. -- John F. Kennedy 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- War does not determine who is right - only who is left. -- Bertrand Russell 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- There's no honorable way to kill, no gentle way to destroy. There is nothing good in war. Except its ending. -- Abraham Lincoln 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- A person in a uniform is merely an extension of another person's will. -- Philip Slater 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- War does not bring to my mind any idea worth communicating. -- Franz Kafka 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- No mar tanta tormenta e tanto dano Tantas vezes a morte apercebida! Na terra tanta guerra, tanto engano Tanta necessidade aborrecida! Onde poderá acolher-se um fraco humano? Onde terá segura a curta vida? Que não se arme e se indigne o Céu sereno Contra um bicho da terra tão pequeno! -- Luiz Vaz de Camões, "Os Lusíadas". 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- The worst enemies of mankind are: the soldiers, because they kill, and the priests, beacuse they lie. -- Victor Hugo 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives. -- Abba Eban 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- No one will be so fool as to favor war over peace: for in peace the sons bury their fathers, while in war the fathers bury their sons. -- Herodotus 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Enter, breath; Breath, slip out; Blood, be channeled, And wind about. O, blessed breath and blood which strive To keep this body of mine alive! O gallant breath and blood Which choose To wage the battle They must lose. -- Ogden Nash 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Youth is a blunder; manhood a struggle; old age a regret. -- Disraeli 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- At age fifty, every man has the face he deserves. -- George Orwell 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- My work is done, why wait? -- Suicide note left by Kodak founder George Eastman (1854-1932) 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- La morte non è nel non poter communicare ma nel non poter più essere compresi. -- Pasolini 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Death is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not. -- Epicurus, /Letter to Menoeceus/ 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of the smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights. -- Albert Einstein, Why Socialism? (1949) 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite. -- John Kenneth Galbraith 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- No one can earn a million dollars honestly. -- unknown 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- A rich man is nothing but a poor man with money. -- W. C. Fields 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- The lives of the poor do not survive their deaths. -- Sumerian proverb. 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- First comes the people, then comes the state, and the king is negligible. -- Confucius 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- "Patriotism means being loyal to your country all the time and to its government when it deserves it." -- Mark Twain 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors. -- Plato 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything. -- Joseph Stalin 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage. -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried. -- Winston Churchill (1874-1965) 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- "Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God." -- Thomas Jefferson (Motto on his seal) 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- There are few minds to which tyranny is not delightful. -- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Dictatorship is without a doubt the most satisfying form of government...as long as I'm the dictator. Phil Stromer 11/9/90- 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- I can no longer obey; I have tasted command, and I cannot give it up. -- Napoleon Bonaparte 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- It's said that 'power corrupts', but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power. When they do act, they think of it as service, which has limits. The tyrant, though, seeks mastery, for which he is insatiable, implacable. David Brin _The Postman_ 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- I will splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and cast it to the winds. -- John F. Kennedy, after the Bay of Pigs debacle 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- What is a man? A miserable little pile of secrets. -- Andre Malraux 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Man differs from the animal only by a little; most men throw that little away. -- Confucius 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- I had before seen with mine own eyes how men could be more swinish than pigs, more savage than lions, more lustful than goats, more envious than dogs, more unruly than horses, more stupid than asses, more mad for drink than the brutes, craftier than foxes, greedier than wolves, sillier than apes, and more poisonous than asps and toads. -- Hans Jacob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, "The Adventures of Simplicius Simplicissimus" 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- I have found little that is good about human beings. In my experience most of them are trash. -- Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals. -- Winston Churchill (1874-1965) 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- I've always thought respectable people scoundrels, and I look anxiously at my face every morning for signs of my becoming a scoundrel. -- Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it's time to pause and reflect. -- Mark Twain 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Don't be humble, you're not that great. -- Golda Meir 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Biographical history, as taught in our public schools, is still largely a history of boneheads: ridiculous kings and queens, paranoid political leaders, compulsive voyagers, ignorant generals -- the flotsam and jetsam of historical currents. The men who radically altered history, the great scientists and mathematicians, are seldom mentioned, if at all. -- Martin Gardner 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. -- Shakespeare 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Que dias há que na alma me tem posto Um não sei quê, que nasce não sei onde, Vem não sei como, e dói não sei por quê. -- Luís de Camões 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible. -- T. E. Lawrence _The Seven Pillars of Wisdom_ 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage, than the creation of a new system. For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by the preservation of the old institutions and merely lukewarm defenders in those who would gain by the new ones. -- Machiavelli 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable. -- John F. Kennedy 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. -- Margaret Mead 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- A baby is God's opinion that the world should go on. -- Carl Sandburg 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody. -- Bill Cosby 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- History is a set of lies agreed upon. -- Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists. -- John Kenneth Galbraith 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- If all the economists in the world were laid end to end, they wouldn't reach any conclusion. George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Finance is the art of passing currency from hand to hand until it finally disappears. Robert W. Sarnoff 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities. -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Truth does not demand belief. Scientists do not join hands every Sunday, singing, `Yes, gravity is real! I will have faith! I will be strong! I believe in my heart that what goes up, up, up must come down, down, down. Amen!' If they did, we would think they were pretty insecure about it. -- Dan Barker, Preacher turned Atheist 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Absolute truth is indestructible. Being indestructible, it is eternal. Being eternal, it is self-existent. Being self-existent, it is infinite. Being infinite, it is vast and deep. Being vast and deep, it is transcendental and intelligent. It is because it is vast and deep that it contains all existence. It is because it is infinite and eternal that it fulfills or perfects all existence. -- Confucius 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- The best mind-altering drug is truth. -- Lily Tomlin 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Imagination is the one weapon in the war against reality. -- Jules de Gaultier 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- If you are ruled by mind you are a king; if by body, a slave. -- Cato (234 b.c. - 149 b.c.) 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- You must not fool yourself---and you are the easiest person [for you] to fool. -- Richard Feynman, CalTech Commencement Address, 1974 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka!" (I found it!) but "That's funny ..." -- Isaac Asimov 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs. -- Maurice Wilkes discovers debugging, 1949 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- We learn geology the morning after the earthquake. --Ralph Waldo Emerson 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Victory goes to the player who makes the next-to-last mistake. -- unknown 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- I've been barbecued, stewed, screwed, tattooed, and fried by people claiming to be my friends. The human race has gone backward, not forward, since the days we were apes swinging through the trees. -- W. C. Fields 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Dergleich Rünstner und Handwerct'sleut Artists and craftsmen too should deal Sollen auch handlen gar vertreuwt With good faith and with honest zeal; Einer den andern dienen sol Let each of them the other aid Mit seiner arbeit recht und wol With work well done and things well made -- Hans Sachs, /The Book of Trades/ (1568) 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- If you want a thing done well, do it yourself. -- Napoleon Bonaparte. 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Art is a lie by which you tell the truth. -- Pablo Picasso 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Abstract art: a product of the untalented sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered. -- Al Capp 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Obstinacy is the result of the will forcing itself into the place of the intellect. -- Arthur Schopenhauer, /Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life/. 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Honor has not to be won; it must only not be lost. -- Arthur Schopenhauer, /Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life/. 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Live so that your friends can defend you but never have to. -- Arnold H. Glasgow 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Un classico è un libro che non ha mai finito di dire quel che ha da dire. --Italo Calvino 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Books and friends should be few but good. -- anonymous 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come. --Victor Hugo 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- An idea does not pass from one language to another without change. -- Miguel de Unamuno, 1921 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- I had already learnt that even the finest mind is bound to perish if it suffers the infection of journalism. It is not merely that one defiles the mind by inflicting upon it slipshod and inaccurate English, shallow, commonplace, vulgar, hasty and prejudiced thought, and deliberate dissipation. Apart from these positive pollutions, there is the negative effect. To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worth while. The natural laziness of the mind tempts one to eschew authors who demand a continuous effort of intelligence. The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter. -- Aleister Crowley 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- And this is nothing strange, because in Wasunga[=Europe] there are so many letters, as many as there are blades of grass on the pastures of Mpororo. One single messenger carries a hundred letters at once; every single man is allowed to receive letters, and some get many letters in one day. I seldom see that the letters make anyone more satisfied or sad, and if one letter makes the Wasungu sad, he just goes on to the next one, which makes him happy. And after he has read all the letters, he doesn't know whether he should be sad or happy, only that he is too tired and too weary to plough his field or to tend his cattle, if he has field or cattle. -- Hans Paasche, /The Journey of Lukanga Mukara/ 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- If you read a lot of books, you're considered well-read. But if you watch a lot of TV, you're not considered well-viewed. -- Lily Tomlin 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Those who read own the world, and those who watch television lose it. -- Werner Herzog. 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- ...all languages share in a common myopia; none can articulate the whole truth...Translators are men groping towards each other in a common mist. --George Steiner, 1975 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- "I do not transfer knowledge from the living hearts of men to the dead hides of sheep." -- Socrates, explaining why he did not write down his teachings. (Quoted by Al-Biruni, 973 - 1048) 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Rules of style: 1. Have something to say. 2. If by chance you have two things to say, say first one, then the other; not both at the same time. -- G. Polya, /How To Solve It/ 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Rule: Call things by their name. -- Lev Tolstoy, diary note, 17/jan/1851 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- The young always have the same problem: how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another. --George Chapman 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age 18. -- Albert Einstein 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- "Experience is the name that everyone gives to their mistakes." -- Oscar Wilde 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience. -- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Ó coração epitélico e macio, Colcha de crochê do anseio morto, Grande prolixidade do navio Que existe só para nunca chegar ao porto. -- Fernando Pessoa 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Pages full of fantastic talk Penned with bitter tears; All men called the author mad, None his message hears. -- Cao2 Xue3 Qin2 (1724--1763), "Hong2 Lou2 Meng4" ("Dream of the Red Mansion") 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Tudo que faço ou medito Fica sempre na metade. Querendo, quero o infinito. Fazendo, nada é verdade. -- Fernando Pessoa, /13-9-1933/ 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. -- Albert Einstein 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain. -- Friedrich von Schiller 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Stupidity is the devil. Look in the eye of a chicken and you'll know. It's the most horrifying, cannibalistic, and nightmarish creature in this world. -- Werner Herzog 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- In the sphere of thought, absurdity and perversity remain the masters of the world, and their dominion is suspended only for brief periods. -- Arthur Schopenhauer, /Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life/. 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness; though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless. -- Gustave Flaubert (1846) 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Health is a most destructive addiction. -- Ivan Ilitch 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Dividi o meu estudo inteiro em partes E os títulos dos capítulos são vazios... --Fernando Pessoa 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Vray est qu'icy peu de perfection Vous apprendrez, si non en cas de rire; Aultre argument ne peut mon cueur elire Voyant le dueil qui vous mine et consomme : Mieulx est de ris que de larmes escripre, Pour ce que rire est le propre de l'homme. --Rabelais, preface to Gargantua 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- Ma comunque si sia, quando l'autore compose questo Poema (che fu una state nella sua gioventù) non fu per acquistar fama in poesia, ma per passatempo e per curiosità di vedere come riuscivano questi due stili mischiati insieme, grave e burlesco; imaginando che se ambidue dilettavano separati avrebbono eziandio dilettato congiunti e misti, se la mistura fosse stata temperata con artificio tale che dalla loro scambievole varietà tanto i dotti quanto gli idioti avessero potuto cavarne gusto. Perciò che i dotti leggono ordinariamente le poesie per ricreazione e si dilettano più delle baie, quando sono ben dette, che delle cose serie; e gl'idioti, oltre a gusto che cavano dalle cose burlesche, sono eziandio rapiti dalla maraviglia, che le azioni eroiche sogliono partorire. -- Alessandro Tassoni, prefazio di "La Secchia Rapita" 8<----------------------------------------------------------------------