No Fear
Surf's up!
Perl rocks!
Don't blink!
Don't panic!
Eat at Joe's
Hell is empty.
I walk in fire.
E Pluribus Unix
Who's on first?
Let τ = 2π
This space for rent
This one goes to 11.
make install -not war
Are we having fun yet?
Build high for happiness.
One planet is all you get.
May the force be with you.
Your money's no good here.
Somebody set up us the bomb.
We're not in Kansas anymore.
Feel the Pain. File the Bug!
Voltage hurts. Current kills.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
We lied.
—GalaxyQuest
Threading the needle at Mach 1
All your base are belong to us.
//GO.SYSIN DD *, DOODAH, DOODAH
I have a bad feeling about this.
I got my 45 on so I can rock on.
Laugh while you can, monkey boy!
New Year's resolution: 2560x1600
Rough consensus and running code
Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!
Out of my mind; back in 5 minutes.
Fate finds those who own chainsaws.
When in doubt, get a bigger hammer.
Lead, follow, or get out of the way.
Are you a good witch or a bad witch?
So long, and thanks for all the fish.
Vell, Zaphod's just zis guy, you know?
$665.95—Retail price of the beast
How Can I Miss You If You Won't Go Away?
It's not my goddamned planet, monkey boy!
Are you afraid to die, or afraid to live?
A friend of the devil is a friend of mine.
We'll burn that bridge when we come to it.
WJUL Lowell: More watts than your toaster!
The future's so bright I gotta wear shades.
Don't test for errors that you can't handle.
I don't want tattoos, I want chromatophores.
Short term memory is always the first to go.
XML is not the solution. XML is the problem.
Veni, vidi, visa. (I came, I saw, I shopped.)
You have no chance to survive make your time.
It's a good landing if you walk away from it.
How many anecdotes does it take to make data?
Lisp hackers have to be bound (to-do 'it) ...
I know this place. I've been lost here before.
grep me no patterns and I'll tell you no lines.
United 232, you are cleared to land, any runway.
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!
Where are we going? PLANET TEN! When? REAL SOON!
Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!
Something is better than nothing. Do what you can.
We're making enemies faster than we can kill them.
I'll get you, my pretty...and your little dog too!
Remember the good old days, when CPU was singular?
I live the way I type: fast, with lots of mistakes.
If it's not worth doing, it's not worth doing well.
Obviously a major malfunction. We have no downlink.
Why does Milnor get to prove all the easy theorems?
You can't stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.
See the glory of the royal scam
—Steely Dan
Veni, vidi, velcro. (I came, I saw, I stuck around.)
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
In the beginning, there was nothing. Then it exploded.
Insanity is hereditary: you get it from your children.
We lose money on every sale, and make it up in volume!
Let A = { x | x ∉ x }
—Bertrand Russell
Never eat more than you can lift.
—Miss Piggy
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
We're only in it for the volume.
—Black Sabbath
The wages of sin are high but you get your money's worth.
The steady state of disks is full.
—Ken Thompson
Russia: Where Russians are sent to die
—The Onion
The politician's apology: I'm sorry...that you're offended.
Measure with a micrometer. Mark with chalk. Cut with an ax.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30,757,874 newtons
The past is solid, future is liquid.
—J. L. Aubert
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Real Daleks don't climb stairs—they level the building.
By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes.
Wagner's music is better than it sounds.
—Mark Twain
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
—Michael Pollan
Four-state logic: yes, no, maybe and maybe not
—Art Ng
History is made at night! Character is what you are in the dark.
I don't drink to forget; I drink to quiet the voices in my head.
I have not lost my mind. It's backed up on disk somewhere.
Who is Saint Martin, and why did he build his academy in a field?
The faster we go, the rounder we get.
—The Grateful Dead
This isn't right. This isn't even wrong.
—Wolfgang Pauli
Time is an illusion; lunchtime, doubly so.
—Ford Prefect
Were the giant mutant sewer rats really necessary? I mean, really?
The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
This may not be the end of the world, but you can see it from here.
Fig Newton: The force required to accelerate a fig 39.37 inches/sec.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
"Hello," he lied.
—Don Carpenter, quoting a Hollywood agent
We are faced with insurmountable opportunities.
—Yogi Berra
Cats, no less liquid than their shadows, offer no angles to the wind.
What is a magician but a practicing theorist?
—Obi-Wan Kenobi
An ounce of mother is worth a ton of priest.
—Spanish proverb
Using Windows always makes me feel like I have arthritis and cataracts.
God made the integers; all else is the work of Man.
—Kronecker
Reading the Bible is the fast track to atheism.
—Penn Jillette
Every little picofarad has a nanohenry all its own.
—Don Vonada
When in doubt, hold onto your altitude. No one ever crashed into the sky.
You know, I've read some of those fiction books. They just make stuff up!
Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.
Law of Software Envelopment: Every program expands until it can read mail.
It's not an optical illusion, it just looks like one.
—Phil White
You can't have everything. Where would you put it?
—Steven Wright
I've known many IT shops where the backups worked better than the restores.
Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.
—Groucho Marx
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.
—Hunter S. Thompson
SHIFT TO THE LEFT! SHIFT TO THE RIGHT! POP UP, PUSH DOWN, BYTE, BYTE, BYTE!
Fresco's Discovery: If you knew what you were doing you'd probably be bored.
Roses are #FF0000,
Violets are #0000FF,
All my base are belong to you.
It's not that your life is so short, it's just that you're dead for so long.
Did I mention the giant mutant sewer rats? There are giant mutant sewer rats.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
—Pablo Picasso
Houston, Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed.
—Neil Armstrong
Every man is as God made him; ay, and often worse.
—Miguel de Cervantes
The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.
—Oscar Wilde
Our problems are mostly behind us. What we have to do now is fight the solutions.
Life is simpler when you don't care about things.
—some Zen koan, surely
The first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it.
—Abbie Hoffman
I could show you my favorite...obsession.
—The Rocky Horror Picture Show
Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for you are crunchy and good with ketchup.
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag...it took him 3 days to respawn!
No medium has ever survived the indifference of 25-year-olds.
—Clay Shirky
If you ain't the lead dog, the view never changes.
—ancient sled dog proverb
What is the difference between a real song and a simulated song?
—Hofstadter
And the mark of the beast was 666. Which meant everyone could read and write his file.
Infertility is hereditary: if your parents didn't have any children, you won't either.
My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled existential crisis, already in progress.
If you can count your money, you don't have a billion dollars.
—J. Paul Getty
Discipline is always a means to an end, never an end in itself.
—King Crimson
For a list of ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 4.
The official secrets act protects officials, not secrets.
—Yes, Prime Minister
Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings.
—Victor Stenger
There's no point in being grown up if you can't be childish sometimes.
—Dr. Who
The amount of weight an evangelist carries with the almighty is measured in billigrahams.
Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
I put my hand upon the lever;
Said let it rock and let it roll.
—Mark Knopfler
English has one inflected adjective: blond/blonde.
—Bill Bryson
I go on working for the same reason that a hen goes on laying eggs.
—H. L. Mencken
Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn't have to do it himself.
—A. H. Weiler
Some mornings it's just not worth gnawing through the leather straps.
—Emo Philips
Heard of a van, loaded with weapons; packed up and ready to go.
—The Talking Heads
A lot of people are afraid of heights. Not me. I'm afraid of widths.
—Steven Wright
If you think the problem is bad now, just wait until we've solved it.
—Arthur Kasspe
Of course, that was long ago, but at the time it seemed like the present.
—P. Steiner
You Only Received One Set of Eyeballs?
—Sam's Laser FAQ: Introduction to Laser Safety
Protozoa are small, and bacteria are small, but viruses are smaller than the both put together.
It doesn't depend on size, or a cow would catch a rabbit.
—Pennsylvania German proverb
Once the game is over, the king and the pawn go back in the same box.
—Italian proverb
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of muti-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
The women will be broad-breasted and fertile, and the men will desire them.
—Eoin Colfer
It's been so long since I made love I can't even remember who gets tied up.
—Joan Rivers
Ryan's Law: Make three correct guesses consecutively and you will establish yourself as an expert.
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie.
From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly.
Heuristics are bug ridden by definition—if they didn't have bugs, then they'd be algorithms.
If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough.
—Mario Andretti
Eventually, primitive life develops, and then shopping malls.
—J. A. Paulos, on evolution
All my life I wanted to be someone. I guess I should have been more specific.
—Jane Wagner
Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; all else is opinion.
—Democritus, ca. 400 BCE
No no no. Don't tug on that. You never know what it might be attached to.
—Buckaroo Banzai
Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is Enemy Action.
—Auric Goldfinger
The politician's syllogism: something must be done; this is something; therefore, this must be done.
There are two kinds of cookies
- chocolate-chip cookies
- cookies deficient in chocolate chips
It isn't the stuff we don't know. It is the stuff we know that just ain't so.
—Josh Billings
If you believe in strong AI, then death is no longer a mystery, but merely a lack of adequate backups.
Sex among humans, as among most mammals, is accomplished with a certain amount of biting and scratching.
Look at me! Look at me! Look at me now! It's fun to have fun, but you have to know how!
—Dr. Seuss
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
The Microsoft tax isn't the money you pay them. It's the time you spend coping with their wretched software.
Whatever is not nailed down is mine. What I can pry loose is not nailed down.
—Collis P. Huntingdon
When the weight of the paperwork equals the weight of the plane, the plane will fly.
—Donald Douglas
Never put off for tomorrow what you can do today, because if you enjoy it today, you can do it again tomorrow.
The Wright brothers were the first to fly with a heavier-than-air machine, but boy did they have a lousy plane.
I love deadlines. I especially like the whooshing sound they make as they go flying by.
—Douglas Adams
Some say the sun rises in the east, some say it rises in the west; the truth lies probably somewhere in-between.
A copy of the universe is not what is required of art; one of the damned things is ample.
—Rebecca West
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes.
—Dr. Warren Jackson, Director, UTCS
In the land of the dark, the Ship of the Sun is driven by the Grateful Dead.
—Egyptian Book of the Dead
I've been aware of the time going by;
they say in the end, it's the blink of an eye.
—Jackson Browne
Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea.
—Heinlein
The struggling for knowledge has a pleasure in it like that of wrestling with a fine woman.
—Lord Halifax
Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine.
My sins are my own: they belong to me.
—Patty Smith
If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers.
—Thomas Pynchon
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
One only needs two tools in life: WD-40 to make things go, and duct tape to make them stop.
—G. M. Weilacher
If you eat a live frog first thing in the morning, nothing worse will happen to either of you for the rest of the day.
Religion is the anthropomorphization of reality: that behind it all there's an invisible man pulling invisible strings.
If I had a plantation in Georgia and a home in Hell, I'd sell the plantation and go home.
—Eugene P. Gallagher
Did you hear the cops finally busted Madame Marie for tellin' fortunes better than they do?
—Bruce Springsteen
Trying to be happy is like trying to build a machine for which the only specification is that it should run noiselessly.
Perhaps the hardest time in anyone's life is having to kill a loved one because they're the devil.
—Emo Philips
The more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air.
—R. S. Mulliken
You're young, you're drunk, you're in bed, you've got knives; shit happens.
—Angelina Jolie, on body modification
Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
—Susan Ertz
Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it.
—Linus Torvalds
Big fleas have little fleas
on their backs to bite 'em,
And little fleas have littler still
And so on, ad infinitum.
Duct tape is like the Force. It has a light side, and a dark side, and it holds the universe together.
—Carl Zwanzig
The purpose of the office of the president is not to wield power, but to draw attention away from it.
—Douglas Adams
You can take my wall of books when you pry the shelves out of the studs we screwed the uprights into.
—Michele Grant
You should never bet against anything in science at odds of more than about 1012 to 1.
—Ernest Rutherford
Linux per se is not a specific set of ones and zeroes, but a self-organizing Net subculture.
—Neal Stephenson
The essence of XML is this: the problem it solves is not hard, and it does not solve the problem well.
—Simeon/Wadler
Mary had a laser bat,
whose eyes exterminated.
And everywhere that Mary went,
her bat echo located.
—Vi Hart
There's no such thing as writer's block. That was invented by people in California who couldn't write.
—Terry Pratchett
Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.
—Gene Fowler
Lockwood's Long Shot: The chances of getting eaten up by a lion on Main Street aren't one in a million, but once would be enough.
Given the choice between accomplishing something and just lying around, I'd rather lie around. No contest.
—Eric Clapton
One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.
—Plato
What, we can't integrate dx/x? What a scandalous state of affairs! Are we really going to stand for this?
—Paul Lockhart
The question of whether computers can think is just like the question of whether submarines can swim.
—Edsger W. Dijkstra
Organic chemistry is the study of carbon compounds. Biochemistry is the study of carbon compounds that crawl.
—Mike Adams
At a certain raw motivational level, my primary use of the voicemail system is to make the little red light on my telephone go out.
Beneath this stone a virgin lies,
For her life held no terrors.
A virgin born, a virgin died:
No hits, no runs, no errors.
When your client's hopping mad
Put his picture in the ad.
If he still should prove refractory,
add a picture of his factory.
This License explicitly affirms your unlimited permission to run the unmodified Program.
—The GNU General Public License, v3
'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
I can't understand why a person will take a year or two to write a novel when he can easily buy one for a few dollars.
—Fred Allen
Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.
—Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
The default Magic Word, "Abracadabra", actually is a corruption of the Hebrew phrase "ha-Bracha dab'ra" which means "pronounce the blessing".
The emperor, undaunted by overwhelming evidence that he had no clothes, redoubled his siege of Antarctica to extort tribute from the penguins.
If you want to eat hippopotamus, you've got to pay the freight.
—attributed to an IBM guy, about why IBM software uses so much memory
When I was crossing the border into Canada, they asked if I had any firearms with me. I said, "Well, what do you need?"
—Steven Wright
Moore's Law of Mad Science: Every eighteen months, the minimum IQ necessary to destroy the world drops by one point.
—Eliezer Yudkowsky
God, grant me the courage to change the things I can,
The serenity to accept the things I cannot,
And the firepower to make the difference.
If a 6600 used paper tape instead of core memory, it would use up tape at about 30 miles/second.
—Grishman, Assembly Language Programming
If one gave me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged.
—Cardinal Richelieu
A fractal is by definition a set for which the Hausdorff Besicovitch dimension strictly exceeds the topological dimension.
—Benoit Mandelbrot
Rather than feeling vulnerable in the presence of powerful authorities, they feel safer.
—John Dean, on people who follow authoritarian leaders
Though I fly through the valley of death I shall fear no evil for I am at 80,000 feet and climbing.
—sign over the entrance to SR-71 operations
The meta-Turing test counts a thing as intelligent if it seeks to devise and apply Turing tests to objects of its own creation.
—Lew Mammel, Jr.
If you don't know where you're going, you'll end up somewhere else. —Yogi Berra
Remember: wherever you go, there you are. —Buckaroo Banzai
Perfection is reached, not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
The history of the evolution of C++ over time can be described as a history of trying to plug the leaks in the string abstraction.
—Joel Spolsky
You must license the entire work, as a whole, under this License to anyone who comes into possession of a copy.
—The GNU General Public License, v3
Unix...is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic.
—Neal Stephenson
Like the ski resort of girls looking for husbands and husbands looking for girls, the situation is not as symmetrical as it might seem.
—Alan McKay
Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless.
—Sinclair Lewis
Aleph-null bottles of beer on the wall,
Aleph-null bottles of beer,
You take one down, and pass it around,
Aleph-null bottles of beer on the wall...
A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
space opera: a subgenre of adventure SF where men are heroic, women are beautiful, monsters are monstrous, and spaceships make whooshing sounds in hard vacuum.
People who are great at something are not so much convinced of their own greatness as mystified at why everyone else seems so incompetent.
—Paul Graham
You can fall for chains of silver;
You can fall for chains of gold;
You can fall for pretty strangers,
And the promises they hold
—Mark Knopfler
Properly defined, privacy is the subjective condition people experience when they have power to control information about themselves.
—The CATO Institute
The systematic restraints on curiosity about sex maintain sexual ignorance, and where people are ignorant, they are manipulable.
—SAMOIS, Coming To Power
Display the things that you value in yourself, and you will attract people who also value those things. It works for finding jobs, and it works for finding mates.
Now I don't know, but I been told
In the heat of the sun a man died of cold.
Keep on coming or stand and wait,
with the sun so dark and the hour so late...
Probability factor of one to one. We have normality. Anything you still can't cope with is therefore your own problem.
—The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
We'll be saying a big hello to all intelligent life forms everywhere...and to everyone else out there, the secret is to bang the rocks together, guys.
The optimist sees that the glass is half full.
The pessimist sees that the glass is half empty.
The engineer sees that the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.
We pray for one last landing
On the globe that gave us birth;
Let us rest our eyes on fleecy skies
And the cool, green hills of Earth.
—Robert A. Heinlein
The word is the only system of encoding thoughts—the only medium—that refuses to dissolve in the devouring torrent of electronic media.
—Neal Stephenson
Traditionally, the relationship between lengths and angles is somewhat strained. There is a lot of mistrust and resentment, and also sines and cosines.
—Paul Lockhart
...jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix...
—William Gibson, Neuromancer
T: One big monster, he called TROLL.
He don't rock, and he don't roll;
Drink no wine, and smoke no stogies.
He just Love To Eat Them Roguies.
—The Roguelet's ABC
"You said they couldn't swim."
"No. I said they aren't adapted for swimming. And they aren't."
"I see. Is there anything else they aren't adapted for that I should know about?"
There are two kinds of people in this world: those who are intensely, obsessively, driven to have sex...and those who are not. We are all children of the first kind.
Oh, my baby, when you're cryin'
Never hide your face from me
I have conquered hell and driven out the demons
I have come with the light to set you free
—Mindy Smith
Disney does mediated experiences better than anyone. If they understood what OSes are, and why people use them, they could crush Microsoft in a year or two.
—Neal Stephenson
Our current obsession with creativity is the result of our continued striving for immortality in an era when most people no longer believe in an afterlife.
—Arianna Huffington
Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming:
Any sufficiently-complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.
I get up each morning, gather my wits.
Pick up the paper, read the obits.
If I'm not there I know I'm not dead.
So I eat a good breakfast and go back to bed.
—Pete Seeger
There are three principal ways to lose money: wine, women, and engineers.
While the first two are more pleasant, the third is by far the more certain.
—Baron Rothschild, ca. 1800
Twenty years ago, I never would've believed that we'd have a black, female Secretary of State, much less one who was a conservative warmonger, too. We've come a long way.
—The Onion
Very few upgrades are [...] clean and simple. Crappy old OSes have value in the basically negative sense that changing to new ones makes us wish we'd never been born.
—Neal Stephenson
If you think C++ is not overly complicated, just what is a protected abstract virtual base pure virtual private destructor, and when was the last time you needed one?
—Peter van der Linded
There must be some Tommy Hilfiger event horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be even more derivative, more removed from the source, more devoid of soul.
—William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
The fossil record—the La Brea Tar Pit—of software technology is the Internet. Anything that shows up there is free for the taking (possibly illegal, but free).
—Neal Stephenson
What nature refused to do for them they simply did without until such time as they were able to rectify the gross anatomical inconveniences with surgery.
—The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Two arbitrageurs are walking down the street.
"Look!" exclaims one. "There's a $100 bill lying on the ground."
"Nonsense," replies the other. If there were, someone would already have picked it up.
It was the kind of place where a state legislator could actually say, "If the English language was good enough for our Lord Jesus Christ, it's good enough for our school children."
—John Perry Barlow
We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough.
—Niels Bohr
Anyone can become angry—that is easy; but to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose and in the right way—that is not easy.
—Aristotle
Beyond ego, beyond personality, beyond awareness, he moved...grace of the mind-body interface granted him, in that second, by the clarity and singleness of his wish to die.
—William Gibson, Neuromancer
Should we throw another human wave of structural engineers at stabilizing the Leaning Tower of Pisa, or should we just let the damn thing fall over and build a tower that doesn't suck?
—Neal Stephenson
In the GNU/Linux world there are two major text editing programs: the minimalist vi...and the maximalist emacs. I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor.
—Neal Stephenson
When I die bury me in straight-lace shoes
a box-back coat and a Stetson hat.
Put a twenty dollar gold piece on my watch chain
so the boys will know I died standing pat.
—St. James Infirmary Blues
The four freedoms:
0. to run the program for any purpose
1. to study and adapt the program
2. to redistribute copies of the program
3. to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public
More than iron, more than lead, more than gold, I need electricity.
I need it more than I need lamb or pork or lettuce or cucumber.
I need it for my dreams.
—Racter (a program that sometimes writes poetry)
I was part of that strange race of people aptly described as spending their lives doing things they detest to make money they don't want to buy things they don't need to impress people they dislike.
—Emile Henry Gauvreay
An electric guitar will jump live in your hands. It's like holding on to an electric eel.
—Keith Richards
[The Fender Jazzmaster] looks like a sleek panther covered in maple syrup shaking in slow motion.
—Neko Case
Gollum used to wear it at first, till it tired him; and then he kept it in a pouch next his skin, till it galled him; and now usually he hid it in a hole in the rock on his island, and was always going back to look at it.
—J.R.R. Tolkien
At the mention of ugly source code, people will of course think of Perl. But the superficial ugliness of Perl is not the sort I mean. Real ugliness is not harsh-looking syntax, but having to build programs out of the wrong concepts.
—Paul Graham
Since, therefore, the substance of the mind has been found to be extraordinarily mobile, it must consist of particles exceptionally small and smooth and round. This discovery, my dear fellow, will prove a timely aid to you in many problems.
—Lucretius
Since I hurt my pendulum
My life is all erratic.
My parrot, who was cordial,
Is now transmitting static.
The carpet died, a palm collapsed,
The cat keeps doing poo.
The only thing that keeps me sane
is talking to my shoe.
—My Shoe
Her mind is Tiffany twisted;
She's got the Mercedes bends.
She's got a lot of pretty, pretty boys
That she calls friends.
How they dance in the courtyard:
Sweet summer sweat.
Some dance to remember;
Some dance to forget.
—Don Henley
Bill Clinton delivered eight years of peace and prosperity, and a highly entertaining sex scandal besides. It wasn't enough. Americans were anxious; worse, they were bored. George Bush delivered four years of war and poverty, and we reelected him. God help us all.
Peril Sensitive Sunglasses [are] specially designed to help people develop a relaxed attitude to danger. At the first hint of trouble they turn totally black and thus prevent you from seeing anything that might alarm you.
—The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving,
Whatever gods may be,
That no life lives forever,
That dead men rise up never,
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.
—Swinburne
The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. Instead of altering their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views ... which can be very uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering.
—Doctor Who, "Face of Evil"
A plain bar of iron is worth $5,
but made into horse shoes it is worth $25;
made into kitchen cutlery it is worth $250;
made into needles it is worth $3,500;
and made into balance springs for watches, it is worth $250,000.
The finer the workmanship, the greater the value.
Image data should be written in top-to-bottom scanline order. The JPEG spec contains some weasel wording about how top and bottom are application-defined terms, but if you want your files to be compatible with everyone else's, you WILL use top-to-bottom order.
—from the IJG JPEG library documentation
The badness scale (how bad you want it)
0. No way!
1. I don't really want it, I just like to think about it.
2. Be careful what you wish for...
3. Only a little
4. Some
5. A lot
6. A whole lot
7. Really, really, really!
8. I'm burning with desire.
9. It's an incessant, gnawing hunger.
In the ordinary man and woman there is a certain amount of active malevolence, both special ill will directed to particular enemies and general impersonal pleasure in the misfortunes of others. It is customary to cover this over with fine phrases; about half of conventional morality is a cloak for it.
—Bertrand Russell
Now, suppose an election held using your [direct recording electronic voting] machine indicates 15,000 Republicrat votes and 0 (that's zero, as in none at all) for the Democrans. That's a possible, but unlikely outcome. How will you demonstrate that your machine correctly counted each voter's choice?
—Ed Nisley, 2001 April
The Macintosh was always sold on its superior usability. In the early days, it delivered on that promise. Today, the Macintosh sacrifices actual usability for an illusion of usability; this charade is sustained on Apple's side by hype and glitz, and on their users' side by ignorance and blindness. I can't tell you how sad this makes me.
Say introduces a report of what someone said; like introduces a performance of it—a question of showing rather than telling. It's a convenient distinction to have in colloquial speech. The only question is why English should suddenly feel the need of the device, after a thousand years of making do without it.
—Geoffrey Nunberg
It's more or less immaterial whether your Artist creates because of a liking for Deluxe Designer Universes or merely because of a liking for caffeine. The simple fact is, we have Artists, and they do Art. We just have to deal with it. We really do. You can make life miserable for the Artist, but the Artist has ways of getting revenge.
—Larry Wall
But this has taken us far afield from interface, which is not a bad place to be, since I particularly want to move ahead to the kludge. Why do people have so much trouble understanding the kludge? What is a kludge, after all, but not enough Ks, not enough ROMs, not enough RAMs, poor quality interface and too few bytes to go around? Have I explained yet about the bytes?
Programming is costly and unpredictable compared to many other activities, and the resulting code is often less than 100% reliable. Programming is labor-intensive and—for a variety of reasons—most serious project delays manifest themselves by code not being ready to ship. So, why not eliminate programming as an activity altogether?
—Bjarne Stroustrup
The conception of the objective reality of the elementary particles has thus evaporated in a curious way, not into the fog of some new, obscure, or not yet understood reality concept, but into the transparent clarity of a mathematics that represents no longer the behavior of the elementary particles but rather our knowledge of this behavior.
—Werner Heisenberg
I have long argued that the entertainment industry doesn't want people to have computers. Computers give users too much capability, too much flexibility, too much freedom. The entertainment industry wants users to sit back and consume things. They are trying to turn a computer into an Internet Entertainment Platform, along the lines of a television or VCR.
—Bruce Schneier
On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
—Charles Babbage
[Commentators have suggested that the MPs were asking whether they were being shown a rigged demo.]
It is very easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of Sirius Cybernetics Corporation products by the sense of achievement you get from getting them to work at all. In other words—and this is the rock solid principle on which the whole of the Corporation's Galaxy-wide success is founded—their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws.
Nothing is weirder than Sacred Harp. Its favored subject matter—the pilgrim, the grave, Christ's blood—is stark; its style—severe fourths and otherworldly open fifths—has been obsolete for more than a century. Its notation, in which triangles, circles and squares indicate pitch, looks like cuneiform. Yet it exudes power and integrity. Five people sound like a choir; a dozen like a hundred.
Any sufficiently advanced read/write technology will get used for two purposes: pornography and activism. Porn is a weak test for the success of participatory media—it's like tapping a mike and asking, "Is it on?" If you're not getting porn in your system, it doesn't work. Activism is a stronger test—if activists are using your tools, it's a pretty good indication that your tools are useful and usable.
—Ethan Zuckerman
I think the sky is blue because it's a shift from black through purple to blue, and it has to do with where the light is. You know, the farther we get into darkness, and there's a shifting of color of light into the blueness, and I think as you go farther and farther away from the reflected light we have from the sun or the light that's bouncing off this earth, uh, the darker it gets ... I think if you look at the color scale, you start at black, move it through purple, move it on out, it's the shifting of color. We mentioned before about the stars singing, and that's one of the effects of the shifting of colors.
—Pat Robertson, The 700 Club