Quotes

One of the most fun things to read on the web are peoples quote collections. I think they are a good way of giving people an idea of your personality. Anyhow I've collected a few, and here are some links to other peoples.

• Quotes collected by Peter Norvig, a notable lisp programmer amongst other things.

• "If you talk to God, you are praying; if God talks to you, you have schizophrenia". - Thomas Szasz (b. 1920), U.S. psychiatrist. The Second Sin, "Schizophrenia" (1973).

• "I don't practice what I preach, because I'm not the kind of person I'm preaching to." - J. R. "Bob" Dobbs.

• ...the history of childhood "is a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken." - Lloyd de Mause.

• "Pay no attention to what the critics say; no statue has ever been erected to a critic." - Jean Sibelius
• "Applicants must also have extensive knowledge of Unix, although they should have sufficiently good programming taste to not consider this an achievement" - Hal Abelson, MIT job advertisement.

• "Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." - Pablo Picasso

• "Dave, put down those windows disks, Dave, Dave ...." - HAL

• "He's a born-again Christian. The trouble is, he suffered brain damage during rebirth." - Anonymous

• "Art has to move you and design does not, unless it's a good design for a bus." - David Hockney, The Guardian, October 26, 1988

• "Extropianism - greed, self obsession and narrow mindedness turned into a a political ideology (how about post-yuppy ?). Then again, the idea of warehouses full of slowly rotting popsicles cheers me up immensely!" - Me, 1996.

• If you happen to be a brilliant scientist casting about for a name to label your latest discovery PLEASE make it up, don't use any word that has meaning in everyday life. eg Quarks and gluons are good names, chaos and relativity are very BAD. Don't mislead the literary critics and new agers any more than neccessary! - (Me again, maybe this should be in it's own separate soapbox page..). Go read about the Sokal affair.

• Rock journalism is people who can't write, preparing stories based on interviews with people who can't talk, in order to amuse people who can't read. - Frank Zappa

• Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education alone will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. - Calvin Coolidge

• My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people:
  • Those who do the work
  • Those who take the credit

  He told me to try to be in the first group; there was much less competition. - Indira Ghandi, the late Prime Minister of India

• It is not the critic who counts. Not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause. Who, at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat. - Theodore Roosevelt

• there's something to be said about the beauty of youth and the immature, but as all things mature, warts and wrinkles show up and make some people want to leave in disgust for yet another immature youth. I don't think this is a valid way to think of beauty in either languages nor humans, despite the intense pressure from the extremely youth-fixated fashion industry whose views permeate our entire culture's view on maturity. - Erik Naggum

• If I sound grumpy, it is only because I have come across too many idiots of the "it can't be done" persuasion lately, the kind of managers who have an aquarium in their office because fifteen brains think better than one. - Erik Naggum

• Never argue with an idiot. They drag you down to their level, then beat you with experience - anon