Quotes
This page contains a list of quotations by various people which I have found to be particularly insightful, inspiring or amusing. Expect it to grow slowly over time.
Quotations are presented in alphabetical order of owner’s surname within their category. If any quotes appear out of this order, it’s a mistake, not an attempt to indicate preference.
General
On two occasions I have been asked, “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
Unless you have a hundred unanswered questions in your mind you haven’t read enough.
Daniel J. Bernstein
Hackers (and creative people in general) should never be bored or have to drudge at stupid repetitive work, because when this happens it means they aren’t doing what only they can do – solve new problems. This wastefulness hurts everybody. Therefore boredom and drudgery are not just unpleasant but actually evil.
Eric S. Raymond
If you want to set off and go develop some grand new thing, you don’t need millions of dollars of capitalization. You need enough pizza and Diet Coke to stick in your refrigerator, a cheap PC to work on and the dedication to go through with it.
John Carmack
Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
Susan Ertz
Government
you shouldn’t trust any government, actually including this one. You should not trust government – full stop. The natural inclination of government is to hoard power and information; to accrue power to itself in the name of the public good.
Nick Clegg
Liberty
Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
Benjamin Franklin
Mathematics
Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty – a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture.
Bertrand Russell
Money
I’ve always lived cheaply. I live like a student, basically. And I like that because it means that money is not telling me what to do. I can do what I think is important for me to do. It freed me to do what seemed worth doing. So make a real effort to avoid getting sucked into all of the expensive lifestyle habits of typical Americans … because, if you do that, then the people with the money will dictate what you do with your life. You won’t be able to do what’s really important to you.
Richard Stallman
Religion
Napoleon: How can this be! You made the system of the world, you explain the laws of all creation, but in all your book you speak not once of the existence of God!
Laplace: No, Sire, I had no need of that hypothesis.
Napoleon Bonaparte & Pierre-Simon Laplace
A man’s ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.
Albert Einstein
Believe not because some old manuscripts are produced, believe not because it is your national belief, believe not because you have been made to believe from your childhood, but reason truth out, and after you have analysed it, then if you find it will do good to one and all, believe it, live up to it and help others live up to it
Siddhartha Gautama (Buddha)
The Church says that the Earth is flat, but I know that it is round. For I have seen the shadow of the earth on the moon and I have more faith in the Shadow than in the Church.
Ferdinand Magellan
Science
Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars – mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is “mere.” I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more ? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination: stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern – of which I am a part – perhaps my stuff was belched from some forgotten star, as one is belching there. Or see them with the greater eye of Palomar, rushing all apart from some common starting point when they were perhaps all together. What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined! Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?
Richard Feynman
The world and the universe is an extremely beautiful place, and the more we understand about it the more beautiful does it appear. It is an immensely exciting experience to be born in the world, born in the universe, and look around you and realise that before you die you have the opportunity of understanding an immense amount about that world and about that universe and about life and about why we’re here. We have the opportunity of understanding far, far more than any of our predecessors ever. That is such an exciting possibility, it would be such a shame to blow it and end your life not having understood what there is to understand.
Richard Dawkins
Software
There are two ways of constructing a software design; one way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.
C. A. Hoare
Increasingly, people seem to misinterpret complexity as sophistication, which is baffling — the incomprehensible should cause suspicion rather than admiration. Possibly this trend results from a mistaken belief that using a somewhat mysterious device confers an aura of power on the user
Niklaus Wirth
