- We might be forced into a high profile intervention against them; it would hardly be a war as such because we're way ahead of them technologically, but we'd have to become an occupying force to control them, and that would mean a huge drain on our resources as well as morale; in the end, such an adventure would almost certainly be seen as a mistake, no matter the popular enthusiasm for it at the time. The people of the empire would lose by uniting against us instead of the corrupt regime which controls them, so putting the clock back a century or two, and we would lose by emulating those we despise; invaders, occupiers, hegemonists. -- Iain M. Banks, "The Player of Games"
- They came for the Communists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Communist; Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew; Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Trade Unionist; Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Catholic; Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak out for me. -- Pastor Martin Niemoller
- There has grown in the minds of certain groups in this country the idea that just because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is supported by neither statue or common law. Neither corporations or individuals have the right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back. -- Robert Heinlein, "Life Line", 1939
- There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum. -- Arthur C. Clarke
- Why of course, the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country. -- Hermann Goering
- Linux makes the easy stuff harder, the hard stuff easier and the impossible possible!
- Non-violence is a more active and real fight against wickedness than retaliation whose very nature is to increase wickedness. It is not a weapon of the weak. It is a weapon of the strongest and bravest. -- Mahatma Gandhi
- Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night; God said, Let Newton be! and all was light. -- Alexander Pope
- It was never the object of patent laws to grant a monopoly for every trifling device, every shadow of a shade of an idea, which would naturally and spontaneously occur to any skilled mechanic or operator in the ordinary progress of manufactures. Such an indiscriminate creation of exclusive privileges tends rather to obstruct than to stimulate invention. It creates a class of speculative schemers who make it their business to watch the advancing wave of improvement, and gather its foam in the form of patented monopolies, which enable them to lay a heavy tax on the industry of the country, without contributing anything to the real advancement of the arts. It embarrasses the honest pursuit of business with fears and apprehensions of unknown liability lawsuits and vexatious accounting for profits made in good faith. -- U.S. Supreme Court, Atlantic Works vs. Brady, 1882
The most effective step that you can take to help protect yourself from malicious hyperlinks is not to click them. Rather, type the URL of your intended destination in the address bar yourself. By manually typing the URL in the address bar, you can verify the information that Internet Explorer uses to access the destination Web site. To do so, type the URL in the Address bar, and then press ENTER. -- Microsoft Corporation, "Steps that you can take to help identify and to help protect yourself from deceptive (spoofed) Web sites and malicious hyperlinks, 2/2/2004
- You know when you buy new Italian salid dressing, and the oil and the spices are all separated in different layers? That is what good software architecture is supposed to look like. Now, shake up the bottle. That is what Microsoft software looks like.
- No, we have to stay here, and there's a simple reason why. Ask ten different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics and you'll get ten different answers, but there's one thing every scientist on the planet agrees on. Whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand years or a million years, eventually our Sun will grow cold and go out. When that happens, it won't just take us. It'll take Marilyn Monroe and Lao-Tzu, Einstein, Morobuto, Buddy Holly, Aristophanes... and all of this, *all* of this was for nothing unless we go to the stars. -- Commander Jeffrey Sinclair
- Mars is essentially in the same orbit... Mars is somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe. -- George W Bush
- 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.R. Hoare
- If your OS wasn't built with the knowledge the source code would be made public, pray it never will.
- If you have nothing to say, say it with Flash.
- Our earth is degenerate in these latter days; bribery and corruption are common; children no longer obey their parents; and the end of the world is evidently approaching. -- Assyrian clay tablet, C2800 BCE
- Every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud, adopts as a last resource pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and happy to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority. -- Arthur Schopenhauer
- Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master. -- Commissioner Pravin Lal
- We are all aware that the senses can be deceived, the eyes fooled. But how can we be sure our senses are not being deceived at any particular time, or even all the time? Might I just be a brain in a tank somewhere, tricked all my life into believing in the events of this world by some insane computer? And does my life gain or lose meaning based on my reaction to such solipsism? -- Project PYRRHO, Specimen 46, Vat 7. (termination of speciman advised)
- Why do you insist that the human genetic code is "sacred" or "taboo"? It is a chemical process and nothing more. For that matter -we- are chemical processes and nothing more. If you deny yourself a useful tool simply because it reminds you uncomfortably of your mortality, you have uselessly and pointlessly crippled yourself. -- Chairman Sheng-ji Yang
- The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw
- War does not determine who is right. Only who is left. -- Bertrand Russell
- Religious education amounts to child abuse because it damages the mind's faculty for critical thinking.
- Nothing is more lethal for certain kinds of meme than a tendency to look for evidence. ... The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.
- Technology-based organizations are dominated by two types of individuals: those who understand what they do not manage, and those who manage what they do not understand.
- Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom: it is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves. -- William Pitt the Younger
- IDLE-TIME PROCESS. Once in a while the system will go into an idle mode, requiring from five minutes to half an hour to unwind. It's weird, and I almost always have to reboot. When I hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete, I see that the System Idle Process is hogging all the resources and chewing up 95 percent of the processor's cycles. Doing what? Doing nothing? Once in a while, after you've clicked all over the screen trying to get the system to do something other than idle, all your clicks suddenly ignite and the screen goes crazy with activity. This is not right. -- John C. Dvorak
- It is time for students of the evolutionary process, especially those who have been misquoted and used by the creationists, to state clearly that evolution is a fact, not theory, and that what is at issue within biology are questions of details of the process and the relative importance of different mechanisms of evolution. It is a fact that the earth with liquid water, is more than 3.6 billion years old. It is a fact that cellular life has been around for at least half of that period and that organized multicellular life is at least 800 million years old. It is a fact that major life forms now on earth were not at all represented in the past. There were no birds or mammals 250 million years ago. It is a fact that major life forms of the past are no longer living. There used to be dinosaurs and Pithecanthropus, and there are none now. It is a fact that all living forms come from previous living forms. Therefore, all present forms of life arose from ancestral forms that were different. Birds arose from nonbirds and humans from nonhumans. No person who pretends to any understanding of the natural world can deny these facts any more than she or he can deny that the earth is round, rotates on its axis, and revolves around the sun. The controversies about evolution lie in the realm of the relative importance of various forces in molding evolution. -- R. C. Lewontin
- At the source of every error which is blamed on the computer you will find at least two human errors, including the error of blaming it on the computer.
- Woody: the stone and the jail // Dynamite newsflash. Coolmail! // "Sarg: Happy Birthday!" // Thy cruft thrust away! // Bonsai! Foremost odyssey: Ale. -- Benjamin Mako Hill
- Functional programming, structured programming, logical programming, constraints programming, p-code systems, object oriented programming, iterative development, patterns, open source development, pair programming, extreme programming, managed code: each of these was heralded as the sine qua non of software development at its inception, only to get bogged down in messy detail once people actually started to build real-world systems with them. Bits and pieces survive here and there and percolate up in newer languages and designs, until every hint of the original glamour has vanished and they become just another fixture for pigeons to shit on. -- Dijkstra
- The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all. -- H. L. Mencken
- Sufficiently advanced political correctness is indistinguishable from irony. -- Erik Naggum
- "The [music] industry will take whatever steps it needs to protect itself and protect its revenue streams. It will not lose that revenue stream, no matter what. Sony is going to take aggressive steps to stop this. We will develop technology that transcends the individual user. We will firewall Napster at source - we will block it at your cable company, we will block it at your phone company, we will block it at your [ISP]. We will firewall it at your PC. These strategies are being aggressively pursued because there is simply too much at stake." --Steve Heckler, Sony senior VP, 2000
- "We must not disguise from ourselves that we go to found a city among strangers and enemies, and that he who undertakes such an enterprise should be prepared to become master of the country the first day he lands, or failing in this to find everything hostile to him." --Nicias, an Athenian general, prior to the invasion of Syracuse, 415 B.C.
- There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one, and 1) those who start them with zero.
- "Do not imagine, comrades, that leadership is a pleasure. On the contrary, it is a deep and heavy responsibility. No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be? -- from Animal Farm
- "The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers." -- attributed to Socrates (469-399 B.C.) by Plato
- "The world is passing through troublous times. The young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint. They talk as if they knew everything, and what passes for wisdom with us is foolishness with them. As for the girls, they are forward, immodest and unladylike in speech, behavior and dress." -- Peter the Hermit, A.D. 1274
- "I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on the frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words. When I was a boy, we were taught to be discrete and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly wise and impatient of restraint." -- Hesiod, Eighth Century B.C.
- Today's lock-in is tomorrow's lock-out.
- Pride is not the opposite of shame, but its source. True humility is the only antidote to shame. -- Uncle Iroh
- It is important to draw wisdom from different places. If you take it form only one place it become rigid and stale. Understanding others, the other elements, the other nations, will help you become whole. -- Uncle Iroh
"The fact that I flew here to sit on a panel for one and a half hours, then I'm flying straight back to the US, is an example of our commitment to environmental sustainability..." -- Indra Nooyi, CEO (and COI) of PepsiCo, on her company's environmental commitments
- Roads are made, streets are made, services are improved, electric light turns night into day, water is brought from reservoirs a hundred miles off in the mountains -- and all the while the landlord sits still. Every one of those improvements is effected by the labor and cost of other people and the taxpayers. To not one of those improvements does the land monopolist, as a land monopolist, contribute, and yet by every one of them the value of his land is enhanced. He renders no service to the community, he contributes nothing to the general welfare, he contributes nothing to the process from which his own enrichment is derived. -- Winston Churchill, 1909
- Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past. -- Jean-Paul Satre
- We must shift America from a needs- to a desires-culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality in America. Man's desires must overshadow his needs. -- Paul Mazur, Lehmen Bros. partner
