Quotes

quotes.txt

A crisis is when you can't say "Let's just forget the whole thing."
-- Ferguson
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A professional programmer is an amateur who never quit.
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A real person has two reasons for doing anything... a good reason and the real reason.
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A student who changes the course of history is probably taking an exam.
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Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it.
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After all is said and done, a hell of a lot more is said than done.
-- Olmstead
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Air travel: Breakfast in London, dinner in New York, luggage in Brazil.
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All I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power.
-- Ashleigh Brilliant
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Always listen to the experts. They'll tell you what can't be done and why. Then do it.
-- Robert A. Heinlein
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Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a Perl script.
-- Programming Perl, 2nd edition
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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.
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Biology is the only science in which multiplication means the same thing as division.
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Boys will be boys, and so will a lot of middle-aged men.
-- Kin Hubbard
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Children act like their parents despite every effort to teach them good manners.
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Children aren't happy without something to ignore, and that's what parents were created for.
-- Ogden Nash
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Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.
-- Mark Twain
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Comments lie. Code doesn't.
-- Ron Jeffries
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Could you be a poster child for retroactive birth control?
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Don't let your mind wander -- it's too little to be let out alone.
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Don't take life too seriously. You won't get out of it alive anyway.
-- Hubbard
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Don't use no double negatives, not never.
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Don't worry over what other people are thinking about you. They' re too busy worrying over what you are thinking about them.
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Drug: A substance that, when injected into a rat, produces a scientific paper.
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Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.
-- Robert Frost
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Emulate your heros, but don't carry it too far. Especially if they are dead.
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Every journalist has a novel in him, which is an excellent place for it.
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Every successful person has had failures but repeated failure is no guarantee of eventual success.
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Given infinite time, 100 monkeys could type out the complete works of Shakespeare. Win 98 source code? Eight monkeys, five minutes.
-- NullGrey
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Go to Heaven for the climate but Hell for the company.
-- Mark Twain
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God is real, unless declared integer.
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God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through.
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Having children is like having a bowling alley installed in your brain.
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Hiroshima '45 - Chernobyl '86 - Windows '95
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How long is a minute depends on which side of the bathroom door you are on.
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I am really enjoying not talking to you, so let's not talk again real soon, OK?
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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
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I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones.
-- John Cage
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I'd rather have a free bottle in front of me than a prefrontal lobotomy.
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Idiot box: Part of an envelope that tells a person where to place the stamp.
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If a machine can be made so that an idiot can use it, then only an idiot will use it.
-- Tadao Ichikawa
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If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend six sharpening my axe.
-- Abraham Lincol
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If I told you had a beautiful body, would you hold it against me?
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If it jams, force it. If it breaks, it needed replacing anyway.
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If we cannot learn from our mistakes, we just rename them Success.
-- Jon Loux
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I'm very frank and earnest with the women... In Cleveland I'm Frank and in New York, I'm Earnest.
-- From the movie "The Long Kiss Goodnight"
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In my eyes it is never a crime to steal knowledge. It is a good theft. The pirate of knowledge is a good pirate.
-- Michel Serres
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It's not hard to meet expenses; they are everywhere.
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Java: write once, debug everywhere.
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Just when you thought you were winning the rat race, along comes a faster rat!
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Knowledge is the only resource on earth that multiplies when shared.
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Love does not make the world go around, just up and down a bit.
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Marriage is not a word; it is a sentence.
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Maybe this world is another planet's Hell.
-- Aldous Huxley
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Most people get lost in thought because it is unfamiliar territory.
-- Paul Fixx
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Mountain climbers rope together to prevent the sensible ones from going home.
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Never knock on Death's door. Ring the bell and run away. Death really hates that.
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Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today. There might be a law against it by that time.
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No man is an island, but some of us are really long peninsulas.
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Not all men who drink are poets. Some of us drink because we are not poets.
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Nothing cures insomnia like the realization that it is time to get up.
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Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn't have to do it himself.
-- Weiler's Law
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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 to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
-- Charles Babbage (1791-1871)
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One of the saddest lines in the world is, 'Oh come now - be realistic.' The best parts of this world were not fashioned by those who were realistic. They were fashioned by those who dared to look hard at their wishes and gave them horses to ride.
-- Richard Nelson Bolles
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People accept an idea more readily if you say Benjamin Franklin said it first.
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People who think they know everything greatly annoy those of us who do.
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Politics is for the moment. An equation is for eternity.
-- Albert Einstein
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Preudhomme's Law of Window Cleaning: It's on the other side.
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Pro is to con as progress is to Congress.
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Productivity is proportional to the deadline of the task.
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Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.
-- Rich Cook
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Smoking is one of the leading causes of statistics.
-- Fletcher Knebel
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Some people cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go.
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Structure is *nothing* if it is all you got. Skeletons *spook* people if they try to walk around on their own. I really wonder why XML does not.
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Talent does what it can; genius does what it must; I do what I am paid to do.
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That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
-- Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle in "Oath of Fealty"
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The cost of living is going up, and the chance of living is going down.
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The purpose of most computer languages is to lengthen your resume by a word and a comma.
-- Larry Wall
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The social dynamics of the net are a direct consequence of the fact that nobody has yet developed a Remote Strangulation Protocol.
-- Larry Wall
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There are two kinds of fool. One says, "This is old, and therefore good." And one says, "This is new, and therefore better."
-- John Brunner, science fiction writer (1934-1995)
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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
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There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.
-- Kissinger
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This isn't right. This isn't even wrong.
-- Wolfgang Pauli, on physics paper
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Time is a waste of life; life is a waste of time, so get wasted and have the time of your life.
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Time is nature's way of making sure that everything doesn't happen at once.
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To get something done, a committee should consist of no more than three men, two of them absent.
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To succeed in politics, it is often necessary to rise above your principles.
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To the man who only has a hammer in the toolkit, every problem looks like a nail.
-- Abraham Maslow
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Toe: A part of the foot used to find furniture in the dark.
-- Rilla May
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Vision without action is a daydream; action without vision is a nightmare.
-- Japanese proverb
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Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
-- Edward V. Berard