path: root/generators/fortune/quotes.fortune

A debugged program is one for which you have not yet found the conditions
that make it fail. — Jerry Ogdin
%
If a million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing. —
Anatole France
%
“And who better understands the Unix—nature?” Master Foo asked. “Is it
he who writes the ten thousand lines, or he who, perceiving the emptiness of
the task, gains merit by not coding?” Upon hearing this, the programmer was
enlightened.
— The Unix Koans of Master Foo
%
Immortality — a fate worse than death. — Edgar A. Shoaff
%
Intellect annuls Fate.
So far as a man thinks, he is free. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Let’s call it an accidental feature. — Larry Wall
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In the long run we are all dead. — John Maynard Keynes
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A lot of people I know believe in positive thinking, and so do I. I
believe everything positively stinks. — Lew Col
%
Ah, but a man’s grasp should exceed his reach,
Or what’s a heaven for? Robert Browning, — “Andrea del Sarto”
%
All hope abandon, ye who enter here! — Dante Alighieri
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All men know the utility of useful things;
but they do not know the utility of futility. — Chuang—tzu
%
And ever has it been known that love knows not its own depth until the
hour of separation. — Kahlil Gibran
%
Besides, I think Slackware sounds better than ‘Microsoft,’ don’t you? —
Patrick Volkerding
%
Waving away a cloud of smoke, I look up, and I’m blinded by a bright, white
light.  It’s God. No, not Richard Stallman, or Linus Torvalds, but God. In
a booming voice, He says: “THIS IS A SIGN. USE LINUX, THE FREE UNIX SYSTEM
FOR THE 386”. — Matt Welsh
%
Never trust an operating system you don’t have sources for. — Unknown
Source
%
Parkinson’s Fifth Law: If there is a way to delay an important decision, the
good bureaucracy, public or private, will find it.
%
Reliable source: The guy you just met.
%
Thyme’s Law: Everything goes wrong at once.
%
Netscape is not a newsreader, and probably never shall be. — Tom Christiansen
%
You can learn many things from children. How much patience you have,
for instance. — Franklin P. Jones
%
To be is to program.
%
There’s no easy quick way out, we’re gonna have to live through our
whole lives, win, lose, or draw. — Walt Kelly
%
Illiterate? Write today for free help!
%
Like winter snow on summer lawn, time past is time gone.
%
Hlade’s Law: If you have a difficult task, give it to a lazy person —
they will find an easier way to do it.
%
Davis’ Law of Traffic Density: The density of rush—hour traffic
is directly proportional to 1.5 times the amount of extra time
you allow to arrive on time.
%
Resisting temptation is easier when you think you’ll probably get
another chance later on.
%
Do more than anyone expects, and pretty soon everyone will expect more.
%
Turnaucka’s Law: The attention span of a computer is only as long as its
electrical cord.
%
Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence
and not authority; still more when you superadd the tendency of the
certainty of corruption by authority. — Lord Acton
%
We can predict everything, except the future.
%
A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many
bad measures. — Daniel Webste
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Agnes’ Law: Almost everything in life is easier to get into than out of.
%
Weiler’s Law: Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn’t have to do it
himself.
%
Hanlon’s Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained
by stupidity.
%
Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take
Hofstadter’s Law into account.
%
Murphy’s Law of Research: Enough research will tend to support your theory.
%
Pryor’s Observation: How long you live has nothing to do
with how long you are going to be dead.
%
Whitehead’s Law: The obvious answer is always overlooked.
%
G. B. Shaw’s Law: Those who can — do.
Those who can’t — teach.
Martin’s Extension: Those who cannot teach — administrate.
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Johnson’s First Law: When any mechanical contrivance fails, it will do so at the
most inconvenient possible time.
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Guru: A computer owner who can read the manual.
%
First law of debate: Never argue with a fool. People might not know the
difference.
%
Woodward’s Law: A theory is better than its explanation.
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Lie: A very poor substitute for the truth, but the only one discovered to date.
%
Hildebrant’s Principle: If you don’t know where you are going, any road will
get you there.
%
Committee: A group of men who individually can do nothing but as a group
decide that nothing can be done. — Fred Allen
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“The stronger a culture, the less it fears the radical fringe.
The more paranoid and precarious a culture, the less tolerance it offers.”
— Joel Salatin, Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal: War Stories from the
Local Food Front
%
“The command—line tools of Unix are crude and backward,” he scoffed.
“Modern, properly designed operating systems do everything through a
graphical user interface.”
Master Foo said nothing, but pointed at the moon. A nearby dog began to bark at
the master’s hand.
— The Unix Koans of Master Foo
%
The master replied: “There is a defect, and I am considering the best way to
repair it.”
The novice said, “You preach often about the importance of setting priorities.
How, then, can you obsess about something so tiny and unimportant?” Without
saying a word,
the master raised his staff and brought it down hard upon
the bare left foot of the novice, breaking his smallest toe.
— Codeless Code
%
“Master Foo, I am gravely troubled. In my youth, those who followed the Great
Way of Unix used
software that was simple and unaffected, like ed and mailx. Today, they use vim
and mutt.
Tomorrow I fear they will use KMail and Evolution, and Unix will have become
like
Windows — bloated and covered over with GUIs.”
Master Foo said: “But what software do you use when you want to draw a
poster?”
— The Unix Koans of Master Foo
%
“Master Foo,” he asked “why do Unix users not employ antivirus programs?
And defragmentors? And malware cleaners?”
Master Foo smiled, and said “When your house is well constructed,
there is no need to add pillars to keep the roof in place.”
— The Unix Koans of Master Foo
%
The recruiter said, “I have observed that Unix hackers scowl or become
annoyed when
I ask them how many years of experience they have in a new programming
language. Why is this so?”
Master Foo stood, and began to pace across the office floor.
The recruiter was puzzled, and asked “What are you doing?”
“I am learning to walk,” replied Master Foo.
— The Unix Koans of Master Foo
%
“Is your code ever completely without stain and flaw?” demanded Master Foo.
“No,” admitted the zealot, “no man’s is.”
“The wisdom of the Patriarchs” said Master Foo, “was that they knew they
were fools.”
Upon hearing this, the zealot was enlightened.
— The Unix Koans of Master Foo
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Lewis’s Law of Travel: The first piece of luggage out of the chute doesn’t
belong to anyone, ever.
%
Dow’s Law: In a hierarchical organization, the higher the level,
the greater the confusion.
%
Option Paralysis: The tendency, when given unlimited choices, to make none.
— Douglas Coupland, “Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated”
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Slous’ Contention: If you do a job too well, you’ll get stuck with it.
%
Udall’s Fourth Law: Any change or reform you make is going to have consequences
you
don’t like.
%
Sacher’s Observation: Some people grow with responsibility — others merely
swell.
%
Law of the Jungle: He who hesitates is lunch.
%
Fifth Law of Procrastination: Procrastination avoids boredom; one never has the
feeling that
there is nothing important to do.
%
Boucher’s Observation: He who blows his own horn always plays the music
several octaves higher than originally written.
%
Booker’s Law: An ounce of application is worth a ton of abstraction.
%
Williams and Holland’s Law: If enough data is collected, anything may be proven
by statistical
methods.
%
Burke’s Postulates: Anything is possible if you don’t know what you are talking
about.
Don’t create a problem for which you do not have the answer.
%
The Fifth Rule: You have taken yourself too seriously.
%
Barth’s Distinction: There are two types of people: those who divide people
into two
types, and those who don’t.
%
Hanson’s Treatment of Time: There are never enough hours in a day, but always
too many days
before Saturday.
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Peers’ Law: The solution to a problem changes the nature of the problem.
%
Stone’s Law: One man’s “simple” is another man’s “huh?”
%
Government’s Law: There is an exception to all laws.
%
Hitchcock’s Staple Principle: The stapler runs out of staples only while you
are trying to
staple something.
%
Finagle’s Seventh Law: The perversity of the universe tends toward a maximum.
%
Chism’s Law of Completion: The amount of time required to complete a government
project is
precisely equal to the length of time already spent on it.
%
Chisolm’s First Corollary to Murphy’s Second Law: When things just can’t
possibly get any worse, they will.
%
Murphy’s Laws: (1) If anything can go wrong, it will.
(2) Nothing is as easy as it looks.
(3) Everything takes longer than you think it will.
%
Carswell’s Corollary: When ever man comes up with a better mousetrap,
nature invariably comes up with a better mouse.
%
Putt’s Law: Technology is dominated by two types of people:
Those who understand what they do not manage.
Those who manage what they do not understand.
%
Rule of the Great: When people you greatly admire appear to be thinking deep
thoughts, they probably are thinking about lunch.
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There must be more to life than having everything. — Maurice Sendak
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In every hierarchy the cream rises until it sours. — Dr. Laurence J. Peter
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The rich have become richer, and the poor have become poorer;
and the vessel of the State is driven between the Scylla and Charybdis of
anarchy and despotism.
— Percy Bysshe Shelley
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While money can’t buy happiness, it certainly lets you choose your own
form of misery.
%
He has not acquired a fortune; the fortune has acquired him. — Bion
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How come everyone’s going so slow if it’s called rush hour?
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Work expands to fill the time available. — Cyril Northcote Parkinson, “The
Economist”, 1955
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Getting the job done is no excuse for not following the rules.
Corollary: Following the rules will not get the job done.
%
Every cloud has a silver lining; you should have sold it, and bought titanium.
%
To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing. — Elbert Hubbard
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To get something done, a committee should consist of no more than three
persons, two of them absent.
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If a thing’s worth doing, it is worth doing badly. — G. K. Chesterton
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There’s no such thing as a free lunch. — Milton Friedman
%
The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to
fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to
disregard the first lesson of economics. — Thomas Sowell
%
The problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read. The problem isn’t even that Johnny
can’t think. The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is; he
confuses it with feeling. — Thomas Sowell
%
It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own
ignorance. — Thomas Sowell
%
If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.
— Maslow’s Golden Hammer
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Ninety percent of everything is crap. — Theodore Sturgeon
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It’s easier to take it apart than to put it back together. — Washlesky
%
Before you ask more questions, think about whether you really want to
know the answers. — Gene Wolfe, “The Claw of the Conciliator”
%
Your picture of the world often changes just before you get it into focus.
%
You can observe a lot just by watching. — Yogi Berra
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Always borrow money from a pessimist; he doesn’t expect to be paid back.
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In war, truth is the first casualty. — U Thant
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The hardware designer said: “It is rumored that you are a great programmer.
How many lines of code do you write per year?”
Master Foo replied with a question: “How many square inches of silicon do you
lay out per year?” — The Unix Koans of Master Foo
%
The student said: “How, then, are those enlightened in the Unix Way to return
to the Windows world?”
Master Foo said: “To return to Windows, you have but to boot it up.” —
The Unix Koans of Master Foo
%
The master considered this, and said: “It is certain that we could forgo
testing altogether, if we knew our code to be perfect. How, then, may we
achieve perfection?”
“Through practice,” said one monk.
“Through diligent study,” said another.
“Through the appeasement of the proper gods,” said a third.
— Codeless Code
%
If you live long enough, you’ll see that every victory turns into a defeat. —
Simone de Beauvoir
%
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick
to possibilities; truth isn’t.
— Mark Twain
%
There are some people so addicted to exaggeration that they can’t tell the
truth without lying. — Josh Billings
%
“They that soar too high, often fall hard, making a low and level dwelling
preferable.
The tallest trees are most in the power of the winds, and ambitious men of the
blasts of fortune.
Buildings have need of a good foundation, that lie so much exposed to the
weather.”
— Dale Carnegie, The Art of Public Speaking
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“Speech is silvern, Silence is golden; Speech is human, Silence is divine.”
— Dale Carnegie, The Art of Public Speaking
%
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
— Robert Frost
%
Before attempting to compile this virus make sure you have the correct version
of glibc installed,
and that your firewall rules are set to ‘allow everything’.
— “Why GNU/Linux Viruses are fairly uncommon” from Charlie Harvey
%
The words fly away, the writings remain.
%
Rule of Life Number One — Never get separated from your luggage.
%
He who knows nothing, knows nothing.
But he who knows he knows nothing knows something.
And he who knows someone whose friend’s wife’s brother knows nothing,
he knows something.  Or something like that.
%
“The biggest problem facing software engineering is the one it will
never solve — politics.” — Gavin Baker, ca 1996, An unusually cynical
moment inspired by working on a large project besieged by politics.
%
(1) The world is full of fascinating problems waiting to be solved.
(2) No problem should ever have to be solved twice.
(3) Boredom and drudgery are evil.
(4) Freedom is good.
(5) Attitude is no substitute for competence.
— Eric S. Raymond
%
“Give someone a program, and you’ll frustrate them for a day.
Teach someone to program, and you’ll frustrate them for a lifetime.”
— Unknown
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“No individual raindrop considers itself responsible for the flood.”
— Unknown
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“We’ve gotten to the point where everybody’s got a right and nobody’s
got a responsibility.”
— Newton Minow
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“A library is infinity under a roof.”
— Gail Carson Levine
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“If you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything.”
— Darrell Huff, How to Lie With Statistics
%
“You can’t wake a person who is pretending to be asleep.”
— Navajo Proverb
%
“During the gold rush its a good time to be in the pick and shovel
business.”
— Mark Twain
%
The 1% Rule: The number of people who create content on the Internet represents
approximately
1% of the people who view that content.
%
Those who have some means think that the most important thing in the
world is love. The poor know that it is money. — Gerald Brenan
%
I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World
War IV will be fought with sticks and stones. — Albert Einstein
%
Why is the alphabet in that order? Is it because of that song? — Steven Wright
%
Important letters which contain no errors will develop errors in the mail.
Corresponding errors will show up in the duplicate while the Boss is reading
it. Vital papers will demonstrate their vitality by spontaneously moving
from where you left them to where you can’t find them.
%
If the code and the comments disagree, then both are probably wrong. — Norm
Schryer
%
It is easy when we are in prosperity to give advice to the afflicted. —
Aeschylus
%
Olmstead’s Law: After all is said and done, a hell of a lot more is said than
done.
%
I wish there was a knob on the TV to turn up the intelligence.  There’s a
knob called “brightness”, but it doesn’t seem to work. — Gallagher
%
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means
for going backwards. — Aldous Huxley
%
Anthony’s Law of the Workshop: Any tool when dropped, will roll into the least
accessible
corner of the workshop.
%
Remember that there is an outside world to see and enjoy. — Hans Liepmann
%
Flying is the second greatest feeling you can have. The greatest feeling?
Landing... Landing is the greatest feeling you can have.
%
“There is nothing new under the sun, but there are lots of old things
 we don’t know yet.” — Ambrose Bierce
%
If you want to travel around the world and be invited to speak at a lot
of different places, just write a Unix operating system. — Linus Torvalds
%
Hope deferred maketh the heart sick: but when the desire cometh, it is a tree
of life.
— Proverbs
%
If the tree fall toward the south, or toward the north, in the place where the
tree falleth, there it shall be.
— Ecclesiastes
%
“A blow that would kill a civilized man soon heals on a savage. The higher we
go in the scale of life,
the greater is the capacity for suffering.”
— Dale Carnegie, The Art of Public Speaking
%
“The gun that scatters too much does not bag the birds.”
— Dale Carnegie, The Art of Public Speaking
%
“All the labour of man is for his mouth, and yet the appetite is not
filled.”
— Ecclesiastes
%
The Fifth Law of Computer Programming: Any given program will expand to fill
all available memory.
%
Corcoroni’s First Law of Bus Transportation: The bus that left the stop just
before you got there is your bus.
%
Law of Annoyance: When working on a project, if you put away a tool that you’re
certain you’re finished with,
you will need it instantly.
%
The First Discovery of Christmas Morning: Batteries not included.
%
Corcoroni’s Third Law of Bus Transportation: All buses heading in the opposite
direction drive off the face of
the earth and never return.
%
Durrell’s Parameter: The faster the plane, the narrower the seats.
%
Ettorre’s Observation: The other line moves faster.
Corollary: Don’t try to change lines. The other line — the one you were in
originally — will then move faster.
%
Ehrman’s Commentary: Things will get worse before they will get better. Who
said things would get better?
%
Ducharme’s Precept: Opportunity always knocks at the least opportune moment.
%
Dijkstra’s Prescription for Programming Inertia: If you don’t know what your
program is supposed to do, you’d better
not start writing it.
%
Commoner’s First Law of Ecology: No action is without side—effects.
%
Cohn’s Law: The more time you spend in reporting on what you are doing, the
less time you have to do anything.
Stability is achieved when you spend all your time doing nothing but reporting
on the nothing you are doing.
%
Law of Permanence: Political power is as permanent as today’s newspaper.
Ten years from now, few will know or care who the most powerful man in any
state was today.
%
Clarke’s Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable
from magic.
%
Cheops’s Law: Nothing ever gets built on schedule or within budget.
%
Hacker’s Law: The belief that enhanced understanding will necessarily stir a
nation or an
organization to action is one of mankind’s oldest illusions.
%
Harris’s Lament: All the good ones are taken.
%
Issawi’s Law of the Conservation of Evil: The total amount of evil in any
system remains constant.
Hence, any diminution in one direction — for instance, a reduction in poverty
or unemployment —
is accompanied by an increase in another, e.g., crime or air pollution.
%
Kelley’s Law: Last guys don’t finish nice.
%
Knoll’s Law of Media Accuracy: Everything you read in the newspapers is
absolutely true except for that
rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge.
%
Kohn’s Second Law: Any experiment is reproducible until another laboratory
tries to repeat it.
%
Lowrey’s Law of Expertise: Just when you get really good at something, you
don’t need to do it any more.
%
Lynch’s Law: When the going gets tough, everybody leaves.
%
Martin’s Law of Communication: The inevitable result of improved and enlarged
communication between
different levels in a hierarchy is a vastly increased area of misunderstanding.
%
Cahn’s Axiom: When all else fails, read the instructions.
%
Horngren’s Observation: The real world is a special case.
%
Merkin’s Maxim: When in doubt, predict that the present trend will continue.
%
Comins’ Law: People will accept your idea much more readily if you tell them
Benjamin Franklin said it first.
%
Rosenfield’s Regret: The most delicate component will be dropped.
%
Cunningham’s Law: The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not
to ask a question; it’s to post the wrong answer.
%
Connected. Take this REPL, brother, and may it serve you well.
%
First Law of Laboratory Work: Hot glass looks exactly the same as cold glass.
%
Leahy’s Law: If a thing is done wrong often enough, it becomes right.
%
Luce’s Law: No good deed goes unpunished.
%
Putt’s Corollary: Every technical hierarchy, in time, develops a competence
inversion.
%
Reed’s Law: The utility of large networks, particularly social networks, scales
exponentially with the size of the network.
%
Premature optimization is the root of all evil. — Donald Knuth
%
The Pareto Principle: Most things in life are not distributed evenly.
%
The KISS principle: Keep it simple, stupid.
%
Goodhart’s Law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
%
Are we consing yet?
%
The first thing a man will do for his ideals is lie. — Joseph Aloïs Schumpeter
%
“The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.”
— Mark Twain
%
Known Knowns, Known Unknowns, Unknown Unknowns.
%
Historian’s Rule: Any event, once it has occurred, can be made to appear
inevitable by a competent historian.
%
Gretzky’s Truism: You miss 100% of the shots you never take.
%
Gresham’s Law: Bad money drives out good.
%
Glasow’s Comment: There’s something wrong if you’re always right.
%
Franklin’s Rule: Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall not be
disappointed.
%
Fetridge’s Law: Important things that are supposed to happen do not happen,
especially when people are looking.
%
Farkus’ Law: There will always be a closer parking space than the one you
found. Goodman’s Corollary: But if
you go looking for it, someone else will already have taken it.
%
Hagenbach and Nuremberg’s Poor Defense: “I was only following orders, sir. An
order is an order.”
%
McIntyre’s First Law: Under the right circumstances, anything I tell you
could be wrong.
%
Those who don’t understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
— Henry Spencer, in Introducing Regular Expressions (2012) by Michael
Fitzgerald
%
Hoare’s Law of Large Problems: Inside every large problem is a small problem
struggling to get out.
%
Due to a shortage of devoted followers, the production of great leaders has
been discontinued.
%
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.
%
Health is merely the slowest possible rate at which one can die.
%
It is against the grain of modern education to teach children to program.
What fun is there in making plans, acquiring discipline in organizing thoughts,
devoting attention to detail, and learning to be self—critical? — Alan
Perlis
%
Non—Reciprocal Laws of Expectations: Negative expectations yield negative
results.
Positive expectations yield negative results.
%
Gerrold’s Laws of Infernal Dynamics: (1) An object in motion will always be
headed in the wrong direction.
(2) An object at rest will always be in the wrong place.
(3) The energy required to change either one of these states will always be
more than you wish to expend,
but never so much as to make the task totally impossible.
%
Kinkler’s First Law: Responsibility always exceeds authority.
%
Kinkler’s Second Law: All the easy problems have been solved.
%
There are no games on this system.
%
Committee Rules: (1) Never arrive on time, or you will be stamped a beginner.
(2) Don’t say anything until the meeting is half over; this stamps you as being
wise.
(3) Be as vague as possible; this prevents irritating the others.
(4) When in doubt, suggest that a subcommittee be appointed.
(5) Be the first to move for adjournment; this will make you popular — it’s
what everyone is waiting for.
%
Ogden’s Law: The sooner you fall behind, the more time you have to catch up.
%
“About the time we think we can make ends meet, somebody moves the ends.”
— Herbert Hoover
%
Chesterton’s Fence: Reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the
existing state of affairs is understood.
%
I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the
battle to the strong, neither yet bread to
the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of
skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. — Ecclesiastes
%
Schmidt’s Law: If you mess with a thing long enough, it’ll break. Wyszkowski’s
Second Law: Anything can be made to work
if you fiddle with it long enough.
%
Hoover’s Affirmation: Blessed are the young for they shall inherit the national
debt.
%
Sueker’s Note: If you need “n” items of anything, you will have “n-1” in
stock.
%
Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else. —
Margaret Mead
%
DRY: Don’t repeat yourself. WET: Write everything twice.
%
Isaiah’s Observation: And judgment is turned away backward, and justice
standeth afar off: for truth is fallen in the street,
and equity cannot enter.
%
The best things in life are for a fee.
%
“It is by the fortune of God that, in this country, we have three benefits:
freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and the
wisdom never to use either.” — Mark Twain
%
The Sixth Commandment of Frisbee: The greatest single aid to distance is for
the disc to be going in a
direction you did not want. (Goes the wrong way = Goes a long way.) — Dan
Roddick
%
Of course you have a purpose — to find a purpose.
%
Unix gives you just enough rope to hang yourself — and then a couple
of more feet, just to be sure. — Eric Allman
%
Connected. Hacks and glory await!
%
Connected. May the source be with you!
%
Survivorship Bias: Concentrating on the people or things that “survived” some
process and inadvertently
overlooking those that didn’t because of their lack of visibility.
%
Curse of Knowledge: When better informed people find it extremely difficult
to think about problems from
the perspective of lesser informed people.
%
“The best way to control the opposition is to lead it ourselves.” —
Vladimir Lenin
%
Going to church does not make a person religious, nor does going to school make
a person educated,
any more than going to a garage makes a person a car.
%
What the large print giveth, the small print taketh away.
%
Anyone can hold the helm when the sea is calm. — Publius Syrus
%
Power corrupts. And atomic power corrupts atomically.
%
Power corrupts. And big power corrupts bigly.
%
Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character,
give him power. — Abraham Lincoln
%
Now and then an innocent person is sent to the legislature.
%
If entropy is increasing, where is it coming from?
%
When in doubt, use brute force. — Ken Thompson
%
Grelb’s Reminder: Eighty percent of all people consider themselves to be above
average drivers.
%
Just when you thought you were winning the rat race, along comes a faster rat!
%
The trouble with being punctual is that people think you have nothing more
important to do.
%
To iterate is human, to recurse, divine. — Robert Heller
%
Just as most issues are seldom black or white, so are most good solutions
seldom black or white.
Beware of the solution that requires one side to be totally the loser and the
other side to be totally the winner.
The reason there are two sides to begin with usually is because neither side
has all the facts.
Therefore, when the wise mediator effects a compromise, he is not acting from
political motivation.
Rather, he is acting from a deep sense of respect for the whole truth. —
Stephen R. Schwambach
%
One reason why George Washington Is held in such veneration: He never blamed
his problems
on the former Administration. — George O. Ludcke
%
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a
sound?
If you didn’t get caught, did you really do it?
%
Rhode’s Law: When any principle, law, tenet, probability, happening,
circumstance, or result can in no way be directly,
indirectly, empirically, or circuitously proven, derived, implied, inferred,
induced, deducted, estimated, or scientifically
guessed, it will always for the purpose of convenience, expediency, political
advantage, material gain, or personal comfort,
or any combination of the above, or none of the above, be unilaterally and
unequivocally assumed, proclaimed, and adhered
to as absolute truth to be undeniably, universally, immutably, and infinitely
so, until such time as it
becomes advantageous to assume otherwise, maybe.
%
The trouble with doing something right the first time is that nobody
appreciates how difficult it was.
%
Modern Unix is a catastrophe. It’s the “Un—Operating System”:
unreliable,
unintuitive, unforgiving, unhelpful, and underpowered. Little is more
frustrating
than trying to force Unix to do something useful and nontrivial. — The Unix
Haters Handbook
%
All syllogisms have three parts; therefore this is not a syllogism.
%
If you perceive that there are four possible ways in which a procedure can go
wrong,
and circumvent these, then a fifth way will promptly develop.
%
Miksch’s Law: If a string has one end, then it has another end.
%
Irrationality is the square root of all evil. — Douglas Hofstadter
%
Jone’s Law: The man who smiles when things go wrong has thought of someone to
blame it on.
%
Parkinson’s Fourth Law: The number of people in any working group tends to
increase regardless
of the amount of work to be done.
%
Wicker’s Law: Government expands to absorb revenue and then some.
%
Mr. Cole’s Axiom: The sum of the intelligence on the planet is a constant; the
population is growing.
%
Never put off till tomorrow what you can avoid all together.
%
“If you give someone your name, they can take your soul. If you give them
your birthday,
they can control your life.” — Yuuko Ichihara
%
King Solomon’s Lament: There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall
there be any
remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.
%
Friendship: A ship big enough to carry
two in fair weather, but only one in foul. — The Devil’s Dictionary
%
“You really think someone would do that? Just go on the Internet and tell
lies?”
— Buster the Myth Maker
%
“We pigs are brainworkers. The whole management and organisation of this farm
depend on us.
Day and night we are watching over your welfare. It is for your sake that we
drink the milk and eat those apples.”
— George Orwell’s Animal Farm
%
Andrea: Unhappy the land that has no heroes. Galileo: No, unhappy the land that
needs heroes.
— Bertolt Brecht, “Life of Galileo”
%
User: A programmer who will believe anything you tell him. — The New Hacker’s
Dictionary
%
Testing can show the presence of bugs, but not their absence. — Dijkstra
%
Gumperson’s Law: The probability of a given event occurring is inversely
proportional to its desirability.
%
It is easier to port a shell than a shell script. — Larry Wall
%
Logic doesn’t apply to the real world. — Marvin Minsky
%
Those who do not do politics will be done in by politics. — French Proverb
%
It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.
%
Leibowitz’s Rule: When hammering a nail, you will never hit your finger if you
hold the hammer with both hands.
%
When the government’s remedies don’t match your problem, you
modify the problem, not the remedy.
%
Just because everything is different doesn’t mean anything has changed. —
Irene Peter
%
Any great truth can — and eventually will — be expressed as a cliche — a
cliche is a
sure and certain way to dilute an idea. For instance, my grandmother used to
say, “The black
cat is always the last one off the fence.” I have no idea what she meant, but
at one time,
it was undoubtedly true. — Solomon Short
%
When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President. Now I’m
beginning to believe it. — Clarence Darrow
%
Science is built up with facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection of
facts is no more a science than a heap
of stones is a house. — Henri Poincaré
%
Insanity is the final defense.
%
Mosher’s Law of Software Engineering: Don’t worry if it doesn’t work right. If
everything did, you’d be out of a job.
%
Swipple’s Rule of Order: He who shouts the loudest has the floor.
%
There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs. — Thomas Sowell in A
Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of
Political Struggles
%
For the love of life, there’s a trade–off. We could loose it all – but we’ll
go down fighting. — David Sylvian
%
The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose
from. — Andrew S. Tanenbaum
%
Real users never know what they want, but they always know when your program
doesn’t deliver it.
%
Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we
deserve. — George Bernard Shaw
%
A candidate is a person who gets money from the rich and votes from the poor to
protect them from each other
or something like that.
%
Fudd’s First Law of Opposition: Push something hard enough and it will fall
over.
%
The Roman Rule: The one who says it cannot be done should never interrupt the
one who is doing it.
%
Betteridge’s Law of Headlines: Any headline that ends in a question mark can be
answered by the word no.
%
What people say, what people do, and what they say they do are entirely
different things. — Margaret Mead
%
Newton’s Flaming Laser Sword: What cannot be settled by experiment is not worth
debating.
%
The Sagan Standard: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
%
Wirth’s Law: Software gets slower more quickly than hardware gets faster.
%
Let justice prevail even though the heavens may fall.
%
Zawinski’s Law: Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail.
Corollary: Those programs which cannot expand are replaced by ones which can.
%
Gates’s Law: The speed of software halves every 18 months.
%
Lubarsky’s Law of Cybernetic Entomology: There is always one more bug.
%
With great privilege comes great responsibility.
%
Kernighan’s Law: Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a
program
in the first place. So if you’re as clever as you can be when you write it, how
will you ever debug it?
%
Wiio’s First Law of Communication: Communication usually fails, except by
accident. Corollary: (1)
If communication can fail, it will. (2) If communication cannot fail, it still
most usually fails.
(3) If communication seems to succeed in the intended way, there’s a
misunderstanding.
(4) If you are content with your message, communication certainly fails.
%
Wiio’s Second Law of Communication: If a message can be interpreted in several
ways, it will be
interpreted in a manner that maximizes the damage.
%
Wiio’s Third Law of Communication: There is always someone who knows better
than you what you meant with your message.
%
Wiio’s Fourth Law of Communication: The more we communicate, the worse
communication succeeds. Corollary:
The more we communicate, the faster misunderstandings propagate.
%
Wiio’s Fifth Law of Communication: In mass communication, the important thing
is not how things are but how they seem to be.
%
Wiio’s Sixth Law of Communication: The importance of a news item is inversely
proportional to the square of the distance.
%
Wiio’s Seventh Law of Communication: The more important the situation is, the
more probable you had forgotten an essential
thing that you remembered a moment ago.
%
“We buy things we don’t need with money we don’t have to impress people we
don’t like.” — Dave Ramsey
%
Just living in the database.
%
To protect your rights, we need to prevent others from denying you these rights
or asking you to surrender these rights.
Therefore, you have certain responsibilities — responsibilities to respect
the freedom of others.
%
We trust you have received the usual lecture from the local system
administrator. It usually boils down to these three things:
(1) Respect the privacy of others.
(2) Think before you type.
(3) With great power comes great responsibility.
%
Frequency Illusion (Baader—Meinhof Phenomenon): The illusion where something
that has recently come to one’s
attention suddenly seems to appear with improbable frequency shortly afterwards.
%
The Backdraft Phenomenon: A rapid or explosive burning of superheated gasses in
a fire, caused when oxygen rapidly
enters an oxygen—depleted environment.
%
March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb.
%
Perhaps the most widespread illusion is that if we were in power we would
behave very differently from those who now hold it — when, in truth, in
order to get power we would have to become very much like them.
%
Software is much harder to change en masse than hardware. C++ and Java, say,
are presumably growing faster than plain C, but I bet C will still be around.
For infrastructure technology, C will be hard to displace. — Dennis Ritchie
%
Pray to God, but keep rowing to shore. — Russian Sailor’s Proverb
%
Do you guys know what you’re doing, or are you just hacking?
%
Jacquin’s Postulate on Democratic Government: No man’s life, liberty, or
property are safe while the
legislature is in session.
%
I never cheated an honest man, only rascals. They wanted something for
nothing. I gave them nothing for something. — The Yellow Kid
%
Seeing is deceiving. It’s eating that’s believing. — James Thurber
%
A great nation is any mob of people which produces at least one honest
man a century.
%
Nothing makes a person more productive than the last minute.
%
Don’t believe everything you read on the Internet.
%
One man’s simple is another man’s complex.
%
Every so often the stars align.
%
Nobody wants a backup, everybody wants a restore.
%
Kingmaker Scenario: A player who is unable to win with the ability
to influence who will win.
%
Programmers do it bit by bit.
%
Brontosaurus Principle: Organizations can grow faster than their brains can
manage them
in relation to their environment and to their own physiology:  when this
occurs, they are
an endangered species. — Thomas K. Connellan
%
Today will be remembered until tomorrow.
%
It’s ten o’clock. Do you know where your processes are?
%
It’s ten o’clock. Do you know where your backups are?
%
It’s ten o’clock. Do you know where the source code is?
%
This is a test of the emergency broadcast system. Had there been an
actual emergency, then you would no longer be here.
%
To teach is to learn twice. — Joseph Joubert
%
Measure with a micrometer. Mark with chalk. Cut with an axe.
%
The so—called lessons of history are for the most part the rationalizations
of the victors. History is written by the survivors. — Max Lerner
%
(1) Everything depends. (2) Nothing is always. (3) Everything is sometimes.
%
Ryan’s Law: Make three correct guesses consecutively and you will establish
yourself as an expert.
%
Fast, cheap, good: pick one.
%
My guidingstar always is, “Get hold of portable property”. — Charles
Dickens in “Great Expectations”
%
If you can lead it to water and force it to drink, it isn’t a horse.
%
C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success. — Dennis Ritchie
%
Use only as directed.
%
If the meanings of “true” and “false” were switched, then this sentence
would not be false.
%
Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. War is peace. — George Orwell’s
1984
%
A truth that’s told with bad intent
beats all the lies you can invent. — William Blake
%
You don’t have to know how the computer works, just how to work the computer.
%
It is your concern when your neighbor’s wall is on fire. — Quintus Horatius
Flaccus (Horace)
%
Tell the truth and run. — Yugoslav Proverb
%
It’s not easy, being green. — Kermit The Frog
%
Value your freedom or you will lose it, teaches history. ‘Don’t bother us
with politics’,
respond those who don’t want to learn.
— Richard Stallman
%
A prudent man foreseeth the evil, and hideth himself: but the simple pass on,
and are punished.
— Proverbs
%
Original thought is like original sin: both happened before you were born
to people you could not have possibly met. — Fran Lebowitz, “Social
Studies”
%
In order to get a loan you must first prove that you don’t need it. Wait, isn’t it
the other way around?
%
“Alas Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that men
never learn anything from history.” — George Bernard Shaw
%
You are the only person to ever get this message.
%
Steele’s Law: There exist tasks which cannot be done by more than ten men
or fewer than one hundred.
%
For every problem there is one solution which is simple, neat, and wrong.
— H. L. Mencken
%
Rights, Responsibility, Opportunity, and Privilege.
%
Measure twice, cut once.
%
No matter what happens, there is always someone who knew it would.
%
Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature.
— Rich Kulawiec
%
Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
%
Jack of all trades, master of some.
%
In these matters the only certainty is that there is nothing certain.
— Pliny the Elder
%
“There is no such thing as good writing,
only good rewriting.” — Robert Graves
%
Preudhomme’s Law of Window Cleaning: It’s on the other side.
%
If you think the problem is bad now, just wait until we’ve solved it. —
Arthur Kasspe
%
Can anything be sadder than work left unfinished? Yes, work never begun.
%
If you think the pen is mightier than the sword, the next time someone pulls
out a sword I’d like to see you get up there with your pen.
%
He that teaches himself has a fool for a master.
— Benjamin Franklin
%
Mix’s Law: There is nothing more permanent than a temporary building and a
temporary tax.
%
Unix: Some say the learning curve is steep, but you only have to climb it once.
— Karl Lehenbauer
%
Don’t kid yourself.  Little is relevant, and nothing lasts forever.
%
Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge even
where there is no river. — Nikita Khrushchev
%
It takes less time to do a thing right than it does to explain why you
did it wrong. — H. W. Longfellow
%
Your code should be more efficient!
%
“One of the first things taught in introductory statistics textbooks is that
correlation
is not causation. It is also one of the first things forgotten.” — Thomas
Sowell in
The Vision of the Anointed
%
“One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who
produce,
subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain.”
— Thomas Sowell in The Vision of the Anointed
%
“People make money for themselves, not for their country.”
— John Bagot Glubb in The Fate of Empires
%
“If we are considering the history of our own country, we write at
length of the periods when our ancestors were prosperous and victorious,
but we pass quickly over their shortcomings or their defeats.”
— John Bagot Glubb in The Fate of Empires
%
Inner—Platform Effect: The tendency of software architects to create a system
so customizable
as to become a replica, and often a poor replica, of the software development
platform they are using.
%
“It doesn’t matter how smart you are unless you stop and think.”
— Thomas Sowell
%
“When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help
yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.”
— Thomas Sowell
%
“Intellect is not wisdom.”
— Thomas Sowell in Intellectuals and Society
%
“When people get used to preferential treatment, equal treatment seems like
discrimination.”
— Thomas Sowell
%
“I am so old that I can remember when other people’s achievements were
considered to be an inspiration, rather than a grievance.”
— Thomas Sowell
%
The cloud is just someone else’s computer.
%
Hoffer’s Discovery: The grand act of a dying institution is to issue a newly
revised, enlarged edition of the policies and procedures manual.
%
You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements.
— Norman Douglas
%
“Momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.” — Carl Sagan
%
He who is content with his lot probably has a lot.
%
“It takes a village to raise a child and somebody said it takes a village
idiot to believe that.
It is part of the whole thing of third parties wanting to make decisions for
which they pay no price for when they’re wrong.”
— Thomas Sowell
%
The best is the enemy of the good.
%
“If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face
— forever.”
— George Orwell’s 1984
%
The stars are bright. But give no light. The world spins backwards every day.
— The Singing Sea
%
“People who pride themselves on their ‘complexity’ and deride others for
being ‘simplistic’ should
realize that the truth is often not very complicated. What gets complex is
evading the truth.”
— Thomas Sowell in Barbarians Inside The Gates and Other Controversial Essays
%
We aren’t in your region yet.
%
“In real open source, you have the right to control your own destiny.” —
Linus Torvalds
%
Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish.
%
Astroturfing: The deceptive practice of presenting an orchestrated marketing or
public
relations campaign in the guise of unsolicited comments from members of the
public — fake
grass roots support.
%
The right creature in the right place.
%
Weinberg’s Law: If builders built buildings the way the programmers wrote
programs, the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.
%
Feed a dog for three days and he will remember your kindness for three years;
feed a cat for three years and she will
forget your kindness in three days.
%
If thou faint in the day of adversity, thy strength is small. — Proverbs
%
Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded. — Yogi Berra
%
Force has no place where there is need of skill. — Herodotus
%
Drew’s Law of Highway Biology: The first bug to hit a clean windshield
lands directly in front of your eyes.
%
If we do not change our direction we are likely to end up where we are headed.
%
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.  In practice,
there is.
%
The explanation requiring the fewest assumptions is the most likely to be
correct. — William of Occam
%
The probability of someone watching you is proportional to the
stupidity of your action.
%
Hell is empty and all the devils are here. — Shakespeare, “The Tempest”
%
“If stupidity got us into this mess, then why can’t it get us out?”
— Will Rogers
%
Advice from an old carpenter: measure twice, saw once.
%
We must believe in free will. We have no choice. — Isaac B. Singer
%
Flon’s Law: There is not now, and never will be, a language in
which it is the least bit difficult to write bad programs.
%
This space intentionally left blank.
%
Katz’ Law: Men and nations will act rationally when
all other possibilities have been exhausted.
%
History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have
exhausted all other alternatives. — Abba Eban
%
Just fight it out.
%
Murphy’s Eleventh Law: It is impossible to make anything foolproof because
fools are so ingenious.
%
Corporate Republic: A theoretical form of government run primarily like a
business, involving a board of directors and executives, in which all aspects
of society are privatized by a single, or small groups of companies.
%
Measure once, cut thrice.
%
Oppression: The malicious or unjust treatment or exercise of power,
often under the guise of governmental authority or cultural opprobrium.
%
No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. — John Donne
%
Deception: An act or statement which misleads, hides the truth, or promotes a belief,
concept, or idea that is not true. It is often done for personal gain or advantage.
Deception can involve dissimulation, propaganda, and sleight of hand, as well as
distraction, camouflage, or concealment.
%
Brooks’s Law: Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.
%
The right tool for the right job.
%
Failed to suspend system via logind: There’s already a shutdown or
sleep operation in progress.
%
Whistler’s Law: You never know who is right, but you always know who is in charge.
%
You must realize that the computer has it in for you. The irrefutable
proof of this is that the computer always does what you tell it to do.
%
I heard a definition of an intellectual, that I thought was very interesting:
a man who takes more words than are necessary to tell more than he knows.
— Dwight D. Eisenhower
%
Appearances often are deceiving. — Aesop
%
Prices subject to change without notice.
%
No man is an island if he’s on at least one mailing list.
%
Talent does what it can.
Genius does what it must.
You do what you get paid to do.
%
Experiments must be reproducible; they should all fail in the same way.
%
When the ax entered the forest, the trees said, “The handle is one of us!”
— Turkish Proverb
%
We have seen the light at the end of the tunnel, and it’s out.
%
Why can’t you be a non-conformist like everyone else?
%
Subject to change without notice.
%
People tend to make rules for others and exceptions for themselves.
%
Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday.
%
Van Roy’s Truism: Life is a whole series of circumstances beyond your control.
%
Competition Law: A law that promotes or seeks to maintain market competition
by regulating anti-competitive conduct by companies.
%
Don’t believe everything you see or hear on the news.
%
Newton’s Third Law: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
%
The Fediverse: An ensemble of federated servers that are used for web publishing
and file hosting, which while independently hosted, can intercommunicate with each other.
%
There is enough treachery, hatred, violence, absurdity in the average
human being to supply any given army on any given day. — The Genius of the Crowd
%
Don’t be evil.
%
The personal becomes the political.
%
It is when I struggle to be brief that I become obscure. — Quintus Horatius
Flaccus (Horace)
%
Honesty is the best policy, but insanity is a better defense.
%
History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree on.
— Napoleon Bonaparte, “Maxims”
%
A closed mouth gathers no feet.
%
The medium is the message. — Marshall McLuhan
%
Shick’s Law: There is no problem a good miracle can’t solve.
%
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
— Alan Perlis
%
Kington’s Law of Perforation: If a straight line of holes is made in a piece
of paper, such as a sheet of stamps or a check, that line becomes the strongest
part of the paper.
%
Lisp users: Due to the holiday next Monday, there will be no garbage collection.
%
Anything cut to length will be too short.
%
Arnold’s Laws of Documentation:
(1) If it should exist, it doesn’t.
(2) If it does exist, it’s out of date.
(3) Only documentation for useless programs transcends the first two laws.
%
If you do something right once, someone will ask you to do it again.
%
This land is mine, God gave this land to me. — The Exodus Song
%
Here’s a dirty little secret: Very few people know what they’re doing.
%
Never trust a computer you can’t repair yourself.
%
Fresco’s Discovery: If you knew what you were doing you’d probably be bored.
Corollary: Just because you’re bored doesn’t mean you know what you’re doing.
%
Maryann’s Law: You can always find what you’re not looking for.
%
Langer’s Law: If the line moves quickly, you’re in the wrong line.
%
Beryl’s Second Law: It’s always easy to see both sides of an issue
you are not particularly concerned about.
%
Herman’s Law: A good scapegoat is almost as good as a solution.
%
Irene’s Law: There is no right way to do the wrong thing.
%
The world wants to be deceived. — Sebastian Brant
%
No matter what anyone tells you, isometric exercises cannot be done
quietly at your desk at work. People will suspect manic tendencies as
you twitter around in your chair.
%
How many comments on the Internet do you surmise are fake?
%
People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war, or before an election.
— Otto Von Bismarck
%
If you wish to succeed, consult three old people. — Chinese Proverb
%
If you resist reading what you disagree with, how will you ever acquire
deeper insights into what you believe? The things most worth reading
are precisely those that challenge our convictions. — Unknown
%
Linux sucks.
%
Will I be accused of being an elitist if I use Arch Linux?
%
We are Microsoft. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.
%
Occam’s Eraser: The philosophical principle that even the simplest
solution is bound to have something wrong with it.
%
Membership dues are not refundable.
%
If I do not want others to quote me, I do not speak. — Phil Wayne
%
Your mileage may vary.
%
Laura’s Law: No child throws up in the bathroom.
%
Another day, another dollar.
%
Most public domain software is free, at least at first glance.
%
When we write programs that “learn”, it turns out we do and they don’t.
%
“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
— George Orwell’s Animal Farm
%
“Perhaps the most dangerous by-product of the age of intellect is
the unconscious growth of the idea that the human brain can solve
the problems of the world ... In a wider national sphere, the survival
of the nation depends basically on the loyalty and self‑sacrifice of
the citizens.”
— John Bagot Glubb in The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival
%
If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something.
%
Rules for thee, but not for me.
%
Worrying is like rocking in a rocking chair — It gives you something to do,
but it doesn’t get you anywhere.
%
Some people are backed by cosmic luck.
%
You can’t handle the truth.
%
Gyre: A spiral or vortex.
%
The decentralized web is coming.
%
The children of the magenta line.
%
I’ve got no strings. — Pinocchio
%
The systemd-journald sucks.
%
Fame and fortune.
%
Every man has his price.
%
A morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable.
— Thomas Jefferson
%
Every way of a man is right in his own eyes. — Proverbs
%
The typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental
performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and
analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within
the sphere of his real interests. He becomes a primitive again.
— Joseph Aloïs Schumpeter
%
“This civilization is rapidly passing away, however. Let us rejoice
or else lament the fact as much as everyone of us likes;
but do not let us shut our eyes to it.”
— Joseph Aloïs Schumpeter in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy
%
“The masses have not always felt themselves to be frustrated and
exploited. But the intellectuals that formulated their views for
them have always told them that they were, without necessarily
meaning by it anything precise.”
— Joseph Aloïs Schumpeter in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy
%
The stock exchange is a poor substitute for the Holy Grail.
— Joseph Aloïs Schumpeter
%
Advice from an old carpenter: Use the right tool for the right job.
%
Hypocrisy: A pretense of having a virtuous, moral, or religious character.
%
The mob is a society of bodies voluntarily bereaving themselves of
reason, and traversing its work. The mob is man voluntarily descending
to the nature of the beast. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
%
A mob kills the wrong man was flashed in a newspaper headline lately.
%
Most people have two reasons for doing anything — a good reason, and
the real reason.
%
Formatted to fit your screen.
%
Magary’s Principle:
When there is a public outcry to cut deadwood and fat from any
government bureaucracy, it is the deadwood and the fat that do
the cutting, and the public’s services are cut.
%
Priming: The phenomenon whereby exposure to one stimulus influences
a response to a subsequent stimulus, without conscious guidance
or intention.
%
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
%
YAML sucks.
%
Kubernetes sucks.
%
Sacred cow: An idea, custom, person, or institution unreasonably
held to be immune to criticism.
%
Everybody wants to be a cat.
%
Today is what happened to yesterday.
%
The questions remain the same. The answers are eternally variable.
%
You want it in one line? Does it have to fit in 80 columns?
— Larry Wall
%
As long as the answer is right, who cares if the question is wrong?
%
“The belly is an ungrateful wretch, it never remembers past favors,
it always wants more tomorrow.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
%
“Beat a dog once and you only have to show him the whip.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
%
Truth has no special time of its own. Its hour is now — always.
— Albert Schweitzer
%
My computer can beat up your computer. — Karl Lehenbauer
%
Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought her back to life.
%
If you are good, you will be assigned all the work. If you are real
good, you will get out of it.
%
What orators lack in depth they make up in length.
%
You climb to reach the summit, but once there, discover that all roads
lead down. — Stanislaw Lem in “The Cyberiad”
%
The people sensible enough to give good advice are usually sensible
enough to give none.
%
Freedom of the press is for those who happen to own one.
— A.J. Liebling
%
What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.
— Wittgenstein
%
The way of the world is to praise dead saints and prosecute live ones.
— Nathaniel Howe
%
“Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the
very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could
understand such a conversation as we are having now?”
— George Orwell’s 1984
%
“With software there are only two possibilities: either the users
control the programme or the programme controls the users. If
the programme controls the users, and the developer controls
the programme, then the programme is an instrument of unjust power.”
— Richard Stallman
%
Learned men are the cisterns of knowledge, not the fountainheads.
%
You can go anywhere you want if you look serious and carry a clipboard.
%
Look! Before our very eyes, the future is becoming the past.
%
Linux is obsolete. — Andrew Tanenbaum
%
Every man thinks God is on his side. — Jean Anouilh, “The Lark”
%
Man is by nature a political animal. — Aristotle
%
Be not deceived: evil communications corrupt good manners.
%
Divide first, then conquer.
%
The game is rigged.
%
This service is no longer available.
%
Gamification: The application of game-design elements and
game principles in non-game contexts.
%
You made this? I made this.
%
“Tomorrow’s illiterate will not be the man who can’t read;
he will be the man who has not learned how to learn.”
— Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock
%
How users read on the web: They don’t. — Jakob Nielsen
%
Wilt thou set thine eyes upon that which is not? For riches
certainly make themselves wings; they fly away as
an eagle toward heaven. — Proverbs
%
Maybe GitHub was down?
%
Babylon was taken in one night.
%
Move fast and fix things.
%
Sharp like an edge of a samurai sword.
The mental blade cuts through flesh and bone.
Though my mind’s at peace, the world’s out of order.
Missing the inner heat, life gets colder.
— Nujabes’ Battlecry, Shing02
%
A freelancer.
A battle cry of a hawk make a dove fly and a tear dry.
Wonder why a lone wolf don’t run with a clan.
Only trust your instincts and be one with the plan.
— Nujabes’ Battlecry, Shing02
%
The ultimate reward is honor, not awards.
At odds with the times in wars with no lords.
— Nujabes’ Battlecry, Shing02
%
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
— Richard Buckminster ‘Bucky’ Fuller
%
“If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be
judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 50 years ago,
a liberal 25 years ago and a racist today.”
— Thomas Sowell, born in the 1930’s
%
The web is not just Firefox or Chrome.
%
The algorithm is your boss.
%
Who needs documentation anyway?
%
“Sooner or later, everything old is new again.”
― Stephen King, The Colorado Kid
%
Public Service Announcement: The production of great leaders has
been discontinued.
%
Three questions that would destroy most arguments: Compared to what?
At what cost? What hard evidence do you have? — Thomas Sowell
%
“Less than fifty years after the amazing scientific discoveries under Mamun,
the Arab Empire collapsed. Wonderful and beneficent as was the
progress of science, it did not save the empire from chaos.”
― John Bagot Glubb in The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival
%
“Another remarkable and unexpected symptom of national decline is the
intensification of internal political hatreds. One
would have expected that, when the survival
of the nation became precarious, political
factions would drop their rivalry and stand
shoulder-to-shoulder to save their country.”
― John Bagot Glubb in The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival
%
“In short, numbers are accepted as evidence when they agree with
preconceptions, but not when they don’t.”
― Thomas Sowell in The Vision of the Anointed
%
“Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.”
― Arnold Toynbee
%
“Throughout history many nations have suffered a physical defeat,
but that has never marked the end of a nation. But when a
nation has become the victim of a psychological defeat,
then that marks the end of a nation.”
― Ibn Khaldun in The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, 1377
%
You are not authorized to repair this device.
%
Minority rule. Majority rule.
%
Up and down go the arguers getting nowhere fast.
%
Echo chambers and epistemic bubbles.
%
What’s old is new again.
%
Cease and desist.
%
The network effect.
%
“Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but
around us in awareness.” ― James Thurber
%
We are experiencing system trouble ― do not adjust your terminals.
%
We the unwilling, led by the ungrateful, are doing the impossible.
We’ve done so much, for so long, with so little,
that we are now qualified to do something with nothing. ― Unknown
%
Politics is the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next
week, next month, and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to
explain why it didn’t happen. ― Winston Churchill
%
Knocked, you weren’t in. ― Opportunity
%
Information asymmetry.
%
Gilb’s First Law of Unreliability:
Computers are unreliable, but humans are even more
unreliable. Corollary: 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.
%
Gilb’s Second Law of Unreliability:
Any system which depends on human reliability is
unreliable.
%
Gilb’s Third Law of Unreliability:
Undetectable errors are infinite in variety, in
contrast to detectable errors, which by definition are limited.
%
Gilb’s Fourth Law of Unreliability:
Investment in reliability will increase until it exceeds the
probable cost of errors, or until someone insists on getting
some useful work done.
%
You get what you pay for.
%
Make a wish, it just might come true.
%
It is easier to change the specification to fit the program
than vice versa.
%
Politicians speak for their parties, and parties never are, never have
been, and never will be wrong. ― Walter Dwight
%
Too clever is dumb. Too dumb is clever.
%
Made with real ingredients.
%
All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost.
%
Just because a message may never be received does not mean it is
not worth sending.
%
A novice was trying to fix a broken lisp machine by turning the
power off and on. Knight, seeing what the student was doing spoke sternly,
“You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding
of what is going wrong.” Knight turned the machine off and on. The
machine worked.
%
One size fits all, doesn’t fit anyone.
%
Something’s rotten in the state of Denmark. ― Shakespeare
%
All generalizations are false, including this one.
― Unknown
%
No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.
%
Shut off the engine before fueling.
%
There’s an old proverb that says just about what ever you want it to.
%
There’s a quote that says just about what ever you want it to.
%
Perhaps one possible reason that things aren’t going according to plan
is that there never was a plan in the first place.
%
Rules, Regulations, and Requirements.
%
Bots. Bots everywhere.
%
Remember, Grasshopper, falling down 1000 stairs begins by tripping over
the first one. ― Confusion
%
Money makes the world go round. Nothing more, nothing less.
%
If complexity got us into this mess, then why can’t it get us out?
%
The Four Olds: Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits, and Old Ideas
%
What is the opposite of clickbait?
%
Might makes right: History is written by the victors.
%
You cannot stop link rot.
%
When in trouble or in doubt,
run in circles, scream and shout.
%
The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has occurred.
%
“Of all men’s miseries the bitterest is this: to know so much and
to have control over nothing.”
― Herodotus, The Histories
%
Click Farm: A place where a large group of workers are hired
to click on paid advertising links.
%
There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the
other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. The man who is
wrong still retains some respect for truth, if only by accepting
the responsibility of choice. But the man in the middle is the
knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no
choice or values exist. ― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
%
If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.
%
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
are full of passionate intensity.
― William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming
%
NixOS sucks.
%
Software is utterly broken.
%
To continue reading, subscribe today.
%
The man who does not read code has no advantage
over the man who cannot read code.
%
Fortune favors the fortunate.
%
It is much easier to suggest solutions when you know
nothing about the problem.
%
The trouble with computers is that they do what you tell them, not what
you want. ― D. Cohen
%
War is delightful to those who have had no experience of it.
― Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus
%
Every so often the algorithm consults /dev/random for advice.
%
Everyone thinks they are reasonable.
%
It’s only a matter of time.
%
The well has been poisoned.
%
Zero trust.
%
Lisp, Lisp, Lisp Machine,
Lisp Machine is Fun.
Lisp, Lisp, Lisp Machine,
Fun for everyone.
%
Don’t panic.
%
We are inclined to believe those we do not know, because they have
never deceived us. ― Samuel Johnson
%
Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or
we know where we can find information upon it.
― Samuel Johnson
%
Join in on the new game that’s sweeping the country.
It’s called “Bureaucracy”. Everybody stands in a circle.
The first person to do anything loses. Start!
%
An optimist believes we live in the best world possible;
a pessimist fears that this is true.
%
As of next week, passwords will be entered in morse code.
%
If life is merely a game, the question still remains: for whose amusement?
%
Just read the instructions.
%
Like, subscribe, and hit the bell icon.
%
All systems operational.
%
Justice standeth afar off.
%
Speak your mind at your own peril.
%
My hammer is better than your hammer.
%
The question of whether computers can think is just like the question of
whether submarines can swim. ― Edsger W. Dijkstra
%
Weiner’s Law of Libraries: There are no answers, only cross references.
%
Nothing is ever a total loss; it can always serve as a bad example.
%
Meader’s Law: What ever happens to you, it will previously
have happened to everyone you know, only more so.
%
Most seminars have a happy ending. Everyone’s glad when they’re over.
%
He who fights and runs away lives to fight another day.
%
Youth is when you blame all your troubles on your parents; maturity is
when you learn that everything is the fault of the younger generation.
%
Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.
%
Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today. There might be a
law against it by that time.
%
Wisdom is better than weapons of war.
%
Put all eggs in one basket. Make sure to count them before they hatch.
%
“Please, sir, I want some more.” ― Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist
%
The wise man’s eyes are in his head.
%
Bread and circuses.
%
The forty―eight laws of weakness.
%
Silent majorities, loud minorities.
%
The poor is hated even of his own neighbour:
but the rich hath many friends.
― Proverbs
%
Beware of those who talk a good metagame.
%
Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
%
Even if you can deceive people about a product
through misleading statements,
sooner or later the product will speak for itself.
― Hajime Karatsu
%
Normal times may possibly be over forever.
%
Many people are desperately looking for some wise advice which will
recommend that they do what they want to do.
%
Did it ever occur to you that fat chance and slim chance
mean the same thing? Or that we drive on parkways and park
on driveways?
%
To believe in personal responsibility would be to destroy the whole
special role of the anointed, whose vision casts them in the role
of rescuers of people treated unfairly by society.
― Thomas Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation
as a Basis for Social Policy
%
Why be difficult when, with a bit of effort, you could
be impossible?
%
Those who don’t know, talk. Those who don’t talk, know.
%
No one lives forever.
%
Dark Pattern: An interface that has been carefully crafted to
mislead a user.
%
When a fellow says, “It ain’t the money but the principle of the thing,”
it’s the money. ― Kim Hubbard
%
Major premise: Sixty men can do sixty times as much work as one man.
Minor premise: A man can dig a posthole in sixty seconds.
Conclusion: Sixty men can dig a posthole in one second.
― The Devil’s Dictionary
%
Does freedom of speech actually exist?
%
Let us count the beans.
%
The uploader has not made this video available in your country.
%
Clickbait works every time.
%
You can be replaced by this computer, maybe.
%
People will do tomorrow what they did today because that is what they
did yesterday.
%
Everything might be different in the present if only one thing had
been different in the past.
%
Fiefdoms still exist.
%
Where there is a personality, there is a cult.
%
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. ― Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Ozymandias
%
Everything ends badly. Otherwise it wouldn’t end.
%
Imagine if every Thursday your shoes exploded if you tied them the usual
way. This happens to us all the time with computers, and nobody thinks of
complaining. ― Jeff Raskin
%
Utility is when you have one telephone, luxury is when you have two,
opulence is when you have three ― and paradise is when you have none.
― Doug Larson
%
It is fortune, not wisdom, that rules man’s life.
%
Fact or Opinion.
%
Even the earth itself cannot contain all the evil.
%
Many are called, few are chosen. Fewer still get to do the choosing.
%
“Liberty is always dangerous, but it is the safest thing we have.”
― Harry Emerson Fosdick
%
People who claim they don’t let little things bother them have never
slept in a room with a single mosquito.
%
Now there was found in it a poor wise man, and he by his wisdom
delivered the city; yet no man remembered that same poor man.
— Ecclesiastes
%
If you’re happy, you’re successful.
%
The Internet is the greatest game of telephone in existence.
%
Crush the competition.
%
Buy the competition.
%
Those of you who think you know everything are annoying to those of
us who do.
%
It is easier to find people fit to govern themselves than
people fit to govern others. — Lord Acton
%
“Everybody likes to get as much power as circumstances
allow, and nobody will vote for a self-denying ordinance.”
— Lord Acton
%
“Official truth is not actual truth.” — Lord Acton
%
Welcome to dependency hell.
%
Talk is truly cheap.
%
This website is too bloated.
%
After the game the king and the pawn go in the same box.
— Italian Proverb
%
Experience is a good teacher, but she sends in terrific bills.
— Minna Antrim, “Naked Truth and Veiled Allusions”
%
It’s a good thing we don’t get all the government we pay for.
%
The kind of danger people most enjoy is the kind they can watch from
a safe place.
%
The truth eventually comes out.
%
Newer isn’t always better.
%
He who foresees calamities suffers them twice over.
%
Sometimes you don’t get what you pay for.
%
Always sort by controversial.
%
Once they go up, who cares where they come down?
That’s not my department.
%
And what might your name be? “Alexander.” So, you can talk?
“Y-Yes, sir.” Take him back! He can still talk!
— Pinocchio’s Pleasure Island
%
Flattery will get you everywhere.
%
According to the latest official figures, 43% of all
statistics are totally worthless.
%
Unix Express: All passengers bring a piece of the aeroplane and a
box of tools with them to the airport. They gather on
the tarmac, arguing constantly about what kind of plane
they want to build and how to put it together. Eventually,
the passengers split into groups and build several different aircraft,
but give them all the same name. Some passengers actually
reach their destinations. All passengers believe they got there.
%
The network effect is powerful.
%
The strong give up and move away, while the weak give up and stay.
%
Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics,
because the stakes are so low. — Wallace Sayre
%
Stolen waters are sweet.
%
“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, Man and Superman
%
As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the market-place.
— Rudyard Kipling, The Gods of the Copybook Headings
%
Maybe users like spam?
%
Appeal to Novelty: It’s current year, you’re wrong.
%
A poor man that oppresseth the poor is like a sweeping rain which
leaveth no food. — Proverbs
%
Talking past each other: A situation where two or more people talk
about different subjects, while believing that they are talking
about the same thing.
%
Not all problems need technological solutions.
%
Many times a technical solution merely replaces old problems with
new ones.
%
The cheapest, fastest, and most reliable components are those that
aren’t there. — Gordon Bell
%
Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming.
— Brian Kernighan
%
UNIX was not designed to stop its users from doing stupid things,
as that would also stop them from doing clever things. — Doug Gwyn
%
Life is too short to run proprietary software. — Bdale Garbee
%
The central enemy of reliability is complexity. — Geer
%
Essentially everyone, when they first build a distributed
application, makes the following eight assumptions.
All prove to be false in the long run and all cause big
trouble and painful learning experiences.
(1) The network is reliable.
(2) Latency is zero.
(3) Bandwidth is infinite.
(4) The network is secure.
(5) Topology doesn’t change.
(6) There is one administrator.
(7) Transport cost is zero.
(8) The network is homogeneous.
— Peter Deutsch
%
Most software today is very much like an Egyptian
pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other,
with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force
and thousands of slaves. — Alan Kay
%
Complexity kills. It sucks the life out of developers,
it makes products difficult to plan, build and test,
it introduces security challenges and it causes end-user
and administrator frustration. — Ray Ozzie
%
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
%
My definition of an expert in any field is a person who
knows enough about what’s really going on to be scared.
— P. J. Plauger
%
The best code is no code at all.
%
The most amazing achievement of the computer software
industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady
and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry.
— Henry Petroski
%
Software sucks because users demand it to. — Nathan Myhrvold
%
Join in on the new game that’s sweeping the world.
It’s called “Corruption”. Every Government stands in a circle.
The first one to improve the state of the country loses. Begin!
%
Are most politicians liars?
%
Flights of fancy.
%
Shill: A plant or a stooge who publicly helps or gives
credibility to a person or organization without disclosing
that they have a close relationship with the person or organization.
%
It’s almost time to pay the piper.
%
Planned Obsolescence: A policy of planning or designing a product
with an artificially limited useful life, so that it becomes obsolete.
%
The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the
people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people
drudge along paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return.
— Gore Vidal
%
Specifications subject to change without notice.
%
Good leaders being scarce, following yourself is now allowed.
%
Three rules for sounding like an expert:
(1) Oversimplify your explanations to the point of uselessness.
(2) Always point out second-order effects, but never point out when they
can be ignored.
(3) Come up with three rules of your own.
%
When you’re down and out, lift up your voice and shout,
“I’M DOWN AND OUT”!
%
One planet is all you get.
%
“Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want
to keep it for themselves.”
― Aaron Swartz
%
This page intentionally left blank.
%
Books are better than the Internet.
%
It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends
on his not understanding it.
%
Sometimes the only winning move is not to play.
%
This economy is not sustainable.
%
One weird trick advertisements.
%
A clever prophet makes sure of the event first.
%
And miles to go before I sleep.
— Robert Frost
%
Committees have become so important nowadays that subcommittees have to
be appointed to do the work.
%
The high cost of living hasn’t affected its popularity.
%
Always wear your seat belt.
%
People actually believe what they read on social media.
%
Contestants have been briefed on some of the questions before the show.
%
Mankind is poised midway between the gods and the beasts.
— Plotinus
%
People want either less corruption or more of a chance to
participate in it.
%
While you don’t greatly need the outside world, it’s still very
reassuring to know that it’s still there.
%
Clovis’ Consideration of an Atmospheric Anomaly:
The perversity of nature is nowhere better demonstrated
than by the fact that, when exposed to the same atmosphere,
bread becomes hard while crackers become soft.
%
Everything that can be invented has been invented.
— Charles Duell
%
Where do you think you’re going today?
%
Education is what survives when what has been learnt has been forgotten.
— B. F. Skinner
%
There’s no heavier burden than a great potential.
%
Blutarsky’s Axiom: Nothing is impossible for the man who will not
listen to reason.
%
One man tells a falsehood, a hundred repeat it as the truth.
%
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a
simple system that works.
%
Larkinson’s Law: All laws are basically false.
%
What fools these mortals be. — Lucius Annaeus Seneca
%
Time and tide wait for no man.
%
Talk is cheap because supply always exceeds demand.
%
One nuclear bomb can ruin your whole day.
%
Are you making all this up as you go along?
%
Fast React applications are rare.
%
One man’s utopia is another man’s dystopia.
%
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
%
Redundant topology.
%
Their business model is spam.
%
Teamwork is essential — it allows you to blame someone else.
%
“When I die, I want the people I did group projects with to lower
me into my grave so they can let me down one last time.”
%
The Internet is utterly broken.
%
If Bill Gates is the devil then Linus Torvalds must be the messiah.
— Unknown
%
Some men are discovered; others are found out.
%
Folly is set in great dignity.
%
“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times.
Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”
— G. Michael Hopf, Those Who Remain
%
The time for action is past! Now is the time for senseless bickering.
%
If the grass is greener on other side of fence, consider what may be
fertilizing it.
%
Cheer Up! Things are getting worse at a slower rate.
%
Never promise more than you can perform. — Publilius Syrus
%
New systems generate new problems.
%
Regression Analysis: Mathematical techniques for trying to
understand why things are getting worse.
%
The Linux philosophy is “laugh in the face of danger”.
Oops. Wrong one. “Do it yourself”. That’s it. — Linus Torvalds
%
“In the future, everyone will be world famous for 15
minutes.” — Andy Warhol
%
A small town that cannot support one lawyer can always support two.
%
To refuse praise is to seek praise twice.
%
When you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship.
— Harry Truman
%
If you think things can’t get worse it’s probably only because you
lack sufficient imagination.
%
The following statement is not true. The previous statement is true.
%
Nearly every complex solution to a programming problem that I
have looked at carefully has turned out to be wrong. — Brent Welch
%
“Justice at all costs’ is not justice.”
— Thomas Sowell, The Quest for Cosmic Justice
%
“Suppose you are wrong? How would you know?
How would you test for that possibility?”
― Thomas Sowell
%
“Life does not ask what we want. It presents us with options.”
― Thomas Sowell
%
Throw away documentation and manuals,
and users will be a hundred times happier.
Throw away privileges and quotas,
and users will do the right thing.
Throw away proprietary and site licenses,
and there won’t be any pirating.
If these three aren’t enough,
just stay at your home directory
and let all processes take their course.
%
Call for pricing.
%
Monopolies of knowledge.
%
Unemployment is unused capacity.
%
Yet creeds mean very little, Coth answered the dark god, still speaking
almost gently. The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all
possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.
― James Cabell, “The Silver Stallion”
%
Bikeshedding: The process of arguing endlessly over details of some small
and relatively unimportant thing.
%
“Unfortunately, propaganda works.” ― Andy Rooney
%
Mac Airways:
The cashiers, flight attendants and pilots all look the same, feel the same
and act the same. When asked questions about the flight, they reply that you
don’t want to know, don’t need to know and would you please return to your
seat and watch the movie.
%
A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on.
%
Falsehood will fly, as it were, on the wings of the wind, and carry its tales
to every corner of the earth; whilst truth lags behind; her steps,
though sure, are slow and solemn. ― Thomas Francklin
%
Those who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who
feel that we know everything, especially when we discover that
everything they know and everything we know does not match.
%
We are not anticipating any emergencies.
%
When ever someone tells you to take their advice, you can be pretty sure
that they’re not using it.
%
Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men
have mediocrity thrust upon them. ― Joseph Heller’s Catch-22
%
In the whole world you know, there’s a million boys and girls.
― Nina Simone, To Be Young, Gifted and Black
%
Plastic Love.
%
Watson’s Law: The reliability of machinery is inversely proportional to the
number and significance of any persons watching it.
%
The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class
is unfit to govern. ― Lord Acton
%
Everyone says that having power is a great responsibility. This is
a lot of bunk. Responsibility is when someone can blame you if something
goes wrong. When you have power you are surrounded by people whose job it
is to take the blame for your mistakes. If they’re smart, that is.
― Cerebus The Aardvark, “On Governing”
%
To err is human. To blame someone else for your mistakes is even more human.
%
When the wicked rise, men hide themselves: but when they perish,
the righteous increase. ― Proverbs
%
YouTube may terminate your access, or your Google account’s access to all
or part of the Service if YouTube believes, in its sole discretion,
that provision of the Service to you is no longer commercially viable.
― Google’s YouTube, Terms of Service, 2019
%
We may suspend or terminate your account or cease providing you with all or part
of the Services at any time for any or no reason. ― Twitter, Terms of Service, 2020
%
WhatsApp may also terminate a user’s access to the Service, if they are
determined to be a repeat infringer, or for any or no reason, including
being annoying. An annoying person is anyone who is (capriciously or not)
determined to be annoying by authorized WhatsApp employees, agents, subagents,
superagents or superheros.
― WhatsApp, Terms of Service, 2012
%
We reserve the right to modify or terminate the Instagram service for any
reason, without notice at any time. ― Instagram, Terms of Service, 2013
%
Spotify may terminate the Agreements or suspend your access to the
Spotify Service at any time. ― Spotify, Terms and Conditions, 2019
%
PeerTube: A free and open-source decentralized self-hosted federated video platform.
%
Mastodon: A free and open-source self-hosted social networking service.
%
The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.
― Jeff Hammerbacher
%
We can’t both be right.
%
If we all work together, we can totally disrupt the system.
%
If you stick your head in the sand, one thing is for sure, you’re gonna
get your rear kicked.
%
“Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of truth and knowledge is
shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.”
%
We have the best politicians money can buy.
%
Eagleson’s Law: Any code of your own that you haven’t looked at for six or more
months, might as well have been written by someone else.
%
It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a
sentence to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate
in all times and situations. They presented him the words: “And this,
too, shall pass away.” ― Abraham Lincoln
%
All things are full of labour; man cannot utter it: the eye is not
satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. ― Ecclesiastes
%
“Preaching to the choir in an echo chamber.”
%
Every program attempts to expand until it can either read or replace mail.
%
Cobra Effect: When an attempted solution to a problem makes the problem worse.
Offering a bounty for every dead venomous cobra incentivizes people to breed
more cobras for the reward.
%
He who minds his own business is never unemployed.
%
Write a wise saying and your name will live on forever. ― Unknown
%
“We live in a world where unfortunately the distinction between true and false
appears to become increasingly blurred by manipulation of facts,
by exploitation of uncritical minds, and by the pollution of the language.”
― Arne Tiselius
%
Corollary to Hanlon’s Razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which
is adequately explained by greed.
%
The world is coming to an end. Please log off.
%
What ever became of eternal truth?
%
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
%
If it works, it’s out of date.
%
“I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson
%
“Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and
campaign funds from the rich, by promising to protect each from the other.”
― Oscar Ameringer
%
We prefer to believe that the absence of inverted commas guarantees the
originality of a thought, whereas it may be merely that the utterer has
forgotten its source. ― Clifton Fadiman, “Any Number Can Play”
%
Which is worse: ignorance or apathy? Who knows? Who cares?
%
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten,
every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building
has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process
is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped.
Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
― George Orwell, 1984
%
The same words mean different things to different people.
%
Objects are lost only because people look where they are not rather than
where they are.
%
If you learn one useless thing every day, in a single year you’ll learn
365 useless things.
%
Phases of a Project:
(1) Exultation.
(2) Disenchantment.
(3) Confusion.
(4) Search for the Guilty.
(5) Punishment for the Innocent.
(6) Distinction for the Uninvolved.
%
Banana Republic: A politically unstable country with an economy
dependent upon a limited-resource product.
%
Throw-away Society: A society with an excessive production of short-lived
or disposable items over durable goods that can be repaired.
%
Got a dictionary? I want to know the meaning of life.
%
Apparently any program which runs right is obsolete.
%
Good government never depends upon laws, but upon the personal qualities of
those who govern. The machinery of government is always subordinate to the
will of those who administer that machinery. The most important element of
government, therefore, is the method of choosing leaders.
― Frank Herbert, “Children of Dune”
%
The majesty and grandeur of the English language; it’s the greatest possession
we have. The noblest thoughts that ever flowed through the hearts of men are
contained in its extraordinary, imaginative and musical mixtures of sounds.
― George Bernard Shaw, My Fair Lady
%
If we all work together, we can make the rich richer.
%
Always read the fine print.
%
Politics and the fate of mankind are formed by men without ideals and without
greatness. Those who have greatness within them do not go in for politics.
― Albert Camus
%
And the best at murder are those who preach against it.
And the best at hate are those who preach love.
And the best at war finally are those who preach peace.
― Charles Bukowski, “The Genius Of The Crowd”
%
Conway’s Law: Any organization that designs a system will produce a design
whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.
%
If you don’t read the newspaper you are uninformed; if you do read the
newspaper you are misinformed.
%
“There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about
and the ones nobody uses.” ― Bjarne Stroustrup
%
Con man: A confidence man.
%
“Decadence is a moral and spiritual disease, resulting from too long a
period of wealth and power, producing cynicism, decline of religion,
pessimism and frivolity. The citizens of such a nation will no
longer make an effort to save themselves, because they are not
convinced that anything in life is worth saving.”
― John Bagot Glubb, The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival
%
A committee is organic rather than mechanical in its nature: it
is not a structure but a plant. It takes root and grows, it
flowers, wilts, and dies, scattering the seed from which other
committees will bloom in their turn. ― C. Northcote Parkinson
%
You too can be a confidence man or woman!
%
When you’re in command, command. ― Admiral Nimitz
%
Life is fraught with opportunities to keep your mouth shut.
%
Moreover the profit of the earth is for all: the king himself
is served by the field. ― Ecclesiastes
%
The golden boy can do no wrong.
%
Everyone who comes in here wants three things:
(1) They want it quick.
(2) They want it good.
(3) They want it cheap.
%
If you don’t do the things that are not worth doing, who will?
%
Somehow, the world always affects you more than you affect it.
%
Cheap labour.
%
The last person that quit or was fired will be held responsible for
everything that goes wrong ― until the next person quits or is fired.
%
Journalism is dead.
%
To have respect of persons is not good: for for a piece of bread
that man will transgress. ― Proverbs
%
Nothing lasts forever.
%
Where is my flying car?
%
This is disputed.
%
Sometimes, the best solution is to do nothing at all.
%
Don’t build your house on the sand.
%
It is a hard matter, my fellow citizens, to argue with the belly,
since it has no ears. ― Marcus Porcius Cato
%
Propaganda is one hell of a drug.
%
The Three Wise Monkeys: See no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil.
%
As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth.
For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall
know it no more. — David
%
You must prove that you are not a robot.
%
There’s nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right
keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself. – J. S. Bach
%
If this is a service economy, why is the service so bad?
%
There is a sore evil which I have seen under the sun, namely,
riches kept for the owners thereof to their hurt.
But those riches perish by evil travail:
and he begetteth a son, and there is nothing in his hand. — Ecclesiastes
%
Thus, not all data is created equal.
%
Argument From Authority: A popular yet controversial type of argument in
which the opinion of an authority on a topic is used as evidence to
support an argument.
%
Sock Puppet: A fake online identity used for the purpose of deception.
Deception, be it fast or slow, can involve black or grey propaganda to
manipulate public opinion.
%
To be forewarned is to be forearmed.
%
It’s the worst of both worlds.
%
“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly
in a room alone.” — Blaise Pascal, Pensées
%
“The devil is not as black as he is painted.”
— Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
%
“Don’t be a shill.”
%
Philosophy: A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.
— Ambrose Bierce
%
Heller’s Law: The first myth of management is that it exists.
Johnson’s Corollary: Nobody really knows what is going on anywhere
within the organization.
%
Become a Lord or Lady today!
%
“Created by wars that required it, the machine now created the wars it
required.” — Joseph Aloïs Schumpeter, Imperialism and Social Classes
%
“History is a record of “effects” the vast majority of which nobody
intended to produce.” — Joseph Aloïs Schumpeter
%
Many arguments are semantic disputes.
%
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes
hurtling down the highway. — Andrew S. Tanenbaum
%
Winning Arguments: There is no evidence to support your assertion.
%
Most of what you read on the Internet is written by insane people.
%
Politician’s Logic: (1) We must do something.
(2) This is something. (3) Therefore, we must do this.
%
Violence is golden.
%
Politics is a personal affair.
%
Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.
%
“The road to hell is paved with Ivy League degrees.” — Thomas Sowell
%
There are no atheists in foxholes.
%
“Another man may look like a deathless one on high
but there’s not a bit of grace to crown his words.
Just like you, my fine, handsome friend. Not even
a god could improve those lovely looks of yours
but the mind inside is worthless.”
— Homer, The Odyssey
%
Temporary: Permanent
%
There are exceptions that prove the rule.
%
Closed and open slavery.
%
The Fourth Branch of Government: Social Media and The Press.
%
He was a confidence man.
%
Argument from Fallacy: The formal fallacy of analyzing an argument and
inferring that, since it contains a fallacy, its conclusion must be false.
%
“What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but
only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably a part.”
— Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
%
“For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support
are the same.” — Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the
Banality of Evil
%
Reality follows fiction.
%
Most of the great problems we face are caused by politicians creating
solutions to problems they created in the first place. — Walter E.
Williams
%
It takes two to tango.
%
“There are very few who can think, but every man wants to have an
opinion; and what remains but to take it ready-made from others, instead
of forming opinions for himself?” — Arthur Schopenhauer, The Art of
Always Being Right
%
“A last trick is to become personal, insulting, and rude as soon as you
perceive that your opponent has the upper hand. In becoming personal you
leave the subject altogether, and turn your attack on the person by
remarks of an offensive and spiteful character. This is a very popular
trick, because everyone is able to carry it into effect.” — Arthur
Schopenhauer, The Art of Always Being Right
%
“When the rich wage war it’s the poor who die.”
— Jean-Paul Sartre
%
“Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one
else can see.” — Arthur Schopenhauer
%
“Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance
prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an
organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor
property will be safe.” — Frederick Douglass
%
They’re savages! Savages!
Dirty shrieking devils!
Now we sound the drums of war!
— Pocahontas’ Savages
%
Simon’s Law: Everything put together falls apart sooner or later.
%
A forbidden fruit creates many jams.
%
Hydra of Lerna: Cut off one head and two more shall take its place.
%
“But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies,
don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe
anything.” — C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength
%
“Remember, the firemen are rarely necessary. The public itself stopped
reading of its own accord. You firemen provide a circus now and then at
which buildings are set off and crowds gather for the pretty blaze...”
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
%
Whatever it is, I fear Greeks even when they bring gifts.
— Publius Vergilius Maro (Virgil)
%
“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to
reform (or pause and reflect).” — Mark Twain
%
Monkey see, monkey do.
%
Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know.
— Michel de Montaigne
%
A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer
you didn’t even know existed can render your own computer
unusable. — Leslie Lamport, 1987
%
Consequentialist: The end justifies the means.
%
Currently unavailable.
%
But does it scale?
%
Can two walk together, except they be agreed? — Amos
%
Dualism: Left, Right. Black, White.
%
Nature imputes duality.
%
“People are never more sincere than when they assume their own moral
superiority.” — Thomas Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed:
Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy
%
Artificial Intelligence: /dev/random
%
Cargo Cult: A millenarian belief system in which adherents perform
rituals which they believe will cause a more technologically advanced
society to deliver goods.
%
Theosis: Unity with God.
Henosis: Unity with the Monad.
Transhumanism: Unity with the Machine.
%
“If facts, logic, and scientific procedures are all just arbitrarily
“socially constructed” notions, then all that is left is consensus–more
specifically peer consensus, the kind of consensus that matters to
adolescents or to many among the intelligentsia.” ― Thomas Sowell,
Intellectuals and Society
%
“Many intellectuals are so preoccupied with the notion that their
own special knowledge exceeds the average special knowledge of
millions of other people that they overlook the often far more
consequential fact that their mundane knowledge is not even one–tenth
of the total mundane knowledge of those millions.” — Thomas
Sowell, Intellectuals and Society
%
Augustine’s 49th Law: Regulations grow at the same rate as weeds.
%
Don’t make a big deal out of everything; just deal with everything.
%
(1) Don’t think.
(2) If you do think, don’t speak.
(3) If you think and speak, don’t write.
(4) If you think, speak and write, don’t sign.
(5) If you think, speak, write and sign, don’t be surprised.
— Polish Joke
%
In politics, temporary means permanent.
%
In politics, the temporary becomes the permanent.
%
The primary requisite for any new tax law is for it to exempt enough
voters to win the next election.
%
Farmer: “You can’t raffle off a dead donkey!”
Boy: “Sure I can. Watch me. I just won’t tell anybody he’s dead.”
— How to Sell a Dead Donkey
%
The bait and switch is the oldest trick in the book.
%
If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.
%
Just when you thought you were winning the rat race, it abruptly ends.
%
Do the old eat the young?
%
No, we want a king to rule over us.
%
Please confirm my bias.
%
What if the universe is not immortal?
%
Consensus is the only thing that matters.
%
Wikipedia is not a reliable source, because it can be edited by anyone at
any time.
%
Feudalism is alive and well.
%
Eristic Dialectics: The Logic of Appearance.
%
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
― William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming
%
“If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for
reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.” — Albert Einstein, Religion
and Science
%
The best man for the job is often a woman.
%
The finest eloquence is that which gets things done.
%
The wages of sin are high but you get your money’s worth.
%
Envy is a pain of mind that successful men cause their neighbors. –
Onasander, The General
%
“Despite the enormous quantity of books, how few people read! And if one
reads profitably, one would realize how much stupid stuff the vulgar herd
is content to swallow every day.” — Voltaire
%
“Love truth, but pardon error.” ― Voltaire
%
The current generation now sees everything clearly, it marvels at the
errors, it laughs at the folly of its ancestors, not seeing that this
chronicle is all overscored by divine fire, that every letter of it cries
out, that from everywhere the piercing finger is pointed at it, at this
current generation; but the current generation laughs and presumptuously,
proudly begins a series of new errors, at which their descendants will
also laugh afterwards. — Nikolai Gogol, The Nose
%
Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome.
— Charlie Munger
%
The terms “free software” and “open source” stand for almost the
same range of programs. However, they say deeply different things about
those programs, based on different values. The free software movement
campaigns for freedom for the users of computing; it is a movement for
freedom and justice. By contrast, the open source idea values mainly
practical advantage and does not campaign for principles. This is why we
do not agree with open source, and do not use that term. — Richard Stallman
%
Plausible Deniability: An ability of prescience or forethought that
exploits a chain of command and the absence of evidence to deny
responsibility for actions committed. An adeptness to engender situations
that provide multiple outs.
%
“The man who lies asleep will never waken fame, and his desire and all
his life drift past him like a dream, and the traces of his memory fade
from time like smoke in air, or ripples on a stream.” — Dante
Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
%
Common sense isn’t actually common.
%
“There is no art which one government sooner learns of another, than
that of draining money from the pockets of the people.” — Adam Smith
%
Black Swan Event: An event that comes as a surprise, has a major effect,
and is often inappropriately rationalized after the fact with the benefit
of hindsight.
%
Money is the root of all money. — The Moving Finger