Quotes

"The imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man."
- Richard Feynman

"The less confident you are, the more serious you have to act."
- Tara Ploughman

"We're even wrong about which mistakes we're making."
- Carl Winfeld

"Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute."
- Abelson & Sussman, SICP, preface to the first edition

"Your twenties are always an apprenticeship, but you don't always know what for."
- Jan Houtema

"That language is an instrument of human reason, and not merely a medium for the expression of thought, is a truth generally admitted."
- George Boole, quoted in Iverson's Turing Award Lecture

"Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it."
- Alan Kay

"But the audience is right. They're always, always right. You hear directors complain that the advertising was lousy, the distribution is no good, the date was wrong to open the film. I don't believe that. The audience is never wrong. Never."
- William Friedkin, in a NYT interview

"The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."
- Brandeis

"The best writing is rewriting."
- E. B. White

"Premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming."
- Donald Knuth

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
- Yeats, The Second Coming

"We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about."
- Einstein

"The path from good to evil goes through bogus."
- Tara Ploughman

"Many who burnt heretics in the ordinary way of their business were otherwise excellent people."
- G. M. Trevelyan, "Bias in History"

"The key to performance is elegance, not battalions of special cases."
- Jon Bentley and Doug McIlroy

"Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable."
- J. K. Galbraith, Letter to Kennedy, 1962

"Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great."
- Mark Twain

"Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word."
- Stephen King

"However little television you watch, watch less."
- David McCullough

"As all these results were obtained, not by any heroic method, but by patient and detailed reasoning, I began to think it probable that philosophy had erred in adopting heroic remedies for intellectual difficulties, and that solutions were to be found merely by greater care and accuracy. This view I have come to hold more and more strongly as time went on, and it has led me to doubt whether philosophy, as a study distinct from science and possessed of a method of its own, is anything more than an unfortunate legacy from theology."
- Bertrand Russell, "Logical Atomism"