Quote Archive

• Furious activity is no substitute for understanding. ~ H.H. Williams
• A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. ~ Robert A. Heinlein
• Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced — even a proverb is no proverb to you till your life has illustrated it. ~ John Keats
• We lie loudest when we lie to ourselves. ~ Eric Hoffer
• The first hour of the morning is the rudder of the day. ~ Henry Ward Beecher
• Put your brain in gear before starting your mouth in motion.
• Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute. ~ Abelson & Sussman, SICP, preface to the first edition
• In everyone’s life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit. ~ Albert Schweitzer, 1875 – 1965
• Many people are desperately looking for some wise advice which will recommend that they do what they want to do.
• Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe and not make messes in the house. ~ Lazarus Long, “Time Enough for Love”
• You may be gone tomorrow, but that doesn’t mean that you weren’t here today.
• Never trust a computer you can’t repair yourself.
• You probably wouldn’t worry about what people think of you if you could know how seldom they do. ~ Olin Miller
• Don’t think about how it works. Just think about how you would make it work. ~ Ravitheja Tetali
• If you judge people, you have no time to love them. ~ Mother Teresa
• Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it. ~ William Arthur Ward
• Writing is turning one’s worst moments into money. ~ J.P. Donleavy
• Rabindranath Tagore – Let My Country Awake

  2010-07-17 Sat 15:16

  Where the mind is without fear and the head held high;
  Where knowledge is free;
  Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
  Where words come out from the depth of truth;
  Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
  Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
  Where the mind is led forward by Thee into ever-widening thought and action;
  Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

• On Freedom (1958), Karl Popper

  2010-07-26 Mon 10:30

  The true Enlightenment thinker, the true rationalist, never wants to talk anyone into anything. No, he does not even want to convince; all the time he is aware that he may be wrong. Above all, he values the intellectual independence of others too highly to want to convince them in important matters. He would much rather invite contradiction, preferably in the form of rational and disciplined criticism. He seeks not to convince but to arouse — to challenge others to form free opinions.