Quotes

Abraham Lincoln

"The worst thing you can do for those you love is the things they could do for themselves."

African Proverb

"If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together."

Al Aho

"The correctness of the implementation is the most important concern, but there is no royal road to correctness. It involves diverse tasks such as thinking of invariants, testing and code reviews. Optimization should be done, but not prematurely."

Al Aho II

"Systems cannot be developed assuming that human beings will be able to write millions of lines of code without making mistakes, and debugging alone is not an efficient way to develop reliable systems."

Alan Kay

"Computer science inverts the normal. In normal science, you're given a world, and your job is to find out the rules. In computer science, you give the computer the rules, and it creates the world."

Alan Kay II

"If most computer people lack understanding and knowledge, then what they will select will also be lacking."

Andrew Carnegie

"The wise man puts all his eggs in one basket and watches the basket."

Aristotle

"The more you know, the more you realize you don't know."

Asian Fable

"The forest kept shrinking but the trees kept voting for the axe. For the axe was clever and convinced them that since his handle was wood, that he was one of them."

Bjarne Stroustrup

"There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses."

Brian Kernighan

"Everyone knows that degugging 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?"

Brian Kernighan II

"C is the best balance I've ever seen between power and expressiveness. You can do almost anything you want to do by programming fairly straightforwardly and you will have a very good mental model of what's going to happen on the machine; you can predict reasonably well how quickly it's going to run, you understand what's going on."

Brian Kernighan III

"The hardest bugs are those where your mental model of the situation is just wrong, so you can't see the problem at all."

Bruce Lee

"Use only that which works, and take it from any place you can find it."

Catherine Austin Fitts

"Don't worry about the other guy's conspiracy, build one."

Catherine Austin Fitts II

"If your law is only encoded in digital technology, and it's not encoded in the covenant, and in the field, and in the people, you have nothing."

Charles Bukowski

"Find what you love and let it kill you."

Chris Bradley

"A limited mind cannot comprehend its unlimited potential."

Chuck Moore

"Legacy software is an unappreciated but serious problem. Legacy code may be the downfall of our civilization."

Confucius

"We have two lives, and the second begins when we realize we only have one."

Confucius II

"The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper names."

Deepak Chopra

"Every time you are tempted to react in the same old way, ask if you want to be a prisoner of the past or a pioneer of the future."

Donald Knuth

"Premature optimization is the root of all evil."

Ernest Hemingway

"There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self."

Fyodor Dostoevsky

"Tolerance will reach such a level that intelligent people will be banned from thinking so as not to offend the imbeciles."

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

"We learn from history, that we do not learn from history."

George Carlin

"It's a big club, and you ain't in it."

George Orwell

"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."

George Santayana

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

Gerald M. Weinberg

"Programming is, among other things, a kind of writing. One way to learn writing is to write, but in all other forms of writing, one also reads. We read examples both good and bad to facilitate learning. But how many programmers learn to write programs by reading programs?"

Gerald M. Weinberg II

"Few programmers of any experience would contradict the assertion that most programs are modified in their lifetime. When they do we rarely find a program that contains any evidence of having been written with an eye to subsequent modification."

Gerald M. Weinberg III

"No matter what they tell you, it's always a people problem."

H. L. Mencken

"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all."

Henri Bergson

"Fortunately, some are born with spiritual immune systems that sooner or later give rejection to the illusory worldview grafted upon them from birth through social conditioning. They begin sensing that something is amiss, and start looking for answers. Inner knowledge and anomalous outer experiences show them a side of reality others are oblivious to, and so begins their journey of awakening. Each step of the journey is made by following the heart instead of following the crowd and by choosing knowledge over the veils of ignorance."

Henry Ford

"It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning."

Henry Petroski

"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."

Immanuel Kant

"If the truth shall kill them, let them die."

Jaana Dogan

"Good engineering is less about finding the perfect solution and more about understanding the tradeoffs and being able to explain them."

Jaana Dogan II

"Failure is expected, failure is not an odd case. Design systems that help you identify failure. Design systems that can recover from failure."

Jaana Dogan III

"A good API is not just easy to use but also hard to misuse."

Jaana Dogan IV

"You can always embed, but you cannot decompose big interfaces once they are out there. Keep interfaces small."

Jason Fried

"Problems can usually be solved with simple, mundane solutions. That means there's no glamorous work. You don't get to show off your amazing skills. You just build something that gets the job done and then move on. This approach may not earn you oohs and aahs, but it lets you get on with it."

John F. Kennedy

"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."

Joseph Campbell

"Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer."

Joseph de Maistre

"In a democracy people get the leaders they deserve."

Kelsey Hightower

"Product excellence is the difference between something that only works under certain conditions, and something that only breaks under certain conditions."

Kevlin Henney

"A unit test is a test of behavior whose success or failure is wholly determined by the correctness of the test and the correctness of the unit under test."

Linus Torvalds

"Talk is cheap. Show me the code."

Mahatma Gandhi

"You assist an evil system most effectively by obeying its orders and decrees. An evil system never deserves such allegiance. Allegiance to it means partaking of the evil. A good person will resist an evil system with his or her whole soul."

Maimonides

"Truth does not become more true by virtue of the fact that the entire world agrees with it, nor less so even if the whole world disagrees with it."

Malcolm X

"If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing."

Malcolm X II

"I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I'm a human being, first and foremost, and as such I'm for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole."

Mark Twain

"It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled."

Mark Twain II

"The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read."

Martin Luther King Jr.

"A riot is the language of the unheard."

Martin Thompson

"Implicit conversion of types is the Halloween special of coding. Whoever thought of them deserves their own special hell."

Maya Angelou

"At the end of the day people won't remember what you said or did, they will remember how you made them feel."

Michael Ellner

"Just look at us. Everything is backwards, everything is upside down. Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, psychiatrists destroy minds, scientists destroy truth, major media destroys information, religions destroy spirituality and governments destroy freedom."

Miyamoto Musashi

"If you know the way broadly you will see it in everything."

Murray N. Rothbard

"No action can be virtuous unless it is freely chosen."

Nietzsche

"Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster... for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you."

Nietzsche II

"A man resorts to dialectics only when he has no other means to hand."

Niklaus Wirth

"The hope is that the progress in hardware will cure all software ills. However, a critical observer may observe that software manages to outgrow hardware in size and sluggishness. Other observers had noted this for some time before, indeed the trend was becoming obvious as early as 1987."

Nikola Tesla

"Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality."

Oscar Wilde

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."

Peter Bourgon

"Making things easy to do is a false economy. Focus on making things easy to understand and the rest will follow."

Peter Weinberger

"There are two kinds of software projects: those that fail, and those that turn into legacy horrors."

Plato

"No one is more hated than he who speaks the truth."

Proverb

"Speech is silver. Silence is golden."

Rainer Maria Rilke

"The only journey is the one within."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be."

Rene Descartes

"The greatest minds are capable of the greatest vices as well as the greatest virtues."

Rich Hickey

"Programmers know the benefits of everything and the trade-offs of nothing. Architects need to understand both."

Richard Feynman

"You learn something by doing it yourself, by asking questions, by thinking, and by experimenting."

Richard Feynman II

"I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned."

Richard Feynman III

"What I cannot create, I do not understand."

Rick Hudson

"The hardware folks will not put more cores into their hardware if the software isn't going to use them, so, it is this balancing act of each other staring at each other, and we are hoping that Go is going to break through on the software side."

Rob Pike

"Don't design with interfaces, discover them."

Robert Mugabe

"The sheep will spend its entire life fearing the wolf, only to be eaten by the shepherd."

Ron Paul

"Governments have nothing. They can't create anything, they never have. All they can do is steal from one group and give it to another at the destruction of the principles of freedom, and we ought to challenge that concept."

Saint Paisos the Athonite

"The fiercest enemy of the devil is none other than humility. Let us heed our lord when he says, demons are expelled by prayer and fasting. If the devil brings us improper thoughts to our spiritual work or anything else against the salvation of our soul, we must oppose him by repeating the salvific interior prayer in our mind. Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me."

Sandy Metz

"Duplication is far cheaper than the wrong abstraction."

Sarah Mei

"We think awful code is written by awful devs. But in reality, it's written by reasonable devs in awful circumstances."

Simon Sinek

"The goal is not to be perfect by the end. The goal is to be better tomorrow."

Socrates

"The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing."

Thomas Aquinas

"He who is not angry when there is just cause for anger is immoral."

Thomas Paine

"Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph."

Thomas Sowell

"The fact that so many successful politicians are such shameless liars is not only a reflection on them, it is also a reflection on us. When the people want the impossible, only liars can satisfy."

Tom Kurtz

"Polymorphism means that you write a certain program and it behaves differently depending on the data that it operates on."

Tom Love

"The software business is one of the few places we teach people to write before we teach them to read."

Tom Love II

"Let's imagine a project that's going to end up with a million lines of code or more. The probability of those projects being successful in the United States these days is very low - well under 50%. That's debatable."

Tom Love III

"100k lines of code fit inside a box of paper."

Unknown

"Debuggers don't remove bugs. They only show them in slow motion."

Viktor Frankl

"When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves."

Voltaire

"It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong."

Voltaire II

"Doctors are men who prescribe medicines of which they know little, to cure diseases of which they know less, in human beings of whom they know nothing."

Wes Dyer

"Make it correct, make it clear, make it concise, make it fast. In that order."

Yuri Bezmenov

"Only about 15% of time, money, and manpower is spent on espionage and such. The other 85% is a slow process which we call either ideological subversion or active measures [meaning] psychological warfare… What it basically means is to change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that, despite the abundance of information, no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interests of defending themselves, their families, their community, and their country."

Zbigniew Brzezinski

"The technotronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities."