When I returned to the soil, I had a ten-cent screwdriver and the mechanical skill of a turtle. Today, thanks to unremitting study, I can change a fuse so deftly that it plunges the entire county into darkness.
Fiat justitia, ruat coelum. (Do the right thing even if the heavens fall.) It's not nearly as naïve a maxim as it seems, because in the real world it often turns out that doing what is morally the right thing is also, in practical terms, the right thing to do.
A sincere compliment is always grateful to a lady, so long as you don't try to knock her down with it.
When I come upon anything -- in Logic or in any other hard subject -- that entirely puzzles me, I find it a capital plan to talk it over, aloud, even when I am all alone. One can explain things so clearly to one's self! And then, you know, one is so patient with one's self: one never gets irritated at one's own stupidity!
The purpose of the present course is the deepening and development of difficulties underlying contemporary theory...
This is probably true in today's market, if you just grafted in some free software. However, we are also talking about how a market would work where software does not need to be rewritten and reinvented literally thousands of times because people don't have any choice. Perhaps the software that would be written would finally be more useful than add-on cruft for MS-DOS or lousy "applets" for Netscape or the umpteenth bad implementation of some marginally useful class for C++. e.g., I don't think "good enough" would be workable in a world of predominantly free software. The unfree code (it won't go away any time soon) would also be held up to much higher standards than is done today.
In gnu.misc.discuss
University President: "Why is it that you physicists always require so much expensive equipment? Now the Department of Mathematics requires nothing but money for paper, pencils, and erasers... and the Department of Philosophy is better still. It doesn't even ask for erasers."
I won't eat any cereal that doesn't turn the milk purple.
The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes
... the genes almost always accurately reproduce. If they don't, you get one of the following results: One, monsters -- that is, grossly malformed babies resulting from genetic mistakes. Years ago most monsters died, but now many can be saved. This has made possible the National Football League.
I think it would be totally inappropriate for me to even contemplate what I am thinking about.
(Mazankowski was the Canadian Finance Minister for most of the 1980s.)
How can we hope to remain economically competitive in a world in which... 90% of Dutch high-school students take advanced math courses and 100% of teachers in Germany have double majors, while the best we can say about our "pocket of excellence" is that 75% of [American] students have learned to "critique tactfully?"
If there's anything the Institute has too much of already, it's concord and placidity. There's no tension on the premises, no crackle in the air, no sense at all that there are mad geniuses lurking about.
"I wish we had more crazy people here," Freeman Dyson has said.
Just so.
Who Got Einstein's Office?
We have our spasms of revolt, our flarings up of peekaboo waists, free love and "art," but a mighty backwash of piety fetches each and every one of them soon or late.
"The Butte Bashkirtseff"
Here you come again with your arithmetical conundrums, when I am suffering death with a cold in the head.
Considered in its entirety, psychoanalysis won't do. It is an end product, moreover, like a dinosaur or a zeppelin; no better theory can ever be erected on its ruins, which will remain for ever one of the saddest and strangest of all landmarks in the history of twentieth century thought.
The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves which make us wonder at the possibility that there may be something to them [which] we are missing.
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
There is another which states that this has already happened.
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Heroin wasn't around then. It was introduced as a "safe" alternative to morphine, just as methadone was then introduced as a "safe" alternative to heroin. As usual, the drug problem had to be continuously invented, or there would not be one.
[Disney's machine] has placed a Mickey Mouse hat on every little developing personality in America. As capitalism, it is a work of genius; as culture, it is mostly a horror.
The Disney Version
About those crude, hate-filled cartoons in your Lesbian, Gay and Bi issue: they're meant to subvert and debunk the stereotypical notion that all gay people are imbued with Wildean wit, right?
In a letter to the McGill Daily
Human beings, for all their pretensions, have a remarkable propensity for lending themselves to classification somewhere within neatly labelled categories. Even the outrageous exceptions may be classified as outrageous exceptions!
As a wise programmer once said, "Floating point numbers are like sandpiles: every time you move one, you lose a little sand and you pick up a little dirt." And after a few computations, things can get pretty dirty.
The Elements of Programming Style
Men do not invent Myths. They only invent fables, and tell lies. True Myths create themselves, and find their expression in the men who serve their purpose.
The Brazen Horn
Sir Howard: It is the truth, Cicely, and nothing but the truth. But the English Law requires a witness to tell the whole truth.
Lady Cicely: What nonsense! As if anybody ever knew the whole truth about anything!
Captain Brassbound's Conversion
I've always thought that the most extraordinary special effect you could do is to buy a child at the moment of its birth, sit it on a little chair and say, "You'll have three score years and ten," and take a photograph every minute. "And we'll watch you and photograph you for ten years after you die, then we'll run the film." Wouldn't that be extraordinary? We'd watch this thing get bigger and bigger, and flower to become extraordinary and beautiful, then watch it crumble, decay, and rot.
A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled.
Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it, in God's name! 'Tis the utmost thou hast in thee: out with it, then. Up, up! Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole might. Work while it is called Today; for the night cometh, wherein no man can work.
Sartor Resartus
The bigger the real-life problems, the greater the tendency for the discipline to retreat into a reassuring fantasy-land of abstract theory and technical manipulation.
I don't like that they're not calculating anything. I don't like that they don't check their ideas. I don't like that for anything that disagrees with an experiment, they cook up an explanation... It is precise mathematically, but the mathematics is far too difficult for the individuals that are doing it, and they don't draw their conclusions with any rigour. So they just guess.
On superstring theory
Seek those who find your road agreeable, your personality and mind stimulating, your philosophy acceptable, and your experience helpful. Let those who do not, seek their own kind.
I would rather live and love where death is king than have eternal life where love is not.
Spring is here. For the love of heaven, let's open our windows or we'll all die, suffocated by our false fears.
Prospero's Books is the Terminator 2 for intellectuals.
Psychographic marketing techniques helped Raid roach spray marketers discover that the reason low-income Southern women were the heaviest users of roach spray was that "a lot of their feelings about the roach were very similar to the feelings that they had about the men in their lives," said the advertising executive on the account. They said the roach, like the man in their life, "only comes around when he wants food." The act of spraying roaches and seeing them die was satisfying to this frustrated, powerless group.
The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists and calculators has succeeded: and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever.
Reflections on The Revolution in France
Fans are interesting things. Rush fans just can't comprehend why the rest of the world doesn't like Rush. REM fans consider the rest of the world beneath their refined dignities to notice. Kate Bush fans love the rest of the world, and the world loves them, but spend long nights plotting to knife one another in the back.
"Gradenza"