All governments, without exception, lie all the time, on every subject. They lie constantly, impenitently, and unashamedly. Nothing that any government ever says, at any time, can be assumed to be true. The sooner you recognize this fact, the easier and more pleasant your life will become.
Quoted from memory by Charles Haines, in a letter to the editor of the Toronto Globe and Mail, Oct. 28, 1995
Only the person who has been trained to think can be trusted to feel.
I was always brought up to believe that language is the master, you are the servant. I was taught to believe that language is almost out of control and you can barely hold on to it.
The record demonstrates that the growth of the Internet has been and continues to be phenomenal. As a matter of constitutional tradition, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, we presume that governmental regulation of the content of speech is more likely to interfere with the free exchange of ideas than to encourage it. The interest in encouraging freedom of expression in a democratic society outweighs any theoretical but unproven benefit of censorship.
The biggest difference between Heaven's Gate and mainstream Christianity is that the Heaven's Gate people never tried to brainwash my kids.
When a person spends a lot of time using a computer system, the configuration of that computer system becomes the city that he lives in. Just as the way our houses and furniture are laid out, determines what it's like for us to live among them, so does the computer system that we use, and if we can't change the computer system that we use to suit us, then our lives are really under the control of others. And a person who sees this becomes in a certain way demoralized: ``It's no use trying to change those things, they're always going to be bad. No point even hassling it. I'll just put in my time and ... when it's over I'll go away and try not to think about it any more''.
One of my first memories is of my father calling excitedly to say, "Look". He was looking up at the sky. I couldn't see what I was to look at. Then he said, "Listen", and I heard this peculiar sort of sound, very distant. He kept saying, "Look higher, look higher", and I did. Then I saw my first skein of geese and heard their call. He took my hand and said to me, "Those are the whales of the sky."
Quoted in A World Of Ideas II
... in wondering why free software is so good these days it occured to me that the propagation of free software is one gigantic artificial life evolution experiment, but the metaphor isn't perfect. Programs are thrown out into the harsh environment, and the bad ones die. The good ones adapt rapidly and become very robust in short order. The only problem with the metaphor is that the process isn't random at all. Python chooses to include Tk's genes; Linux decides to make itself more suitable for symbiosis with X, etcetera. Free software is artificial life, but better.
The brain thinks not by adding two and two to make four, but like a sheet of wet paper on which drops of watercolour paints are being splashed, merging into unforeseen configurations.
Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind
Consumers are like roaches -- you spray them and they get immune after a while.
A book reads the better which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots, and dog's ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins.
We have found to our horror that computer programs live on for decades, long after the machines and compilers that caused their misshape have died. We thus live in the purgatory created by our hackerish enthusiasm.
But the tight feedback mechanism between hardware/compiler optimizations and the software 'literature' ensures that the poor programming styles of the past will persist (because they are 'efficient' on machines optimized for these poor programming styles) and will leave little room for optimizing better styles.
We must force ourselves to break out of this cycle by writing excellent programs, and then molding compilers and machines to make these programs efficient, rather than vice versa. Excellent programs do not happen by accident, but require very hard work. We must proactively seek elegance, as elegance will not find us on its own.
"Garbage In/Garbage Out: When Bad Programs Happen to Good People"
Just as poetry strives to resolve the tension between form and meaning, so programming must resolve the conflict between intelligibility and concision.
My Life as a Quant
Teaching is the process of curing the amnesia into which every generation is born. Teaching is the opposite of Alzheimer's disease in that it builds memory and consciousness, rather than stealing them. The memory is collective--the history of the human race, of Western thought and values, of this nation's experience, of a family's past--but it all contributes to the identity of the individual who receives it.
Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.
From the introduction to Crash.
Intelligence is derived from two words--inter and legere -- inter meaning 'between' and legere meaning 'to choose.' An intelligent person, therefore, is one who has learned 'to choose between.' He knows that good is better than evil, that confidence should supersede fear, that love is superior to hate, that gentleness is better than cruelty, forbearance than intolerance, compassion than arrogance, and that truth has more virtue than ignorance.
The chief value in going to college is that it's the only way to learn it really doesn't matter.
Language is the amber in which a thousand precious thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved. . . . Words convey the mental treasures of one period to the generations that follow; and laden with this, their precious freight, they sail safely across gulfs of time in which empires have suffered shipwreck and the languages of common life have sunk into oblivion.
Upon my desk lies Wired Style: Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age, a title nearly as offensive in concept as it is in execution. Its creators somehow managed to forsake the Wired "my brain is melting" color scheme, but its lime green pages, wire binding, and flourescent orange cardboard casing embody the same principle of flash over utility.
http://www.go2net.com/internet/sequitur/1997/01/27/body.html
The mark of an educated man is not in his boast that he has built his mountain of facts and has stood on top of it, but in his admission that there may be other peaks in the same range with men on top of them, and that, though their views of the landscape may be different from his, they are none the less legitimate.
Classical-rock is like things done by Deep Purple or ELP, where the band played a rock thing and then the orchestra did a pathetic classic-like thing, ... I hate any connection between me and that. And I also hate New Age. That term used to mean 'Hair' and the Age of Aquarius. Now it's stuff for getting your hair done and relaxing. It's just boring... I'm just me... Pythonesque-world-classical-folk-whatever.
Persichetti could do everything and do it well, but you didn't really care.
On his former composition teacher Vincent Persichetti
The plural of anecdote is not data.
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.
There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of those books.
The late twentieth century has become a new collector's age, a vast resurgence of the campy spirit that led Walpole to cram Strawberry Hill with medieval garbage. The future, should there be one, will inherit from the twentieth century far more junk that it can have any use for; it will also, very likely, inherit no standards for distinguishing junk from nonjunk.
The Thrill of Fear: 250 Years Of Scary Entertainment
The best mathematicians either don't get on boards and panels or don't do any work if they are appointed.
Quoted in More Mathematical People
From age eight until I was sixteen, I used to sit in the corner and listen to the smart-alec intellectuals of the 1920's expounding. I learned a lot but said little. After a while I began to suspect that they really didn't know what they were talking about. Perhaps this explains why to this day I can never get excited about philosophical ideas.
Quoted in More Mathematical People
Free software, to me, means the ability of programmers to form a community within which they can speak the same language, which I hope will be the language of programming, not each of the many dialects we use.
In gnu.misc.discuss