If all the good people were clever; / And all clever people were good, / The world would be nicer than ever / We thought that it possibly could.
"Good and Clever"
An efficient organization is one in which the accounting department knows the exact cost of every useless administrative procedure which they themselves have initiated.
France has culture but no civilization. England has civilization but no culture. The United States has neither. Canada has both.
There was never a great genius without a tincture of madness.
A technique succeeds in mathematical physics, not by a clever trick, or a happy accident, but because it expresses some aspect of a physical truth.
In brief, she assumed that, being a man, I was vain to the point of imbecility, and this assumption was correct, as it always is.
"A Popular Virtue"
Even when uttered by Democrats, "middle class" often sounds like a mealymouthed way of saying, "Us, and not them," where "them" includes poor people, snake handlers and those with pierced tongues.
You see, our experts describe you as an appallingly dull fellow, unimaginative, timid, lacking in initiative, spineless, easily dominated, no sense of humour, tedious company and irrepressibly drab and awful. And whereas in most professions these would be considerable drawbacks, in chartered accountancy they are a positive boon.
Monty Python: "Show Ten"
By the worldly standards of public life, all scholars in their work are of course oddly virtuous. They do not make wild claims, they do not cheat, they do not try to persuade at any cost, they appeal neither to prejudice nor to authority, they are often frank about their ignorance, their disputes are fairly decorous, they do not confuse what is being argued with race, politics, sex or age, they listen patiently to the young and to the old who both know everything. These are the general virtues of scholarship, and they are peculiarly the virtues of science.
Some compilers allow a check during execution that subscripts do not exceed array dimensions. This is a help, but not sufficient. First, many programmers do not use such compilers because "They're not efficient." (Presumably, this means that it is vital to get the wrong answers quickly.)
The Elements of Programming Style
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- for ever... And remember that it is for ever.
1984
There are... scientific works -- star catalogues, for example -- which are not art; but the theoretical structures of Gauss, Einstein, or Maxwell are original, individual, "very personal" responses and expressions of exactly the same kind as the creative works of Beethoven or Dostoievski.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
Walden
As a matter of fact, I personally would much rather hear Perotin than Mozart.
Once you accept that the world is a giant computer run by white mice, all other movies fade into insignificance.
On The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Our advanced and fashionable thinkers are, naturally, out on a wide swing of the pendulum, away from the previous swing of the pendulum. If you want to reach dead center, you will do well to avoid the most advanced thinkers.
We talk about the American way, the British way. If we had any sense, we would know that there is no American way, no British way. There is only one way -- the scientific way that cuts across racial lines with international boundaries.
If we follow the advice of these people, we might as well go back into the cave.
I loathe the expression "What makes him tick." It is the American mind, looking for simple and singular solution, that uses the foolish expression. A person not only ticks, he also chimes and strikes the hour, falls and breaks and has to be put together again, and sometimes stops like an electric clock in a thunderstorm.
About the only people who don't quarrel over religion are the people who don't have any.
The primary purpose of the DATA statement is to give names to constants; instead of referring to pi as 3.141592653589793 at every appearance, the variable PI can be given that value with a DATA statement and used instead of the longer form of the constant. This also simplifies modifying the program, should the value of pi change.
As with most fine things, chocolate has its season. There is a simple memory aid that you can use to determine whether it is the correct time to order chocolate dishes: any month whose name contains the letter A, E, or U is the proper time for chocolate.
"Chocolate: The Consuming Passion"
If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.
Mathematics transfigures the fortuitous concourse of atoms into the tracery of the finger of God.
I am a sociologist, God help me.
Every body continues in its state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line, except insofar as it doesn't.
Think until it hurts.
The real question of government versus private enterprise is argued on too philosophical and abstract a basis. Theoretically, planning may be good etc -- but nobody has ever figured out the cause of government stupidity -- and until they do and find the cure all ideal plans will fall into quicksand.
In a letter to Gweneth Feynman
The Social Sciences are good at accounting for disasters once they have taken place.
The past is an old armchair in the attic, the present an ominous ticking sound, and the future anybody's guess. It was fun back there with the Rover Boys, the Little Colonel, Pollyanna, and Peg-o'-my-Heart, but we don't want to be caught in the past while the Russians are shaking hands with the Martians. Let us then be up and doing.
Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy; but after a war it seems more like astrology.
There are three roads to ruin; women, gambling and technicians. The most pleasant is with women, the quickest is with gambling, but the surest is with technicians.
This is th' original contract; these the laws / Impos'd by nature, and by nature's cause.
... it is certain that the real function of art is to increase our self-consciousness; to make us more aware of what we are, and therefore of what the universe in which we live really is. And since mathematics, in its own way, also performs this function, it is not only aesthetically charming but profoundly significant. It is an art, and a great art.
It is simply untrue that all our institutions are evil, . . . that all politicians are mere opportunists, that all aspects of university life are corrupt. Having discovered an illness, it's not terribly useful to prescribe death as a cure.
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.
"Of Beauty"
He saw the crowd and thought of the waves moving through them, breaking into white, swallowing foam. The small figures dimly sensed the eddies of the waves as paradox, as riddle, and heard the tick of time without knowing what they sensed, and clung to their linear illusions of past and future, of progression, of their opening births and yawning deaths to come... And he thought of Markham and his mother and all these uncountable people, never loosening their grip on their hopes, and their strange human sense, their last illusion, that no matter how the days moved through them, there always remained the pulse of things coming, the sense that even now there was yet still time.
Timescape
They must often change, who would be constant in happiness or wisdom.
The most dreadful thing of all is that many millions of people in the poor countries are going to starve to death before our eyes. We shall see them doing so upon our television sets.
Reverend Belling (Graham Chapman): You know, there are many people in the country today who, through no fault of their own, are sane. Some of them were born sane. Some of them became sane later in their lives. It is up to people like you and me who are out of our tiny little minds to try and help these people overcome their sanity. You can start in small ways with ping-pong ball eyes and a funny voice and then you can paint half of your body red and the other half green and then you can jump up and down in a bowl of treacle going "squawk, squawk, squawk..." And then you can go "Neurhhh! Neurhhh!" and then you can roll around on the floor going "pting pting pting"...
Monty Python: "Show Twenty-One"
But is such a thing fit to be discovered to the people? shall I do such an unworthy Act? Ah! my pen falls out of my hand. Yet my desire to help posterity, overcomes; for perhaps from this gleaning as it were, greater and more admirable inventions may be produced.
Natural Magick