This is a collection of quotes that I enjoyed. Some reflect my own personal view of the world, and others I just found funny. If you would like to submit a quote, please email me at .

Index:
Computer Science
Economics and Finance
Education
Literature
Math and Science
Philosophy
Politics
Predictions
Technology
Friends' Quotes

Computer Science

Any problem in computer science can be solved with another layer of indirection.
David Wheeler, 1927 - 2004, inventor of the subroutine, completed the world's first PhD in computer science in 1951

Compatibility means deliberately repeating other people's mistakes.
David Wheeler

Computer Science is embarrassed by the computer.
Alan Perlis, Epigrams of Programming

Computer science is as much about computers as astronomy is about telescopes.
Edsger Wybe Dijkstra, 1930 - 2002

The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.
Edsger Wybe Dijkstra

Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.
Alan Perlis, Epigrams of Programming

A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
Alan Perlis, Epigrams of Programming

The goal of Computer Science is to build something that will last at least until we've finished building it.
anonymous

The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals. We cause accidents.
Nathaniel Borenstein

We should not worry about what happens when computers pass the Turing test, but rather what happens when humans fail.
unknown

There's an old story about the person who wished his computer were as easy to use as his telephone. That wish has come true, since I no longer know how to use my telephone.
Bjarne Stroustrup

If the automobile had followed the same development as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year killing everyone inside.
Robert Cringely, InfoWorld

Economics and Finance

[T]he whole presumption of bailout so underlies our market that we don't have a free market. We have a government subsidized market that encourages inefficiency and encourages really unfair and unjust results. And when actions are taken, like Geithner did with AIG, it just reinforces all of that unfairness and inefficiency in our markets.
Neil Barofsky, former Special Investigator General for TARP
in an interview with Russ Roberts on EconTalk, August 27, 2012

The United States faces a fundamental disconnect between the services that people expect the government to provide, particularly the benefits for older Americans, and the tax revenues that people are willing to send to the government to finance those services.
Doug Elmendorf, director of the Congressional Budget Office, May 13, 2010

Rule 10b-5 is not a complete scheme for remedying securities fraud. Indeed, it is just a declaration that securities fraud is unlawful.
...
No social purpose would be served by encouraging everyone who suffers an investment loss because of an unanticipated change in market conditions to pick through offering memoranda with a fine-tooth comb in the hope of uncovering a misrepresentation. Defrauders are a bad lot and should be punished, but Rule 10b-5 does not make them insurers against national economic calamities.
Judge Richard Posner, Bastian, 892 F.2d at 685.

It is generally agreed that casinos should, in the public interest, be inaccessible and expensive. And perhaps the same is true of stock exchanges.
John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, VI, 1935.

The future is hard to predict accurately, especially in detail.
The Impact of Skewness and Fat Tails on the Asset Allocation Decision
James X. Xiong, CFA, and Thomas M. Idzorek, CFA
Financial Analysts Journal, Volume 67, Number 2

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, hedge fund manager and author of The Black Swan, is particularly harsh when it comes to the copula. "People got very excited about the Gaussian copula because of its mathematical elegance, but the thing never worked," he says. "Co-association between securities is not measurable using correlation," because past history can never prepare you for that one day when everything goes south. "Anything that relies on correlation is charlatanism."
Felix Salmon, Recipe for Disaster: The Formula That Killed Wall Street, Wired Magazine, March 2009.

Never again will America allow any insured institution to operate normally if owners lack sufficient tangible capital to protect depositors and taxpayers alike.
George Bush, U.S. president, August 9, 1989

We do not want and will not have another epidemic of bank failures.
Franklin Roosevelt, U.S. president, March 12, 1933

Unless the cost spiral is stopped, the Nation's health bill could reach a staggering $100 billion by 1975.
Lyndon Lyndon Johnson, U.S. president, March 4, 1968.
(Was actually $133 billion in 1975. Today is over $2 trillion.)

In finance, there was no such thing as reality.
Frank Partnoy, in The Match King: Ivar Kreuger, the Financial Genius Behind a Century of Wall Street Scandals

A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back when it begins to rain.
Robert Frost

Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.
John Kenneth Galbraith

Isn't it strange? The same people who laugh at gypsy fortune tellers take economists seriously.
Cincinnati Enquirer

A top-secret government study indicates that we wouldn't be any worse off if we let the economists predict the weather and the meteorologists predict the economy.
Paul Harwitz, March 19, 1980, Wall Street Journal

Personally I don't think day traders are speculating, because traditional speculation requires some market knowledge. They are, instead, gambling, which doesn't.
Arthur Levitt, SEC chariman

It would be thought a hard government that should tax its people one tenth part.
Benjamin Franklin

I would like to electrocute everyone who uses the word 'fair' in connection with income tax policies.
William F. Buckley

The trick is to stop thinking it as 'your' money.
IRS auditor

Too many of us look upon Americans as dollar chasers. This is a cruel libel, even if it is reiterated thoughtlessly by the Americans themselves.
Albert Einstein, 1929

About a dozen different theories have been advanced by men of imaginative minds, but not one of these would-be historians permitted himself to be hampered by the underlying facts.
Florian Cajori, A History of Mathematical Notations, discussing the origin of the dollar sign ($)

A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money.
Everett Dirksen

A budget is just a method of worrying before you spend money, as well as afterward.
anonymous

The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.
Albert Einstein

If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion.
anonymous

If you want to know what God thinks about money, just look at the people He gives it to.
old Irish saying

Education

But going to college is not enough. You also have to study the right subjects. And American students are not studying the fields with the greatest economic potential.

Over the past 25 years the total number of students in college has increased by about 50%. But the number of students graduating with degrees in science, technology, engineering and math (the so-called STEM fields) has been flat.

Moreover, many of today's STEM graduates are foreign-born and taking their knowledge and skills back to their native countries. Consider computer technology. In 2009 the U.S. graduated 37,994 students with bachelor's degrees in computer and information science. This is not bad, but we graduated more students with computer science degrees 25 years ago.

The story is the same in other technology fields. The United States graduated 5,036 chemical engineers in 2009, no more than we did 25 years ago. In mathematics and statistics there were 15,496 graduates in 2009, slightly more than the 15,009 graduates of 1985.

Few fields have changed as much in recent years as microbiology, but in 2009 we graduated just 2,480 students with bachelor's degrees in microbiology — about the same number as 25 years ago. Who will solve the problem of antibiotic resistance?

If students aren't studying science, technology, engineering and math, what are they studying? In 2009 the U.S. graduated 89,140 students in the visual and performing arts, more than in computer science, math and chemical engineering combined and more than double the number of visual and performing arts graduates in 1985.

The story is the same in psychology, which graduates about 95,000 students a year, more than double the number of 25 years ago and far in excess of the number of available jobs.

Perhaps most oddly, despite the decline in the number of news media jobs, especially in the print media, the number of students in communication and journalism also has nearly doubled since 1985.

There is nothing wrong with the arts, psychology and journalism, but graduates in these fields have lower wages and are less likely to find work in their fields than graduates in science and math.

As a result, more than half of all humanities graduates end up in jobs that don't require college degrees. Baggage porters and bellhops don't need college degrees, but in 2008 17.4% of them had at least a bachelor's degree and 45% had some college education. Mail carriers don't need a college education, but in 2008 14% had at least a bachelor's degree and 61% had some college education.

Educated people have higher wages and lower unemployment rates than the less educated so why are college students at Occupy Wall Street protests around the country demanding forgiveness for crushing student debt? The sluggish economy is tough on everyone but the students are also learning a hard lesson, going to college is not enough. You also have to study the right subjects. And American students are not studying the fields with the greatest economic potential.

Over the past 25 years the total number of students in college has increased by about 50 percent. But the number of students graduating with degrees in science, technology, engineering and math (the so-called STEM fields) has remained more or less constant. Moreover, many of today's STEM graduates are foreign born and are taking their knowledge and skills back to their native countries.

Consider computer technology. In 2009 the U.S. graduated 37,994 students with bachelor' degrees in computer and information science. This is not bad, but we graduated more students with computer science degrees 25 years ago! The story is the same in other technology fields such as chemical engineering, math and statistics. Few fields have changed as much in recent years as microbiology, but in 2009 we graduated just 2,480 students with bachelor's degrees in microbiology — about the same number as 25 years ago. Who will solve the problem of antibiotic resistance?

If students aren't studying science, technology, engineering and math, what are they studying?

In 2009 the U.S. graduated 89,140 students in the visual and performing arts, more than in computer science, math and chemical engineering combined and more than double the number of visual and performing arts graduates in 1985.

...

There is nothing wrong with the arts, psychology and journalism, but graduates in these fields have lower wages and are less likely to find work in their fields than graduates in science and math. Moreover, more than half of all humanities graduates end up in jobs that don't require college degrees and these graduates don't get a big college bonus.

Most importantly, graduates in the arts, psychology and journalism are less likely to create the kinds of innovations that drive economic growth.

...

As a result, an argument can be made for subsidizing students in fields with potentially large spillovers, such as microbiology, chemical engineering, nuclear physics and computer science. There is little justification for subsidizing sociology, dance and English majors.

College has been oversold. It has been oversold to students who end up dropping out or graduating with degrees that don't help them very much in the job market. It also has been oversold to the taxpayers, who foot the bill for these subsidies.

Nobody rises to low expectations.
Calvin Lloyd

Teaching is the highest form of understanding.
Aristotle

The main hope of a nation lies in the proper education of its youth.
Erasmus

The secret of education is respecting the pupil.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards.
Anatole France

The best learners... often make the worst teachers. They are, in a very real sense, perceptually challenged. They cannot imagine what it must be like to struggle to learn something that comes so naturally to them.
Stephen Brookfield

In what may as well be starkly labelled smug satisfaction, an amazing 94% [of college instructors] rate themselves as above average teachers, and 68% rank themselves in the top quarter of teaching performances.
K. Patricia Cross

At the desk where I sit, I have learned one great truth. The answer for all our national problems -- the answer for all the problems of the world -- comes to a single word. That word is "education."
Lyndon B. Johnson

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
H.G. Wells, 1920

Only the educated are free.
Epictetus, Discourses

The nation that expects to be ignorant and free
expects what never will and never can be.
Thomas Jefferson

Literature

How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four

All that is gold does not glitter;
not all those that wander are lost.
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Dylan Thomas

I'm very good at integral and differential calculus,
I know the scientific names of beings animalculous;
In short, in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral,
I am the very model of a modern Major-General.
Gilbert and Sullivan, Pirates of Penzance

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,
adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.
With consistency, a great soul has simply nothing to do.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Karate is a form of martial arts in which people who have had years and years of training can, using only their hands and feet, make some of the worst movies in the history of the world.
Dave Barry

Math and Science

[P]ublishing is also the basis of a conflict of interest between personal interests and the objective of knowledge accumulation. The reason? Published and true are not synonyms. To the extent that publishing itself is rewarded, then it is in scientists' personal interests to publish, regardless of whether the published findings are true....
Brian Nosek, "Scientific Utopia: II - Restructuring Incentives and Practices to Promote Truth Over Publishability", forthcoming in Perspectives on Psychological Science.

All science is either physics or stamp collecting.
Ernest Rutherford

I turn away with fright and horror from the lamentable evil of functions which do not have derivatives.
Charles Hermite

And all this science I don't understand
It's just my job five days a week
Elton John, Rocket Man

The root of all superstition is that men observe when a thing hits, but not when it misses.
Francis Bacon

Religion and science are opposed... but only in the same sense as that in which my thumb and forefinger are opposed -- and between the two, one can grasp everything.
Sir William Bragg

Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than standing in a garage makes you a car.
anonymous

God himself made the whole numbers: everything else is the work of man.
Leopold Kronecker

He who does not increase his knowledge, decreases it. Say not, when I have leisure I will study; perchance thou wilt have no leisure.
Hillel

Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate into their own language, and forthwith it is something entirely different.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

It is of interest to note that while some dolphins are reported to have learned English - up to fifty words used in correct context - no human being has been reported to have learned dolphinese.
Carl Sagan

[Richard Feynman]'s method is this. You write down the problem. You think very hard. Then you write down the answer.
Murray Gell-Mann

Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.
Rich Cook

We often hear that mathematics consists mainly of "proving theorems." Is a writer's job mainly that of "writing sentences?"
Giancarlo Rota

The only way to do numerical analysis is to get a calculator and sit in a corner.
Denton Hewgill

If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulders of giants.
Isaac Newton

One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid.
James D. Watson, who along with Francis Crick discovered the double-helix structure of DNA, The Double Helix pp 18 -- 19

Yesterday was my 21st birthday, at that age Newton and Pascal had already acquired many claims to immortality.
Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier, 1768 - 1830

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.
Carl Sagan

A science is any discipline in which the fool of this generation can go beyond the point reached by the genius of the last generation.
Max Gluckman

Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind.
Albert Einstein, Science, Philosophy and Religion: a Symposium, 1941

Organic chemistry is the chemistry of carbon compounds. Biochemistry is the study of carbon compounds that crawl.
Mike Adams

Philosophy is a game with objectives and no rules. Mathematics is a game with rules and no objectives.
anonymous

Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital.
Aaron Levenstein

96.37% of all statistics are made up.
Kevin D. Quitt

The average Ph.D. thesis is nothing but a transference of bones from one graveyard to another.
J. Frank Dobie, A Texan in England, 1945

The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning while those other subjects merely require scholarship.
Robert Heinlein

Astrology is a disease, not a science.
Maimonides (Moshe Ben Maimon), Laws of Repentance, 1170-1180

The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance.
Robert R. Coveyou

The great tragedy of Science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.
Thomas Henry Huxley

The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them.
Sir William Bragg

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I've found it!), but "That's funny...".
Isaac Asimov

The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.
Albert Einstein

There are three schools of magic. One: State a tautology, then ring the changes on its corollaries; that's philosophy. Two: Record many facts. Try to find a pattern. Then make a wrong guess at the next fact; that's science. Three: Be aware that you live in a malevolent Universe controlled by Murphy's Law, sometimes offset by Brewster's Factor; that's engineering.
Fortune

You are not thinking. You are merely being logical.
Neils Bohr to Albert Einstein

Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.
Albert von Szent-Gyorgy

If others would but reflect on mathematical truths as deeply and as continuously as I have, they would make my discoveries.
Karl Friedrich Gauss

I hope that posterity will judge me kindly, not only as to the things which I have explained, but also to those which I have intentionally omitted so as to leave to others the pleasure of discovery.
Rene Descartes

Engineers think that equations are approximation of reality.
Scientists think that reality is approximation of equations.
Mathematicians are unable to make the connection.
unknown

When computing dy/dx, do the "d"s cancel?
unknown

Mathematics is the alphabet with which God has written the universe.
Galileo

Heizenburg may have been here.
unknown

I want to know God's thoughts - all the rest are details.
Albert Einstein

Philosophy

SEVEN DEADLY SOCIAL SINS
Politics without principle
Wealth without work
Commerce without morality
Pleasure without conscience
Education without character
Science without humanity
Worship without sacrifice
Gandhi

Cowardice asks the question, 'Is it safe?'.
Expediency asks the question, 'Is it politic?'.
Vanity asks the question, 'Is it popular?'.
But, conscience asks the question, 'Is it right?'. And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but one must take it because one's conscience tells one that it is right.
Martin Luther King, Jr.

Life without the possibility of parole is a death sentence. It just takes a little longer, and the state is not the one responsible for pulling the plug.
Former district attorney in Atlanta, J. Tom Morgan

I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive.
Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World, 1996

I do get disappointed that so many members spend so much time solving puzzles. It is a form of mental masturbation. Nothing comes of it.
Lancelot Ware, founder of Mensa, 1996

People who are resting on their laurels are wearing them on the wrong end.
Malcome Kushner

Please all, and you will please none.
Aesop

There is no sadder sight than a young pessimist.
Mark Twain

Don't ever become a pessimist, Ira; a pessimist is correct oftener than an optimist, but an optimist has more fun--and neither can stop the march of events.
Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough For Love

The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears it is true.
Robert Oppenheimer

For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism.
Harrison's postulate

A critic is a legless man who teaches running.
anonymous

A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on.
William Burroughs

We cannot live better than in seeking to become better.
Socrates

Some people do not become thinkers simply because their memories are too good.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

That is our final arrogance; that we blame God for our own state.
Bono

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.
Thomas Alva Edison

Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.
Albert Einstein

Failure is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.
Henry Ford

But when feminists suggest that God might be a She without suggesting that the Devil might also be female, they must be opposed.
Warren Farrell

When I get a little money, I buy books; And, if any is left, I buy food and clothes.
Erasmus

If we make peaceful revolution impossible, we make violent revolution inevitable.
Address on the First Anniversary of the Alliance for Progress
John F. Kennedy, March 13, 1962

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.
Isaac Asimov

Lottery: a tax on people who are bad at math.
unknown

If you're too open-minded, your brains will fall out.
anonymous

It is a good rule in life never to apologize. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them.
P.G. Wodehouse

The function of Science Fiction is not to predict the future, but to prevent it.
Ray Bradbury, discussing Fahrenheit 451

The human race does not have a very good record of intelligent behavior.
Stephen Hawking, The Universe In A Nutshell

Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.
George Burns

A witty saying proves nothing.
Voltaire

Think how stupid the average person is, then realize half of them are stupider than that.
George Carlin

In view of the stupidity of the majority of the people, a widely held opinion is more likely to be foolish than sensible.
Bertrand Russell, Marriage and Morals

Lawyer: n. One skilled in circumventing the law.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

All things are difficult before they are easy.
Thomas Fuller

An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field.
Niels Bohr

An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less.
Nicholas Murray Butler

Obstacles are those terrible things you see when you take your eyes off your goal.
U.S. Olympic Team Gymnast Coach

Any event, once it has occurered, can be made to appear inevitable by a competent historian.
Lee Simonson

First Rule of History: History doesn't repeat itself -- historians merely repeat each other.
unknown

Any society that needs disclaimers has too many lawyers.
Erik Pepke

Anyone who can walk to the welfare office can walk to work.
Al Capp

Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory.
Leonardo Da Vinci

As long as people will accept crap, it will be financially profitable to dispense it.
Dick Cavett

Everything should be as simple as it is, but not simpler.
Albert Einstein

I don't have any solution, but I certainly admire the problem.
Ashleigh Brilliant

I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.
Thomas Edison

If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention.
bumper sticker

In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.
Laurence Peter

In fact, one thing that I have noticed...is that all of these conspiracy theories depend on the perpetrators being endlessly clever. I think you'll find the facts also work if you assume everyone is endlessly stupid.
Brian E. Moore

Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information on it.
Samuel Johnson

Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
H. L. Mencken

Nobody believes the official spokesman... but everybody trusts an unidentified source.
Ron Nesen

Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all.
anonymous

The function of genius is not to give new answers, but to pose new questions - which time and mediocrity can solve.
Hugh Trevor-Roper, Men and Events

The purpose of a liberal arts education is to learn that a person can like both cats and dogs!
anonymous

The purpose of a liberal education is to make you philisophical enough to accept the fact that you will never make much money.
anonymous

The reward for a thing well done is to have done it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously.
Hubert H. Humphrey

The Social Sciences are good at accounting for disasters once they have taken place.
Claude T. Bissell

The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools.
Herbert Spencer

There are only two truly infinite things, the universe and stupidity. And I am unsure about the universe.
Albert Einstein

There is no substitute for hard work.
Thomas A. Edison

This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.
T. S. Eliot

A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.
Mignon McLaughlin

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
H.L. Mencken

One does not fall into love; one grows into love, and love grows in him.
Karl Menninger

The difficulty with marriage is that we fall in love with a personality, but must live with a character.
Peter Devries

I would like to have engraved inside every wedding band, "Be kind to one another." This is the Golden Rule of marriage and the secret of making love last through the years.
Randolph Roy

The only way to get pertinent information is to ask impertinent questions.
Joe Michael Straczynski

How to Kill a Volunteer Organization

• Don't participate beyond paying your dues. Let "them" handle things. Then complain that members have no voice in the organzation.
• Decline all offices and committee appointments - you're too busy. Then offer vociferous advice on how they should do things.
• If appointed to a committee, don't work. It's a courtesy appointment. Then complain because the organization has stagnated.
• If you do attend meetings, don't initiate new ideas. Then you can play "devil's advocate" to those submitted by others.
• Don't encourage others to become mebers - that's the Rep's job. Then complain that the dues are too high.
• Don't read the mail from the Association - it's not important. Then complain that you're not kept informed.
• Don't volunteer your talent - that's ego fulfillment. Then complain that you're never asked, never appreciated.
• If by chance, the organization grows in spite of your contributions, grasp every opportunity to tell the "youngsters" how tough it was, how hard you worked, in the "old days", to bring the organization to its present level of success.

Truth is the most valuable thing we have - so let us economize it.
Mark Twain

Health is simply the slowest possible rate at which you can die.
unknown

I am returning this otherwise good typing paper to you because someone has printed gibberish all over it and put your name at the top.
English Professor, Ohio University

I am returning this note to you instead of your paper because it [your paper] currently occupies the bottom of my birdcage.
English Professor, Providence College

Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on.
Winston Churchill

All men wish to have truth on their side, but few to be on the side of truth.
Richard Whately (1787-1863)

Ginsberg's Theorem:
  1) You can't win.
  2) You can't break even.
  3) You can't quit the game.

Freeman's Commentary on Ginsberg's Theorem: Every major philosophy that attempts to make life seem meaningful is based on the negation of one part of Ginsberg's Theorem. To wit:
  1) Capitalism is based upon the assumption that you can win.
  2) Socialism is based upon the assumption that you can break even.
  3) Mysticism is based upon the assumption that you can quit the game.

A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject.
Winston Churchill

People always find it easier to be a result of the past rather than a cause of the future.
unknown

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
(I remember almost no Latin at all, and I have no problem with that.)
unknown

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
(Whatever is said in Latin sounds profound.)
unknown

Illegitimi non carborundum.
(Don't let the bastards grind you down.)
unknown

Those who heeded the past are doomed to relive it...
Piers Anthony, But What of Earth?

Blessed are the children, for they shall inherit the national debt.
Herbert Hoover

Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.
Jonathan Swift

Just as most issues are seldom black or white, so are most good solutions seldom black or white. Beware of the solution that requires one side to be totally the loser and the other side to be totally the winner. The reason there are two sides to begin with usually is because neither side has all the facts. Therefore, when the wise mediator effects a compromise, he is not acting from political motivation. Rather, he is acting from a deep sense of respect for the whole truth.
Stephen R. Schwambach

Everything should be as simple as possible - but not simpler.
Albert Einstein

People will often give you what they will not let you take.
Adam Florence

There may be said to be two classes of people in the world: those who constantly divide the people of the world into two classes and those who do not.
Robert Benchley

A great rabbi stands teaching in the marketplace. It happens that a husband finds proof that morning of his wife's adultery, and a mob carries her to the marketplace to stone her to death. (There is a familiar version of this story, but a friend of mine, a Speaker for the Dead, has told me of two other rabbis that faced the same situation. Those are the ones I'm going to tell you.)

The rabbi walks forward and stands beside the woman. Out of respect for him the mob forbears, and waits with the stones heavy in their hands. "Is there anyone here," he says to them, "who has not desired another man's wife, another woman's husband?"

They murmur and say, "We all know the desire. But, Rabbi, none of us has acted on it."

The rabbi says, "Then kneel down and give thanks that God made you strong." He takes the woman by the hand and leades her out of the market. Just before he lets her go, he whispers to her, "Tell the lord magistrate who saved his mistress. Then he'll know I am his loyal servant."

So the woman lives, because the community is too corrupt to protect itself from disorder.

Another rabbi, another city. He goes to her and stops the mob, as in the other story, and says, "Which of you is without sin? Let him cast the first stone."

The people are abashed, and they forget their unity of purpose in the memory of their own individual sins. Someday, they think, I may be like this woman, and I'll hope for forgiveness and another chance. I should treat her the way I wish to be treated.

As they open their hands and let the stones fall to the ground, the rabbi picks up one of the fallen stones, lifts it high over the woman's head, and throws it straight down with all his might. It crushes her skull and dashes her brains onto the cobblestones.

"Nor am I without sin," he says to the people. "But if we allow only perfect people to enforce the law, the law would soon be dead, and our city with it."

So the woman died because her community was too rigid to endure her deviance.

The famous version of this story is noteworthy because it is so startingly rare in our experience. Most communities lurch between decay and rigor mortis, and when they veer too far, they die. Only one rabbi dared to expect of us such a perfect balance that we could preserve the law and still forgive the deviation. So, of course, we killed him.

Q: How many IBM CPU's does it take to perform a logical shift right?
A: 33. 32 to hold the bits and one to push the register.
unknown

Q: How many mathematicians does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: One. He gives it to __, thereby reducing the problem to a previously answered joke.
unknown

Biology is the only science in which multiplication means the same thing as division.
unknown

Physics in general [students] took to be unacceptably hard mental labor, but what happened when a gun spat out a bullet... that was interesting.

...

I liked teaching. Specifically I liked teaching physics, a subject I suppose I embraced with passion and joy, knowing full well that most people shied away in horror. Physics was only the science of the unseen world, as geography was of the seen. Physics was the science of all the tremendously powerful invisibilities - of magnetism, electricity, gravity, light, sound, cosmic rays... Physics was the science of the mysteries of the universe. How could anyone think it dull?

College is the break you get between your mother and your wife.
unknown

Every woman is a 10; it just depends on what base you're counting in.
unknown

Writing science fiction for about a penny a word is no way to make a living. If you really want to make a million, the quickest way is to start your own religion.
L. Ron Hubbard

Depressing teenagers is like shooting fish in a barrel.
Bart Simpson, The Simpsons, episode 3F21, Homerpalooza

Only Irish coffee provides in a single glass all four essential food groups: alcohol, caffeine, sugar, and fat.
Alex Levine

The trouble with eating Italian food is that five or six days later you're hungry again.
George Mille

People are more opposed to fur than leather because rich ladies are easier to harass than bikers.
bumper sticker

Politics

The word "politics" is derived from the word "poly", meaning "many", and the word "ticks", meaning "blood sucking parasites".
unknown

If we accept the old feminist argument that marriage is slavery for women, then it is undeniable that -- given the current state of the nation's family courts -- divorce is slavery for men.
Matthew Weeks

There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you please unless it causes others harm. With it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.
P.J. O'Rourke

University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.
Henry Kissinger

Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.
Ronald Reagan

I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.
Thomas Jefferson

It is only because of the bravery and courage of our war dead that these idiots can live in a free country at all.
Tony Blair, British Prime Minister, 1 May 2000, commenting on anti-capitalist demonstrators

Having smoking sections in restaurants is like having urinating and non-urinating sections in public swimming pools.
Garfield Mahood, executive director Canadian Non-Smokers' Rights Association

Smoking is nature's way of solving the Social Security funding crisis.
Penny Harper

The national budget must be balanced. The public debt must be reduced; the arrogance of the authorities must be moderated and controlled. Payments to foreign governments must be reduced if the nation doesn't want to go bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance.
Marcus Tullius Cicero, 55 BC

Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.
Seneca, 65 AD

Cutting the space budget really restores my faith in humanity. It eliminates dreams, goals, and ideals and lets us get straight to the business of hate, debauchery, and self-annihilation.
Johnny Hart, B.C., comic-strip

Bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote.
George Jean Nathan

Democracy encourages the majority to decide things about which the majority is ignorant.
John Simon

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.
Winston Churchill

Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
George Bernard Shaw

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.
H.L. Menchen

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half the time.
E. B. White

The Army has carried the American... ideal to its logical conclusion. Not only do they prohibit discrimination on the grounds of race, creed and color, but also on ability.
T. Lehrer

Oh, I don't blame Congress. If I had $600 billion at my disposal, I'd be irresponsible, too.
Lichty and Wagner

Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.
George Washington

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people, It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
John Adams

Religion and morality are the foundations of all government. Without these restraints no free government could long exist.
Pennsylvania Supreme Court, 1824

Religion, morality, and knowledge are necessary to good government, the preservation of liberty, and the happiness of mankind.
US Supreme Court, 1892

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.
Winston Churchill

Affirmative Action is mediocrity's answer to Darwin.
unknown

It's the opinion of some that crops could be grown on the moon. Which raises the fear that it may not be long before we're paying somebody not to.
Franklin P. Jones

Predictions

Inventions reached their limit long ago, and I see no hope for further development.
Julius Frontinum, 1st century AD

Students today can't prepare bark to calculate their problems. They depend upon their slates which are expensive. What will they do when the slate is dropped and it breaks? They will be unable to write.
Teachers' Conference, 1703

What can be more palpably absurd than the prospect held out of locomotives traveling twice as fast as stagecoaches?
The Quarterly Review, England, March 1825

Men might as well project a voyage to the Moon as attempt to employ steam navigation against the stormy North Atlantic Ocean.
Dr. Dionysus Lardner, Professor of Natural Philosophy and Astronomy, University College, London, 1838

Well informed people know it is impossible to transmit the voice over wires and that were it possible to do so, the thing would be of no practical value.
Editorial in the Boston Post, 1865

Louis Pasteur's theory of germs is ridiculous fiction.
Pierre Pachet, 1872, Professor of Physiology at Toulouse

His 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.
Western Union internal memo, 1876

[W]hen the Paris Exhibition closes electric light will close with it and no more be heard of.
Erasmus Wilson, Professor at Oxford University, 1878

Such startling announcements as these should be deprecated as being unworthy of science and mischievious to to its true progress.
Sir William Siemens on Edison's announcement of a sucessful light bulb, 1880

It is apparent to me that the possibilities of the aeroplane, which two or three years ago were thought to hold the solution to the [flying machine] problem, have been exhausted, and that we must turn elsewhere.
Thomas Edison, 1895

Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.
Lord Kelvin, British mathematician and physicist, ca. 1895

Radio has no future.
Lord Kelvin, ca. 1897

The demonstration that no possible combination of known substances, known forms of machinery, and known forms of force can be united in a practicable machine by which men shall fly for long distances through the air, seems to the writer as complete as it is possible for the demonstration of any physical fact to be.
Simon Newcomb, 1906

That the automobile has practically reached the limit of its development is suggested by the fact that during the past year no improvements of a radical nature have been introduced.
Scientific American, Jan. 2, 1909

The foolish idea of shooting at the moon is an example of the absurd length to which vicious specialization will carry scientists working in thought-tight compartments.
A.W. Bickerton, Professor of Physics and Chemistry, Canterbury College, New Zealand, 1926

Man will never reach the moon regardless of all future scientific advances.
Lee De Forest, died 1961

While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially I consider it an impossibility, a development of which we need waste little time dreaming.
Lee DeForest, American radio pioneer, 1926

There is not the slightest indication that [nuclear energy] will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will.
Albert Einstein, 1932

The whole procedure [of shooting rockets into space]...presents difficulties of so fundamental a nature, that we are forced to dismiss the notion as essentially impracticable, in spite of the author's insistent appeal to put aside prejudice and to recollect the supposed impossibility of heavier-than-air flight before it was actually accomplished.
Richard Woolley, reviewing P.E. Cleator's "Rockets in Space", Nature, March 14, 1936

Anyone who expects a source of power from the transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine.
Ernest Rutherford, 1937

I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.
Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943

Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 19,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps only weigh 1.5 tons.
Popular Mechanics, March 1949

It would appear that we have reached the limits of what it is possible to achieve with computer technology, although one should be careful with such statements, as they tend to sound pretty silly in 5 years.
John von Neumann, ca. 1949

Space travel is utter bilge.
Richard Woolley, 1956, Astronomer Royal

Space travel is bunk.
Harold Spencer Jones, two weeks before the launch of Sputnik

Atmospheric nuclear tests do not seriously endanger either present or future generations.
Dr. Edward Teller, 1958

But what ... is it good for?
Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968, commenting on the microchip

Though determinants and matrices received a great deal of attention in the nineteenth century and thousands of papers were written on these subjects, they do not constitute great innovations in mathematics.... Neither determinants nor matrices have influenced deeply the course of mathematics despite their utility as compact expressions and despite the suggestiveness of matrices as concrete groups for the discernment of general theorems of group theory....
Morris Kline, 1972, Mathematical Thought From Ancient to Modern Times

There is no need for any individual to have a computer in their home.
Ken Olson, 1977, President, Digital Equipment Corp.

640 K [of computer memory] ought be enough for anybody.
Bill Gates, 1981

Technology

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future

If hard data were the filtering criterion you could fit the entire contents of the Internet on a floppy disk.
Cecil Adams, syndicated author, in The Straight Dope Tells All

We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.
Robert Wilensky, computer science sage

A million monkeys at a million keyboards might eventually produce Shakespeare, but they are going to produce monkey porn sites first.
Martin Bredeck

You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.
Albert Einstein

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.
Richard P. Feynman

At Microsoft, they all rock back and forth like Gates, they wear the same glasses, they have the same hair style. Maybe they grow them in tanks.
Marc Andreessen, the Netscape Wunderkind

Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. If we continue to develop our technology without wisdom or prudence, our servant may prove to be our executioner.
General Omar Bradley

Technology is a gift of God. After the gift of life it is perhaps the greatest of God's gifts. It is the mother of civilizations, of arts and of sciences.
Freeman Dyson, Infinite in All Directions

Television: a medium. So called because it is neither rare nor well-done.
Ernie Kovacs

If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it.
Albert Einstein

It is with logic that one proves; it is with intuition that one invents.
Henri Poincaré

There are two kinds of researchers: those that have implemented something and those that have not. The latter will tell you that there are 142 ways of doing things and that there isn't consensus on which is best. The former will simply tell you that 141 of them don't work.
David Cheriton, Prof. of Computer Science at Stanford, paraphrased

I think that it is much more likely that the reports of flying saucers are the results of the known irrational characteristics of terrestrial intelligence than of the unknown rational efforts of extra-terrestrial intelligence.
Richard Feynman

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.
FORTRAN manual for Xerox computers

Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage, and those who manage what they do not understand.
Archibald Putt

Think? Why think! We have computers to do that for us.
Jean Rostand

To err is human, and to blame it on a computer is even more so.
Orben's Current Comedy

I saw the logarithmic growth of computer power...
Al Gore jr, US vice president

Friends' Quotes

I was drunk when I wrote that.
Charles van Loan, 1999

It seems like in this new age, not only is every business an e-business, but every person is an e-person.
Robert "Bo" Lipari, 2000, after getting his new business cards, which had an e-mail address but no name

Last updated 5 October 2012.