Quotes

From jWiki
Revision as of 14:14, 16 September 2022 by Snoopj (talk | contribs)
(diff) ← Older revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)
Jump to navigationJump to search

TODO: bad formatting is bad

  • We're all beginners, some of us just have more practice - Jon Kiparsky (paraphrased)
  • A computer can never be held accountable / Therefore a computer must never make a management decision - Unknown origin, apocryphally from a set of IBM training slides
  • Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure. - Conway's Law
  • Es wird nichts so heiß gegessen, wie es gekocht wird (Nothing is eaten as hot as it is cooked, German idiom expressing that one imagines things to be worse than it really is)
  • A physicist, biologist, and a chemist are walking along a beach. The physicist, excited by the motion of the waves, runs into the water and disappears. The biologist, excited by the prospect of aquatic life, runs into the water and disappears. The chemist thinks for a moment, pulls out a notebook, and writes "the physicist and biologist are soluble in water. - My paraphrase of unknown author
  • Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. - Douglas Adams
  • Instead of asking 'can you give me a rocket on my shovel to shovel this shit faster?', ask why you're shoveling shit at all; can a robot do this? - Michael Pavlovich in a GDC 2015 talk about concept/production art pipelines
  • It is highly desirable that the machine itself should carry out as much as possible of the clerical work [i.e. loading code, decoding instructions] involved in drawing up the program; the chance of error is then reduced, and the programmer is left free to concentrate his attention on the more essential aspects of the program. - Programming for an Electronic Digital Computer
  • The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than is needed to produce it. - Brandolini's Law
  • I admire its purity. A survivor...unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality. - Ian Holm playing Ash in Alien (1979)
  • Basically, you’re either dealing with Mossad or not-Mossad. If your adversary is not-Mossad, then you’ll probably be fine if you pick a good password and don’t respond to emails from ChEaPestPAiNPi11s@ virus-basket.biz.ru. If your adversary is the Mossad, YOU’RE GONNA DIE AND THERE’S NOTHING THAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT. - James Mickens on threat models
  • A distributed computer system’s resilience is not defined by its lack of errors; it’s defined by its ability to survive many, many, many errors. - Charity Majors, ["I test in prod"]
  • A zero-sum view would assume that apparent oppositions are fundamental, e.g., that appealing to the JS crowd inherently hurts the C++ one. A positive-sum view starts by seeing different perspectives and priorities as legitimate and worthwhile, with a faith that by respecting each other in this way, **we can find strictly better solutions than we can when optimizing solely for one perspective.** - Aaron Turon, [listening and trust, part 2]
  • if everyone is yelling, truly listening becomes very painful, and you “grow a thicker skin” in part by learning to not take other people’s feelings so seriously… which means they need to yell louder… - Aaron Turon, listening and trust, part 2
  • "All fiction is about the Now of the fiction writer; how can it be about anything else? ... What writers of science fiction and of the fantastic do is write about ourselves - Neil Gaiman, foreword to the Penguin Galaxy printing of Neuromancer
  • Anything can be a UFO if you're bad enough at identifying stuff - Unknown
 We ought to think through  
 what are the bad things  
 that could happen,  
 and what are the good things  
 that could happen  
 that we need to be ready for.  
 Nov. 23, 2001 (no time stamp)
 - a memo written by US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld arranged as verse in "THINGS THAT COULD GO WRONG" by Hart Seely
  • I really believe that if the political leaders of the world could see their planet from a distance of 100,000 miles, their outlook could be fundamentally changed. That all-important border would be invisible, that noisy argument silenced. - Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins
  • I sometimes think that stacks and trees is just about all computer science is about - Professor David Brailsford on Computerphile (9:16)
  • Excessive precision is not the mark of the expert. Nor is it the mark of the layman. It’s the mark of the intern. If you ask for the circumference of a circle that is about a mile across, the expert and the layman will both say about three miles. The intern will pull out a calculator and say 3.14159265 miles. - John D. Cook
  • I try to let the programming problem naturally occur and then show what to do about it - Kate Gregory in her excellent talk ["Stop Teaching C"], answering a question about teaching regular types to beginners
  • With a sufficient number of users of an API, it does not matter what you promise in the contract: all observable behaviors of your system will be depended on by somebody. - Hyrum's Law
  • If you need help getting unstuck, the first step is to create a reprex, or reproducible example. The goal of a reprex is to package your problematic code in such a way that other people can run it and feel your pain. Then, hopefully, they can provide a solution and put you out of your misery. - The Tidyverse help page
  • Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence! - Edsger W. Dijkstra (EWD249
  • Optimizers usually evolve to be excellent at optimizing the benchmark du jour -- what benchmark do we want to use? - Guido van Rossum (bpo42115)
  • The stock market is best understood as something like the Yeerk pool from Animorphs - Edward Ongweso Jr. in a Vice article about reddit gambling on gamestop stock
  • I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
  • Half of all 3 sigma events turn out to be correct. - Charles Stuart Bowyer, as told by Bruce Margon
  • A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems. - Alfred Renyi
  • I can feel the clockwork of the Solar System. - Nick Suntzeff
 We teach Kepler's laws in ASTR101. One of the easy things to
 show is that the closer the planet is to the Sun, the faster the
 speed in the orbit. This goes like speed is proportional to
 1/sqrt(R) where R is the distance from the Sun to the planet. But
 while the math is straightforward, the concept remains an
 abstraction to me. I would actually like to see the planets moving
 in my mind's eye. The conjunction is perfect for this. Looking at
 Jupiter and Saturn, I can make my mind see the three dimensions
 placing Saturn well behind Jupiter. But what has been lacking is
 cartoon in my mind of the planets moving. Taking out the rotation
 of the Earth, the orbits of the planets are almost always west to
 east. Jupiter is the closer planet, so it should be moving west to
 east more rapidly than Saturn. The fact that Saturn is father away
 also makes Saturn's easterly motion smaller. With those two facts
 in my head, I can "feel" the full motion of these planets at their
 distances with Jupiter overtaking Saturn, west to east, as in the
 graphic. I can feel the clockwork of the Solar System.
  • In order to demonstrate the Turing-completeness of constexpr for a compiler that implements the proposed resolution of core issue 1454, I wrote a Turing-machine simulator for clang's test suite - deeply cursed stackoverflow remarks on the Turing-completeness of C++ constexpr
  • Due to some questionable network security, you realize you might be able to solve both of these problems at the same time. - Advent of Code 2020, Day 4
  • A man hitting himself on the head with a hammer, asked why he is doing that, says, 'Because it feels good when I stop.' - Unknown, this phrasing cited from Phil Shaw
  • Your code's going to be way better designed if you consider more than one use of the code. - Ned Batchelder on Talk Python to Me #178
  • Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no. - Betteridge's law of headlines
  • Architecting is characterized by dealing with ill-structured situations, situations where neither goals nor means are known with much certainty... the architect cannot appeal to the client for a resolution, as the client has engaged the architect precisely to assist and advise in such a resolution. - The Art of Systems Architecting
  • Inside C++, there is a much smaller and cleaner language struggling to get out. - Bjarne Stroustrup
  • Many difficult and complicated problems require a combination of the skills of management and the insights of engineering. Yet often, the difficulty managers and engineers have in understanding each other's view of the world thwarts the melding of their skills to truly solve a problem. In isolation, a manager can feel rewarded watching the organisation he created to work the problem grow larger and more important. Rewardingly occupied too, is the engineer who finds 'fix' after 'fix,' each revealing another aspect of the problem that requires yet another fix. Neither realises, in their absorption in doing what they love, that the problem is still there and continues to cause difficulties. - John Walker, in The Hacker's Diet
  • As so often happens to me, nobody knew what the fuck I was talking about. - Rudy Rucker
  • _Who are we trying to teach_ must precede _what are we trying to teach_ as a fundamental consideration. Teaching methods must reflect the first of those questions at least as much as the second. - Gabor Maté, "Scattered Minds"
  • What, after all, does it mean to provide an appropriate education to a student? Frankly, nobody knows. Appropriate education is relative. It depends on the kid. Some seventeen-year-olds need to be able to factor polynomials and deconstruct Ivanhoe; other seventeen-year-olds need to learn to recognize common visual cues: skull and crossbones mean poison,do not touch, stay away. And there are a lot of seventeen-year-olds in between. It's hard to tell who requires what... - Allyson Goldin in (originally published in Harper's Magazine "The incoherent brain"
  • Alan is lost in the sludgy zone that is the learning process, that mire lurking between knowledge presented and knowledge absorbed. It is a dangerous patch, as perilous as the distance between seeing and believing, and the words, the concepts, the bits of data that get stuck there disappear forever, leaving nothing but residual traces of doubt. - Allyson Goldin in (originally published in Harper's Magazine "The incoherent brain"
  • There is as yet insufficient data for a meaningful answer. - descendents of Multivac in The Last Question
  • There is a replica of this Model in the Museum of Traffic and Technology in Berlin. Back then it didn't function well, and in that regard the replica is very reliable -- it also doesn't work well. - Konrad Zuse, about the Deutsches Technikmuseum Berlin's exhibit of his Z1 mechanical computer
  • Leap in and try things. If you succeed, you can have enormous influence. If you fail, you still learned something, and your next attempt is sure to be better for it. - Brian Kernighan
  • As long as there were no machines, programming was no problem at all; when we had a few weak computers, programming became a mild problem, and now we have gigantic computers, programming had become an equally gigantic problem. In this sense the electronic industry has not solved a single problem, it has only created them, it has created the problem of using its products. - Edsger Dijkstra, "The Humble Programmer" (EWD#340)
  • In theory there is no difference between theory and practice, while in practice there is? - Benjamin Brewster
  • A wise engineer once said that all systems, regardless of composition, do one of three things: blow up, oscillate, or stay about the same. - John Walker, in The Hacker's Diet
  • Nous devons donc envisager l'état présent de l'universe comme l'effet de son état antérieur, et comme la cause de celui qui va suivre. - Pierre-Simon Laplace in his "Essai philosophique sur les probabilités", translated as: We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future.
  • Niceness has nothing to do with this whole matter of being oppressive to others. Peggy McIntosh
  • A common fallacy is to assume authors of incomprehensible code will somehow be able to express themselves lucidly and clearly in comments. - Kevlin Henney
  • Today I wouldn't get an academic job. It's as simple as that. I don't think I would be regarded as productive enough. - Peter Higgs
  • The purpose of a system is what it does. - Stafford Beer
  • Everyone knows that debugging 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, "The Elements of Programming Style", 2nd edition, chapter 2.
  • Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. - Carl Sagan
  • When I began my physical studies [in Munich in 1874] and sought advice from my venerable teacher Philipp von Jolly...he portrayed to me physics as a highly developed, almost fully matured science...Possibly in one or another nook there would perhaps be a dust particle or a small bubble to be examined and classified, but the system as a whole stood there fairly secured, and theoretical physics approached visibly that degree of perfection which, for example, geometry has had already for centuries. - Max Planck in a 1924 lecture
  • There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.' - Isaac Asimov, "A Cult of Ignorance," 1980 available at Aphelis
  • Not to lose time, not to get caught / Not to be left behind, not, please! to resemble / The beasts who repeat themselves, or a thing like water / Or stone whose conduct can be predicted, these / Are our common prayer, whose greatest comfort is music / Which can be made anywhere, is invisible, / And does not smell. - W.H. Auden, "In Praise of Limestone"
  • Most mathematicians are not writing for people. They're writing for God the Mathematician. And they're hoping God will give them a pat on the back and say 'yes, that's exactly how I think about it.' - John Carlos Baez on Twitter
  • Each Hackernews expresses the foundational nature of whatever shitty build tool they espouse, patiently explaining to one another that their disparate habits constitute natural laws, necessitating the canonization of the resulting trash moussaka. - n-gate.com, 1 Apr 2020, synopsizing an article shared on Orange Website by the title of "What the heck is pyproject.toml?"
  • Ludwig Boltzman, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics. Perhaps it will be wise to approach the subject cautiously. - D.L. Goodstein, "States of Matter"
  • Work expands to as to fill the time available for its completion - C. Northcote Parkinson
  • Two of the most important characteristics of good design are discoverability and understanding. Discoverability: Is it possible to even figure out what actions are possible and where and how to perform them? Understanding: What does it all mean? How is the product supposed to be used? What do all the different controls and settings mean? - Don Norman, "The Design of Everyday Things"
  • Make things work. Profile. Make things fast. In this order. - Freenode's ##C++-general
  • [I do not] carry such information in my mind since it is readily available in books. ...The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think. - Albert Einstein
  • I look for puzzles. I look for interesting problems that I can solve. I don't care whether they're important or not, and so I'm definitely not obsessed with solving some big mystery. That's not my style. - Freeman Dyson
  • Understanding a paper somebody else wrote is always more useful than writing a paper nobody understands. - jarpenter2 in Freenode ##physics, Feb 13 2020
  • The only reason coders’ computers work better than non-coders’ computers is coders know computers are schizophrenic little children with auto-immune diseases and we don’t beat them when they’re bad. - Programming Sucks
  • Of all the souls I have encountered in my travels, his was the most human. - James T. Kirk
  • Monte Carlo is an extremely bad method; it should only be used when all alternative methods are worse. -- Alan Sokal
  • Entropy always comes for its due, and that's what even lobsters must accept. - Juni on Twitter
  • What reinforcement we may gain from hope, if not - what resolution from despair. - John Milton, Paradise Lost
  • The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy. - Albert Camus, "The Myth of Sisyphus"
  • One sometimes sees this referred to as “a Green’s function.” This is a grammatical abomination, which is as wrong as calling an apple pie “an apple’s pie.” There are numerous offenders in the physics community. - Christopher Pope's notes on Electrodynamics
  • The process of preparing programs for a digital computer is especially attractive, not only because it can be economically and scientifically rewarding, but also because it can be an aesthetic experience much like composing poetry or music. - Donald Knuth
  • My goal was to ensure that all use of references should be absolutely safe, with checking performed automatically by the compiler. But I couldn't resist the temptation to put in a null reference, simply because it was so easy to implement. This has led to innumerable errors, vulnerabilities, and system crashes, which have probably caused a billion dollars of pain and damage in the last forty years. - Tony Hoare, inventor of the null reference
  • One of the characteristics of successful scientists is having courage. Once you get your courage up and believe that you can do important problems, then you can. If you think you can't, almost surely you are not going to. - Richard Hamming
  • But I am very poorly today and very stupid and hate everybody and everything. - Charles Darwin
  • Ipse se nihil scire id unum sciat. - Plato, in his Apology, from whence we get the paraphrase I know that I know nothing
  • It is not even wrong. - Attributed to Wolfgang Pauli by Rudolf Peierls
 Quite recently, a friend showed him the paper of a young physicist
 which he suspected was not of great value but on which he wanted Pauli’s
 views. Pauli remarked sadly, 'It is not even wrong.
  • I don’t think anything I do will change the world. But nothing in the world releases me from my obligation to try. - Ehren Tool
  • I feel obliged to say that the emotional universes we inhabit are so distinct, and in deepest ways opposed, that nothing fruitful or sincere could ever emerge from association between us. - Bertrand Russell replying to British fascist Oswalt Molsey's invitation to lunch.
  • The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. - Carl Sagan
  • The answer always seemed obvious to me; There is no threshold that makes us greater than the sum of our parts. No inflection point at which we become fully alive. We can't define consciousness because consciousness does not exist. - Robert Ford, Westworld
  • I think you may judge of a man’s character by the persons whose affection he seeks. If you find a man seeking only the affection of those who are great, depend upon it he is ambitious and self-seeking; but when you observe that a man seeks the affection of those who can do nothing for him, but for whom he must do everything, you know that he is not seeking himself, but that pure benevolence sways his heart. - Charles Spurgeon
  • I was supposed to be a doctor. I was supposed to go to Princeton. And everything I was supposed to do I didn't. - Samuel Barber
  • How can you say such cruel things to the flightless bird - grym
  • We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. - Martin Luther King Jr.
  • Any coding standard which insists on syntactic clarity at the expense of algorithmic clarity should be rewritten. If your employer fires you for using this trick, tell them that repeatedly as the security staff drag you out of the building. - Simon Tatham on code standards
  • A topologist is someone who cannot tell the difference between a doughnut and a coffee cup. - Unknown, quoted from Hubbard and West
  • The conclusion is, that the question 'what are the limits' should be replaced by the alternative question 'what strategies are available to go beyond limitations.' - Th. Stammbach
  • The best way to keep a secret is to never have it. - Julian Assange
  • We are a way for the Cosmos to know itself. - Carl Sagan
  • Our species is young and curious and brave. It shows much promise... - Carl Sagan
  • The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both. - Carl Sagan in "The Demon-Haunted World"
  • Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. - Lord Acton
  • Now I will have fewer distractions. - Leonhard Euler, on his loss of vision
  • In fact, if I had to design a mechanism for the express purpose of **destroying** a child's natural curiosity and love of pattern-making, I couldn't possibly do as good a job as is currently being done—I simply wouldn't have the imagination to come up with the kind of senseless, soul-crushing ideas that constitute contemporary mathematics education. - Paul Lockhart
  • The only thing that I’ve ever wanted for Christmas is an automated way to generate strong yet memorable passwords. - James Mickens in This World of Ours
  • We do not need medals. We do not need authorities deciding about who is a 'hero' and who is 'illegal.' In fact, they are in no position to make this call, because we are all equal. - Pia Klemp
  • In the fields of observation chance favours only the prepared mind. - Louis Pasteur in a lecture at the University of Lille (7 Dec 1854)
  • He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you. - Friedrich Nietzsche, in Beyond Good and Evil
  • Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. - Michael Pollan
  • The destructive impact [of computing] on the brain is demonstrated by the programming languages people write. - Peter Welch in "Programming Sucks"
  • Hence, anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when the spirit...looks down into its own possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself. - Søren Kierkegaard
  • In our reasonings concerning matter of fact, there are all imaginable degrees of assurance, from the highest certainty to the lowest species of moral evidence. A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence. - David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
  • Sagredo: My brain already reels. My mind, like a cloud momentarily illuminated by a lightning-flash, is for an instant filled with an unusual light, which now beckons to me and which now suddenly mingles and obscures strange, crude ideas. From what you have said it appears to me impossible... Salviati: So it is, Sagredo. - Galileo Galilei's Dialogo
  • All computers are just carefully organized sand. - XKCD
  • The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!', but 'That's funny ...' - Isaac Asimov
  • Die ganzen Zahlen hat der liebe Gott gemacht, alles andere ist Menschenwerk. - Leopold Kronecker. Translated: "The whole numbers were made by the good Lord, all else is the work of humanity."
  • Wir müssen wissen. Wir werden wissen. - David Hilbert's epitaph, translated as We must know. We will know.
  • It seems that perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove. - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (translated)
  • If you’ve done modeling and computation, you will appreciate how hard it is to be sure what’s a local minimum and what’s a global one, and so it is with your emotional state. - Derek Lowe, on what not to do in grad school
  • You don't understand something until you've forgotten it twice. - John Zweck, explaining his decision to teach a course in differential geometry — which was his dissertation subject — at UMBC.
  • If a lion could speak, we could not understand him. - Ludwig Wittgenstein
  • They say if scratch a cynic, you'll find a disappointed idealist, and I would admit that somewhere beneath all of this, there's a little flicker of a flame of idealism... - George Carlin, in an Archive of American Television interview
  • It's very hard to imagine all the crazy things that things really are like. - Richard Feynman
  • How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks. - Dorothy L. Sayers
  • Re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul - Walt Whitman
  • To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. - Joan Didion, "On Self Respect
  • Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it. - Niels Bohr
  • Не невозможно, но очень трудно. - "Not impossible, but very difficult." Taught to me by Igor Meshkov at COOL'15, where there was a lot of talk about muon cooling, making the context extra amusing.
  • An author's ability to solve conflict with magic is DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL to how well the reader understands said magic. - Brandon Sanderson's First Law of Magic
  • Focused, hard work is the real key to success. Keep your eyes on the goal, and just keep taking the next step towards completing it. If you aren't sure which way to do something, do it both ways and see which works better. - John Carmack
  • Too many focus on the effort when they should be focused on impact. A way to address this is through quantification and measurement. As I am fond of saying in regards to efforts (or individuals) trapped here: **Lots of RPM, little MPH.** - Peiter "Mudge" Zatko
  • adulthood is maybe the accumulation of hundreds of quiet subroutines that operate tracelessly - @eigenrobot
  • With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk. - Attributed to John von Neumann by Enrico Fermi (as quoted by Freeman Dyson) (see also John D. Cook's "How to fit an elephant"
  • Whitepapers are like drinking orange juice concentrate. - Jason C. McDonald (CodeMouse92 via freenode)
  • QA Engineer walks into a bar. Orders a beer. Orders 0 beers. Orders 999999999 beers. Orders a lizard. Orders -1 beers. Orders a sfdeljknesv. - Bill Sempf
  • There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics. - Attributed to British PM Benjamin Disraeli by Mark Twain
  • Microorganisms needed a better way to get around, so they invented animals. - Unknown, my paraphrase
  • Your taste will always exceed your ability. - Mika McKinnon at ComSciCon Houston 2019
  • Michel Ardan chatted first with Barbicane, who did not answer him, and then with Nicholl, who did not hear him, with Diana, who understood none of his theories, and lastly with himself, questioning and answering, going and coming, busy with a thousand details; at one time bent over the lower glass, at another roosting in the heights of the projectile, and always singing. In this microcosm he represented French loquacity and excitability, and we beg you to believe that they were well represented. - Jules Verne's "From the Earth to the Moon"
  • Michel Ardan allowed himself to be convinced to a certain extent. He admitted that the thing was difficult but not impossible, a word which he never uttered. - Jules Verne's "From the Earth to the Moon"
  • Never overestimate the knowledge of your readers/viewers, and never underestimate their intelligence. - adapted from a quote by Glenn Frank (and taught to me by science comedian Brian Malow)
  • Courage is being scared to death, but saddling up anyway. - John Wayne
  • Most bugs are a result of the execution state not being exactly what you think it is. - John Carmack
  • Every kid starts out as a natural-born scientist, and then we beat it out of them. A few trickle through the system with their wonder and enthusiasm for science intact. - Carl Sagan
  • If you pay a man a salary for doing research, he and you will want to have something to point to at the end of the year to show that the money has not been wasted. In promising work of the highest class, however, results do not come in this regular fashion., in fact years may pass without any tangible results being obtained, and the position of the paid worker would be very embarrassing and he would naturally take to work on a lower, or at any rate, different plane where he could be sure of getting year by year tangible results which would justify his salary. The position is this: you want this kind of research, but if you pay a man to do it, it will drive him to research of a different kind. The only thing to do is to pay him for doing something else and give him enough leisure to do research for the love of it. - (originally from Lord Rayleigh's biography of Thomson J.J. Thomson
  • Captain, the most elementary and valuable statement in science, the beginning of wisdom, is, 'I do not know'. I do not know what that is, sir. - Lt. Cmdr. Data
  • What is the velocity between these two points? The distance between them is a, and the velocity is just da/dt, which is 1. Well, I don't want it to be 1, because 1 stands for the speed of light, and uh... - Leonard Susskind, in his first lecture on cosmology (quote @ 42:00)
  • From out there on the Moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.’ - Edgar Mitchel, Apollo 14 astronaut, speaking in People magazine on 8 April 1974.
  • Man alone chimes the hour. And, because of this, man alone suffers a paralyzing fear that no other creature endures. A fear of time running out. - Mitch Alborn
  • A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools. - Douglas Adams (from Mostly Harmless)
  • Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. - Arthur C. Clarke
  • The road to wisdom? Well's it's plain, and simple to express: Err, and err, and err again, but less, and less, and less. - Piet Hein
  • Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes. - Goodhart's Law, coined by Charles Goodhart, phrased by Marily Strathern as When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
  • Aristotle says that “an iron ball...reaches the ground before a one-pound ball has fallen a single cubit.” I say that they arrive at the same time. You find, on [65] making the experiment, that the larger outstrips the smaller by two finger-breadths...now you would not hide behind these two fingers the ninety-nine cubits of Aristotle, nor would you mention my small error and at ghe same time pass over in silence his very large one. - Galileo Galilei being sassy