Just some quotes I've collected over the years for various reasons. They're organized chronologically from earliest to latest addition My only rule is that once something is added it cannot be removed. That means there's some stuff in here that doesn't make any sense and some stuff that's pointless. "Excellent idea sir. And if I might make an early suggestion sir? The gun, sir. A gentleman never ever points his gun at his butler. Not even in America where they point guns at almost everything." -Children of the Lamp: The Grave Robbers of Genghis Khan by P.B Kerr "I made it by grinding up the stalks of a most extraordinary plant that I found growing on the shores of the Mirror Lakes" " What in The Realm made you think of burning it?" asked Tobias. Oswyn winked. "I burn everything." -The Rise of the Wyrm Lord by Wayne Thomas Batson "Whereas I?" He chuckled bitterly. "I must kill my friends and murder my principles and throw my sons on the funeral pyre of state." He swayed a moment, then turned unsteadily for the door. "Because I..." He spread his arms in an expansive gesture as he exited. "I am the goddamned King!" -The Poison Throne by Celine Kiernan “Be a better king than your father was,” Conner said softly. “You come to the throne at a time of great upheaval.” “There is always upheaval,” I said. “only the reason for the troubles change.” “You have the betrothed princess. She will support you.” “She hates me.” “So do I. And I just crowned you king.” - The False Prince by Jennifer A. Nielsen “I am not a Federalist because I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all. Therefore I protest to you I am not of the party of Federalistsm. But I am much farther from that of the Antifederalists.” - Thomas Jefferson to Francis Hopkinson, March 1789 “Always an honest man, often a great one, but sometimes absolutely mad.” - A description of John Adams by Benjamin Franklin "You have many chances to change your life, but they do run out. A life is never set in stone, but grows like the roots of a tree in fertile ground. Still, over time, the strength to find new ground leaves you." "One can hope. Hope, after all, is the fire that burns forever." - The Saint of Dragons by Jason Hightman "Say the A people and the B people get in an argument. The A people do something that hurts the B people. The B people strike back to get even. But that just makes the A people angry all over again. They say 'You hurt us, so we're going to hurt you.' It keeps on like that. One bad thing leads to a worse bad thing, on and on. ... When the fight is over, what do we have? A place destroyed, People who hate each other." "This is such an amazing world ... I love it here, except for the troubles with people. " - The People of Sparks by Jeanne DuPrau “A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called "leaves") imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time ― proof that humans can work magic.” - Carl Sagan ""Your dream is a good one," said Ender. "It's the dream of every living creature. The desire that is the very root of life itself: To grow until all the space you can see is part of you, under your control. It's the desire for greatness. There are two ways to fulfill it, though. One is to kill anything that is not yourself, to swallow it up or destroy it, until nothing is left to oppose you. But that way is evil. You say to all the universe, Only I will be great and to make room for me the rest of you must give up even what you already have, and become nothing. Do you understand Human, that if we humans felt this way, acted this way, we could kill every piggy in Lusitania and make this place our home. How much of your dream would be left, if we were evil?" Human was trying hard to understand. "I see that you gave us great gifts, when you could have taken from us even the little that we had. But why did you give us the gifts, if we can't use them to become great?" "We want you to grow, to travel among the stars. Here on Lusitania we want you to be strong and powerful, with hundreds of thousands of brothers and wives. We want to teach you to grow many kinds of plants and raise many different animals...But why does a single piggy in any other forest have to die, just so you can have these gifts? And why would it hurt you in any way, if we also gave the same gifts to them?" "If they become just as strong as we are then what have we gained?" What am I expecting this brother to do, though Ender. His people have always measured themselves against other tribes. Their forest isn't fifty hectares or five hundred-it's either larger or smaller than the forest of the tribe to the west or south. - Xenocide by Orson Scott Card “I always felt such pity for you humans because you can only think of one thing at a time and your memories were so imperfect and . . . now I realize that just getting through a day without killing somebody can be an achievement.” “It gets to be a habit. Most of us manage to keep our body count quite low. It’s the neighborly way to live.” - Children of the Mind by Orson Scott Card “They why bother doing everything, Grego? Because someday you will die. Why should anyone ever have children? Someday they will die, their children will die, all children will die. Someday stars will wind down or blow up. Someday death will cover us all like the water of a lake and perhaps nothing will ever come to the surface to show that we were ever there. But we were there, and during the time we lived, we were alive. That’s the truth-what is, what was, and what will be-not what could be, what should have been, what never can be. If we die, then our death has meaning to the rest of the universe. Even if our lives are unknown, the fact that someone lived here, and died, that will have repercussions, that will shape the universe.” - Children of the Mind by Orson Scott Card "I shall often go wrong through defect of judgement. When right, I shall often be thought wrong by those whose positions will not command a view of the whole ground. I ask your indulgence for my own errors, which will never be intentional, and your support against the errors of others" - Thomas Jefferson's Inaugural Address "Learn the facts, and the origins behind the facts, and make up your own damn mind. That's why you have one." - http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/rants/bsd4linux/01 "I have a lot of regrets, but I think my essential failing was that I lost touch with the accountability and responsibility that comes with being a member of society. A friend of mine once told me to behave as though everyone could see what I was doing all the time. A sure way to avoid engaging in illegal conduct, but I guess I wasn't a believer because when I was invisible, I forgot all about this advice. I know now that we can't be invisible, and that it's dangerous thinking." - Max Vision, as quoted by Kevin Poulsen in Kingpin "If I had a letter, sealed it in a locked vault and hid the vault somewhere in New York. Then told you to read the letter, thats not security, thats obscurity. If I made a letter, sealed it in a vault, gave you the blueprints of the vault, the combinations of 1000 other vaults, access to the best lock smiths in the world, then told you to read the letter, and you still can't, thats security." -Bruce Schneier "The world's most secure computer in the world is powered down, encased in a solid block of concrete, lying at the bottom of the Challenger Deep. It is also the world's most useless computer." -Wouter Verhelst "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -George Bernard Shaw "Programming is, after all, much more fun than fighting." -Ian Jackson "So the universe is not quite as you thought it was. You'd better rearrange your beliefs, then. Because you certainly can't rearrange the universe." -Nightfall by Asimov/Silverberg "There are two kinds of fool. One says,"This is old and therefore good.” And one says, “This is new and therefore better.” " -John Brunner “I must say that I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a book.” -Groucho Marx "The game of science is, in principle, without end. He who decides one day that scientific statements do not call for any further test, and that they can be regarded as finally verified, retires from the game." -The Logic of Scientific Discovery by Sir Karl Popper "Future software is always bug-free and runs in O(1) time" -Keith Packard “Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That's when I will be truly dead - when I exist in no one's memory. I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people. When that person dies, the whole cluster dies,too, vanishes from the living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead?” ― Irvin D. Yalom http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/73/Pale_Blue_Dot.png "Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.” -Carl Sagan on the Pale Blue Dot "In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.” ― Carl Sagan "I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue. But as much as I want to believe that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural traditions that assert an afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest that it is more than wishful thinking.” ― Carl Sagan "Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors. The library connects us with the insight and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species. I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries.” ― Carl Sagan, Cosmos "The idea that God is an oversized white male with a flowing beard, who sits in the sky and tallies the fall of every sparrow is ludicrous. But if by 'God,' one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying... it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.” ― Carl Sagan "People are not stupid. They believe things for reasons. The last way for skeptics to get the attention of bright, curious, intelligent people is to belittle or condescend or to show arrogance toward their beliefs.” ― Carl Sagan "It is sometimes said that scientists are unromantic, that their passion to figure out robs the world of beauty and mystery. But is it not stirring to understand how the world actually works — that white light is made of colors, that color is the way we perceive the wavelengths of light, that transparent air reflects light, that in so doing it discriminates among the waves, and that the sky is blue for the same reason that the sunset is red? It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little bit about it” ― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space "We have designed our civilization based on science and technology and at the same time arranged things so that almost no one understands anything at all about science and technology. This is a clear prescription for disaster” ― Carl Sagan "We all have a thirst for wonder. It's a deeply human quality. Science and religion are both bound up with it. What I'm saying is, you don't have to make stories up, you don't have to exaggerate. There's wonder and awe enough in the real world. Nature's a lot better at inventing wonders than we are.” ― Carl Sagan, Contact "We live on a hunk of rock and metal that circles a humdrum star that is one of 400 billion other stars that make up the Milky Way Galaxy which is one of billions of other galaxies which make up a universe which may be one of a very large number, perhaps an infinite number, of other universes. That is a perspective on human life and our culture that is well worth pondering.” ― Carl Sagan "NULL is a block cipher the origins of which appear to be lost in antiquity. Despite rumors that the National Security Agency suppressed publication of this algorithm, there is no evidence of such action on their part. Rather, recent archaeological evidence suggests that the NULL algorithm was developed in Roman times, as an exportable alternative to Ceaser ciphers. However, because Roman numerals lack a symbol for zero, written records of the algorithm's development were lost to historians for over two millennia." - RFC 2410 "All programmers are playwrights, and all computers are lousy actors." -Unknown "Love is... a complex sequence of neurochemical reactions that makes people behave like idiots. It's similar to intoxication, but the hangover's even worse." - J. Jacques Questionable Content #1039 "When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realized that the Lord doesn't work that way so I stole one and asked Him to forgive me." - Emo Philips "Ban cryptography! Yes. Let's also ban pencils, pens and paper, since criminals can use them to draw plans of the joint they are casing or even, god forbid, create one time pads to pass uncrackable codes to each other. Ban open spaces since criminals could use them to converse with each other out of earshot of the police. Let's ban flags since they could be used to pass secret messages in semaphore. In fact let's just ban all forms of verbal and non-verbal communication -- let's see those criminals make plans now!" -Unknown "Why is it 'marketing' when a company helps itself to my information against my will and 'piracy' or 'industrial espionage' if I helped myself to THEIR information against their will ?" -Causality. “Computer perspective on Moore's Law: Human effort becomes twice as expensive roughly every two years.” -anonymous "Democracy is more dangerous than fire. Fire can't vote itself immune to water." - Michael Z. Williamson "The userbase for strong cryptography declines by half with every additional keystroke or mouseclick required to make it work." -Carl Ellison "...In the UNIX world, people tend to interpret `non-technical user' as meaning someone who's only ever written one device driver." - Daniel Pead "ubuntu is an ancient african word meaning 'I can't install debian.'" - unknown "Hey, that's not a bug, that's a feature! You know what the most complex piece of engineering known to man in the whole solar system is? Guess what – it's not Linux, it's not Solaris, and it's not your car. It's you. And me. And think about how you and me actually came about – not through any complex design. Right. "Sheer luck". Well, sheer luck, and: • Free availability and crosspollination through sharing of "source code", although biologists call it DNA. • A rather unforgiving user environment, that happily replaces bad versions of us with better working versions and thus culls the herd (biologists often call this "survival of the fittest"). • Massive undirected parallel development ("trial and error"). I'm deadly serious: we humans have never been able to replicate something more complicated than what we ourselves are, yet natural selection did it without even thinking. Don't underestimate the power of survival of the fittest. And don't ever make the mistake that you can design something better than what you get from ruthless massively parallel trial-and-error with a feedback cycle. That's giving your intelligence much too much credit. Quite frankly, Sun is doomed. And it has nothing to do with their engineering practices or their coding style." -Linus Torvalds "I'm personally convinced that computer science has a lot in common with physics. Both are about how the world works at a rather fundamental level. The difference, of course, is that while in physics you're supposed to figure out how the world is made up, in computer science you create the world. Within the confines of the computer, you're the creator. You get to ultimately control everything that happens. If you're good enough, you can be God. On a small scale. And I've probably offended roughly half the population on Earth by saying so. But it's true. You get to create your own world, and the only thing that limits what you can do are the capabilities of the machine--and, more and more often these days, your own abilities." -Linus Torvalds "...I think Open Source is the right thing to do the same way I believe science is better than alchemy. Like science, Open Source allows people to build on a solid base of previous knowledge, without some silly hiding. But I don't think you need to think that alchemy is "evil." It's just pointless because you can obviously never do as well in a closed environment as you can with open scientific methods." -Linus Torvalds "The fact is, there aren't just two sides to any issue, there's almost always a range of responses, and "it depends" is almost always the right answer in any big question." -Linus Torvalds "Why is it that all of the instruments seeking intelligent life in the universe are pointed away from Earth?" -unknown "You have many years to live--do things you will be proud to remember when you are old." - Shinka proverb. "Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you really want to test his character, give him power." - Abraham Lincoln "The true measurement of a person's worth isn't what they say they believe in, but what they do in defense of those beliefs...If you're not acting on your beliefs, then they probably aren't real." - Edward Snowden "The two hard things in computing: * naming things * cache invalidation * off-by-one errors" -Stig Sandbeck Mathisen "Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.” -George Bernard Shaw "If you are wondering why microkernels aren't even more widely used, well, there is a lot of inertia in the system. Why haven't Linux or Mac OS X replaced Windows? Well, there is a lot of inertia in the system. Most cars in Brazil can run on home-grown ethanol so Brazil uses relatively little oil for vehicle fuel. Why doesn't the U.S. do that and reduce its dependence on the volatile Middle East? Well, there is a lot of inertia in the system. Getting people to change, even to superior practices, is very hard." -Andrew S. Tanenbaum "This is the place where I slip in my golden rules. Number One is: 'Do unto others as you would want them to do unto you.' If you follow that rule you'll always know how to behave in any situation. Number Two is: 'Be proud of what you do.' Number Three: 'And have fun doing it.'" -Linus Torvalds "only by counting could humans demonstrate their independence of computers." - Douglas Adams "[T]he question of whether Machines Can Think, [...] is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim." - Edsger W. Dijkstra "The unfortunate truth seems to be that a system built to accommodate anything can provide provide a tyranny of choice and so we develop easy ways to make decisions." -Mike Rugnetta "What is a government but an institutionalized method of making sure somebody else does all the work?" - The Well of Ascension by Brandon Sanderson "when you’re putting things into a black box, even if you think you know exactly how that black box works, you’re trusting that the black box hasn’t changed" - Greg Kumparak “We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.” - Henry L. Mencken “Not using Microsoft products is like being a non-smoker 40 or 50 years ago: You can choose not to smoke, yourself, but it's hard to avoid second-hand smoke.” - Michael Tiemann “The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.” - Alice Walker “Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, ‘What! You too? I thought I was the only one!’” - C. S. Lewis "... The prejudices people feel about each other disappear when they get to know each other." - Kirk, "Elaan of Troyius", stardate 4372.5 "The worst thing that can happen to a socialist is to have his country ruled by socialists who are not his friends." - Ludwig von Mises "By contrast here, unless a person is prepared to forgo use of what for many has become a personal or professional necessity, he cannot help but accept the risk of surveillance...It is idle to speak of “assuming” risks in contexts where, as a practical matter, individuals have no realistic alternative." - Justice Marshall in Smith v Maryland "...both ideas and material possessions should be tools that serve us, rather than things we live in service to. When that relationship with material possessions is inverted, such that we end up living in service to them, the result is consumerism. When that relationship with ideas is inverted, the result is ideology or religion." - Moxie Marlinspike "As a young person, though, I think the best thing you can do is to ignore all of that and simply observe the older people working there. They are the future you. Do not think that you will be substantially different. Look carefully at how they spend their time at work and outside of work, because this is also almost certainly how your life will look. It sounds obvious, but it’s amazing how often young people imagine a different projection for themselves." - Moxie Marlinspike on choosing a career "UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity." - Dennis Ritchie “There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.” – C.A.R. Hoare, The 1980 ACM Turing Award Lecture "Rebellion is not simply vile murder, but is like a great fire that kindles and devastates a country; it fills the land with murder and bloodshed, makes widows and orphans, and destroys everything, like the greatest calamity. Therefore, whosoever can, should smite, strangle, and stab, secretly or publicly, and should remember that there is nothing more poisonous, pernicious, and devilish than a rebellious man. Just as one must slay a mad dog, so, if you do not fight the rebels, they will fight you, and the whole country with you." - Martin Luther "...the proper response to a perceived ad hominem attack is not, "That's ad hominem! You suck! All your reasoning is crap!" The proper response is "How is that relevant?" Because it might be in some way that you just haven't noticed yet." - Laurence Perkins "Ingenious ideas are simple. Ingenious software is simple. Simplicity is the heart of the Unix philosophy. The more code lines you have removed, the more progress you have made. As the number of lines of code in your software shrinks, the more skilled you have become and the less your software sucks." - suckless.org/philosophy "In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head for headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he's the controller— and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land." — Richard Feynman "Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for." - "The Mentor" "the right to free speech is the right to express oneself without state retaliation. It is not a right to speak without social retaliation. Speech has consequences. Among those consequences are condemnation, vituperation, scorn, ridicule, and pariah status. Those consequences represent other people exercising their free speech rights. That's a feature of the marketplace of ideas, not a bug." - Ken White “In studying the action of the Analytical Engine, we find that the peculiar and independent nature of the considerations which in all mathematical analysis belong to operations, as distinguished from the objects operated upon and from the results of the operations performed upon those objects, is very strikingly defined and separated.” - Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace; the basis of general computation theory “I’m not here to try and...change the way people think. I’m not here to change politics of the world. I’m not here to change some grand sweeping thing across the world, but if I can make...myself happy and then that happiness will spread to others. That happiness will shine through in the content that I make and I think does.” - jacksepticeye “The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." - James D. Nicoll “To study and not think is a waste. To think and not study is dangerous.” - Confucius “Unix lost its roots decades ago with X11, or maybe even before with the Berkeley socket API, which didn't work from a shell script. I think it would be cool if somebody tried to make Linux look more like Plan9, and maybe the current backlash will kick that off.” - Neale Pickett “It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others.” - John Andrew Holmes “Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.” - Groucho Marx “How many people here have telekinetic powers? Raise my hand.” - Emo Philips “Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat.” - John Lehman, Secretary of the US Navy 1981-1987 “Man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalizing animal.” - Robert Heinlein “All generalizations are false, including this one.” - Mark Twain “Ultimately, if people lose their willingness to recognize that there are times in our history when legality becomes distinct from morality, we aren't just ceding control of our rights to government, but our futures.” - Edward Snowden “Shit breaks. Complicated shit breaks more, and needs bigger nerds to fix it. Stay simple, and you can recover quicker.” - Neale Pickett "In theory there is no difference between theory and practice; in practice there is." - Unknown "In another exchange leaked [...], Zuckerberg explained to a friend that his control of Facebook gave him access to any information he wanted [...]: ZUCK: yea so if you ever need info about anyone at harvard ZUCK: just ask ZUCK: i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns FRIEND: what!? how’d you manage that one? ZUCK: people just submitted it ZUCK: i don’t know why ZUCK: they “trust me” ZUCK: dumb fucks" - http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/09/20/the-face-of-facebook "Common-sense, n.: the reason so many people can be wrong at the same time." - The Thinking Man's Dictionary, Kevin Solway “[On the Internet,] power and control will shift to those who are actually contributing something useful rather than just having lunch.” - Douglas Adams "Hard as nails and posh as cushions" - Brady Haran "Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life." - Terry Pratchett "Be more positive!!" - jacksepticeye "hacker ethic: n. 1. The belief that information-sharing is a powerful positive good, and that it is an ethical duty of hackers to share their expertise by writing open-source code and facilitating access to information and to computing resources wherever possible. 2. The belief that system-cracking for fun and exploration is ethically OK as long as the cracker commits no theft, vandalism, or breach of confidentiality." - Jargon File "On one hand, information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other." - Stewart Brand "There is nothing more odious than the majority. It consist of a few powerful men who lead the way; of accommodating rascals and submissive weaklings; and of a mass of men who trot after them without in the least knowing their own minds." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe "...the great truth of America: if you want to do something evil, put it inside something boring." - John Oliver "Cryptography is harder than it looks. Complexity is the worst enemy of security...The more complex a system is, the more lines of code, interactions with other systems, configuration options, and vulnerabilities there are. Implementing cryptography involves getting everything right, and the more complexity there is, the more there is to get wrong." - Bruce Schneier "This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children." - Dwight Eisenhower "Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge even where there is no river." - Nikita Khrushchev "The computer allows you to make mistakes faster than any other invention, with the possible exception of handguns and tequila" - Mitch Ratcliffe "Time is like a drug. Too much of it kills you." - Small Gods by Terry Prachett "There is always a choice. You mean I could choose certain death?" A choice nevertheless, or perhaps an alternative. You see I believe in freedom. Not many people do, although they will of course protest otherwise. And no practical definition of freedom would be complete without the freedom to take the consequences. Indeed, it is the freedom upon which all the others are based." - Going Postal by Terry Prachett "I think perhaps the most important problem is that we are trying to understand the fundamental workings of the universe via a language devised for telling one another when the best fruit is." - Terry Prachett "If people subscribed to this channel to watch me be good at games, oh you're in the wrong place. Oh you didn't just miss the off-ramp, you crashed into a sign and fell off the highway and your car is on fire and you're crawling out of that car right now." - jacksepticeye "Very frankly, I am opposed to people being programmed by others. My whole approach in broadcasting has always been “You are an important person just the way you are. You can make healthy decisions." - Fred Rogers "I knew very few English Lit majors who are equipped to teach me science, but I am very aware of the vast state of my ignorance and I am prepared to learn as much as I can from anyone, so I read on." - Isaac Asimov "The power of default is enormous." - Adam Borowski "Other than Trump, it’s been a fairly normal, predictable election cycle! Of course, that’s like saying “other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?”" - Nate Silver on the 2016 Election, May 31st 2016 "Exclusivity is a bad idea for everyone. It's basically a financial leveraging strategy that creates short term market distortion and long term crying." - Gabe Newell "Yes, of course duct tape works in a near-vacuum. Duct tape works anywhere. Duct tape is magic and should be worshipped." - The Martian by Andy Weir "All plants defend themselves with toxins but usually at such low levels that they are harmless and might even be good for us. There is a hypothesis that our immune system has evolved to rely on a continual barrage of plant chemicals to fine-tune its production of antioxidants. In other words, the very thing that makes vegetables healthy may be the fact that they are trying to kill us." - Unseen City by Nathaniel Johnson "The 10 Immutable Laws Of Security Law #1: If a bad guy can persuade you to run his program on your computer, it's not solely your computer anymore. Law #2: If a bad guy can alter the operating system on your computer, it's not your computer anymore. Law #3: If a bad guy has unrestricted physical access to your computer, it's not your computer anymore. Law #4: If you allow a bad guy to run active content in your website, it's not your website any more. Law #5: Weak passwords trump strong security. Law #6: A computer is only as secure as the administrator is trustworthy. Law #7: Encrypted data is only as secure as its decryption key. Law #8: An out-of-date antimalware scanner is only marginally better than no scanner at all. Law #9: Absolute anonymity isn't practically achievable, online or offline. Law #10: Technology is not a panacea." - Microsoft (https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh278941.aspx ) "It seems to be yaks all the way down. My computer is full of yaks. I guess all that unproductive hackery is the price we pay for productivity. But it sure doesn’t feel like productivity this week." - Ron Jeffries "Every man would like to be God, if it were possible; some few find it difficult to admit the impossibility.” - Bertrand Russell, Power: A New Social Analysis "The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter." - Winston Churchill "It is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it... anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job." - Douglas Adams “We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.” ― Viktor E. Frankl "Science, innit? We don't really know it. But we're trying it." - Matt Gray "Things do not get done until someone actually gets it done." - Jean-Baptiste Boric "It is a rare mind indeed that can render the hitherto non-existent blindingly obvious. The cry 'I could have thought of that' is a very popular and misleading one, for the fact is that they didn't, and a very significant and revealing fact it is too." - Douglas Adams "Without us [Free Software developers], people would study computer science and programming without ever having seen a real program in its entirety. That's like becoming writers without ever having read a complete book." - Matthias Ettrich "All bad precedents began as justifiable measures." - Gaius Julius Caesar in "The Conspiracy of Catiline" by Sallust "The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain." - Scotty (James Doohan), Star Trek III, The Search For Spock "We're all just pieces of dirt flying around on a bigger piece of dirt, flying around a giant ball of fire thats also flying around a big giant black hole thats flying around a giant universe that really doesn't give a shit about any of us." - jacksepticeye "[W]e found...that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. ... I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs." - Maurice Wilkes, 1949 "Politics is the thing we do to keep ourselves from murdering each other." - Maciej Cegłowski "if there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other, it is the principle of free thought -- not free thought for those who agree with us, but freedom for the thought that we hate." - Justice Brandeis, United States v. Schwimmer "Twitter is a private company. It has every right to suspend me or kick me off, however foolish its reason. It's got the right to free speech and free association. My rights have not been violated. I am not a victim. When you use a "free" service like Twitter and Facebook, you're buying into the policies and attitudes they pursue, for better or worse. Want a platform with no dumb policies? Create one or pay for one." - Ken White "The smallest quantity of bread that can be sliced and toasted has yet to be experimentally determined. In the quantum limit we must necessarily encounter fundamental toast particles which the author will unflinchingly designate here as "croutons"." - Cser, Jim. Nanotechnology and the Physical Limits of Toastability. AIR 1:3, June, 1995. "It may be that our sense of self, our awareness of our own identity, arises naturally from awareness of what’s happening in someone else’s mind. Our primate ancestors thrived and survived because they had profound social ties, they fought and struggled and died for each other, because they spent all this time looking at each other, face-to-face, and developed the evolutionary advantage that let them understand what the other monkey was thinking and feeling. That came first. Then the awareness of ourselves thinking, feeling, being perceived arises. Playing D&D, face to face, is the act of bonding with each other and reinforcing our own sense of self, and being part of a larger social group. It’s psychological and sociological simultaneously." - Matt Colville "So you were born, and that was a good day Someday you'll die, and that is a shame But somewhere in the between was a life of which we all dream And nothing and no one will ever take that away" - Tomas Kalnoky “We’re all flawed; we all do foolish things. It’s a privilege to fight vigorously for someone regardless of their mistakes, just as we would want to be supported when we err.” - Ken White "Alas, not all problems can be solved with code" - Chris Lamb “The price of freedom is the probability of crime.” - Dan Greer "One man's terrorist is another man's revolutionary" - https://reddit.com/r/HistoryMemes/comments/95cmeb/_/e3shheg/?context=1 “I think there's a idealistic, utopian tendency among a lot of technical people, myself included, to believe that any serious conflict or (from our perspective) incorrect decision is a bug in a process somewhere, and if we can just find the right process, we can fix the bugs. And it's just not true. Humans are messy and humans disagree, and sometimes stuff is just really hard, and is going to be really hard no matter how you do it.” - Russ Allbery “We are weak and censorious and we like to punish people for ideas that make us mad. This trend particularly burdens the powerless, because that’s the way the system works. Exceptions to free speech always have been, and always will be, applied disproportionately to people of color and the poor and unpopular political minorities.” - Ken White “I, like many other people in my profession, was always more comfortable with the technical and scientific classes in college. I liked math and equations and rules, dreaded essay courses, and struggled to engage with the mandatory humanities courses. Something that I'm still learning, two decades later, is the extent to which this was because the humanities are harder work than the sciences and I wasn't yet up to the challenge of learning them properly. The problems are messier and more fluid. The context required is broader. It's harder to be clear and precise. And disciplines like sociology deal with our everyday lived experience, which means that we all think we're entitled to an opinion.” - Russ Allbery "...the joy of a writer is to be read" - Paulo Coelho "'Just remember you’re not alone here.' I never know what to say to that. I am actually alone in my head, and that’s where 90 plus percent of my problems are." - Network Effect by Martha Wells "In the last analysis, our rejection of the request for jury nullification doctrine is a recognition that there are times when logic is not the only or even best guide to sound conduct of government. For machines, one can indulge the person who likes to tinker in pursuit of fine tuning. When men and judicial machinery are involved, one must attend to the many and complex mechanisms and reasons that lead men to change their conduct-when they know they are being studied; when they are told of the consequences of their conduct; and when conduct exercised with restraint as an unwritten exception is expressly presented as a legitimate option." - Harold Leventhal, United States v. Dougherty