Quotes

Taking some inspiration (and all of the quotes on this page so far) from Peter Norvig, I decided to post a quotations page. At some point in the future I may expand on these quotations with my own remarks, or maybe a snippet on why I thought it was important to post the quote here.


It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
- Aristotle

No art, however minor, demands less than total dedication if you want to excel in it.
- Leon Battista Alberti, (architect, painter and mathematician)

I cannot afford to waste my time making money.
- Louis Agassiz

Far and away the best prize life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.
- Theodore Roosevelt

A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants to do.
- Bob Dylan

In the beginning, the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
- Douglas Adams

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
- Albert Einstein

For all our conceits about being the center of the universe, we live in a routine planet of a humdrum star stuck away in an obscure corner ... on an unexceptional galaxy which is one of about 100 billion galaxies. ... That is the fundamental fact of the universe we inhabit, and it is very good for us to understand that.
- Carl Sagan

If you give someone Fortran, he has Fortran. If you give someone Lisp, he has any language he pleases.
- Guy L. Steele

If I have made myself clear, you must have misunderstood me.
- Alan Greenspan

Science is like sex: sometimes something useful comes out, but that is not the reason we are doing it
- Richard Feynman

I don't want to achieve immortality through my work ... I want to achieve it through not dying.
- Woody Allen

I am a man of fixed and unbending principles, the first of which is to be flexible at all times.
- Sen. Everett DirksenTurns out the border between genius and insanity is a pretty cheery place.
- Paul Graham on "The Land of Lisp"

Being smart is like owning a jeep: You'll still get stuck, but when you do, you'll be further away from help.
- lawpoop from Reddit

That's what it feels like to be an expert. Things just pop into your head, you have no idea where they came from, and they're right.
- Dave Thomas

It's easier to fix the bugs when you were the one who made them.
- Charles Lee

Programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.
- SICP

One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.
- Bertrand Russell

If you want more effective programmers, you will discover that they should not waste their time debugging, they should not introduce the bugs to start with.
- Edsger Dijkstra

If you can't explain it to a computer, you don't understand it.
- Craig Gidney