Author: LINUS FERNANDES
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Howard Aiken: Ram them down people’s throats
“Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.” —Howard Aiken.
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Kent Nerburn: Debt
“Debt defines your future, and when your future is defined, hope begins to die. You have committed your life to making money to pay for your past.” — Kent Nerburn.
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Walt Whitman: Secret
“Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons. It is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.” —Walt Whitman, poet.
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Neil Gaiman: Trust your obsessions
“Trust your obsessions. This is one I learned more or less accidentally. People sometimes ask whether the research or the idea for the story comes first for me. And I tell them, normally the first thing that turns up is the obsession: for example, all of a sudden I notice that I’m reading nothing but…
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Howard Marks: Manage risk and protect capital
“The main job of a steward of other people’s assets is to manage risk and protect capital.” —Howard Marks.
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Hal Clement: Speculation, science and superstition
“Speculation is perfectly all right, but if you stay there you’ve only founded a superstition. If you test it, you’ve started a science.” —Hal Clement, science fiction author.
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Bertrand Russell: On avoiding foolish opinions
“If an opinion contrary to your own makes you angry, that is a sign that you are subconsciously aware of having no good reason for thinking as you do. If some one maintains that two and two are five, or that Iceland is on the equator, you feel pity rather than anger, unless you know…
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John F Kennedy: Entrust
“We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.” —John F. Kennedy, 35th US president.
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Steven H Strogatz: Fundamentally naive
“Calculus is fundamentally naive. Almost childish in its optimism. Experience teaches us that change can be sudden, discontinuous, and wrenching. Calculus draws its power by refusing to see that. It insists on a world without accidents, where one thing leads logically to another. Give me the initial conditions and the law of motion, and with…
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Walker Percy: Worst of us
“We love those who know the worst of us and don’t turn their faces away.” —Walker Percy, author.
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Verity Stob: Cardinal rule
“The primary duty of an exception handler is to get the error out of the lap of the programmer and into the surprised face of the user. Provided you keep this cardinal rule in mind, you can’t go far wrong.” — Verity Stob.
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Hubert Humphrey: Freedom
“Freedom is hammered out on the anvil of discussion, dissent, and debate.” —Hubert Humphrey, US Vice President.
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Warren Buffett: No equations
“We have no equations [in making acquisitions]. Ben Graham used to say that it’s a lot like selecting a wife. You can thoughtfully establish certain qualities you’d like her to have, and then all of a sudden you meet someone and you do it.” —Warren Buffett.
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Warren Buffett: Change the future
“Human beings are human beings, and we all have weaknesses and peculiarities—and everything else. Don’t be too hard on yourself because you have some of those. But don’t be totally forgiving either. You can change the future. You can’t change the past. But you can change the future.” —Warren Buffett.
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Warren Buffett: They’re delusional
“It is interesting how many mistakes you can make if you just keep going. And Charlie used to talk about that ‘you just soldier through.’ You just keep going. But you still need luck. Anybody that says ‘I did it all myself’—they’re delusional.” —Warren Buffett.
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Harry Emerson Fosdick: Life
“Life is like a library owned by an author. In it are a few books which he wrote himself, but most of them were written for him.” —Harry Emerson Fosdick, preacher and author.
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Charlie Munger: Good general education
“I’m all in favor of a good general education. And I think it helps investment performance. And it helps business performance. And it helps one be a better citizen. And some of the things people say are quite memorable. And therefore, they’re helpful to the mind by the very ease of which they’re remembered. And…
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Margaret Fuller: Knowledge
“If you have knowledge, let others light their candles in it.” —Margaret Fuller, author.
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Charlie Munger: Luck
“Spend less than you earn. Invest shrewdly. Avoid toxic people and toxic activities. Try to keep learning all your life. And do a lot of deferred gratification. If you do all those things, you are almost certain to succeed. And if you don’t, you’ll need a lot of luck. And you don’t want to need…
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Arthur Conan Doyle: Even the little ones count for something
“I should dearly love that the world should be ever so little better for my presence. Even on this small stage we have our two sides, and something might be done by throwing all one’s weight on the scale of breadth, tolerance, charity, temperance, peace, and kindliness to man and beast. We can’t all strike…
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Charlie Munger: What could be simpler than that?
“If something is too hard, we move on to something else. What could be simpler than that?” —Charlie Munger.
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Mary Robinson: Absolute poverty
‘When I am asked, “What, in your view, is the worst human rights problem in the world today?” I reply: “Absolute poverty.” This is not the answer most journalists expect. It is neither sexy nor legalistic. But it is true.’ —Mary Robinson, 7th President of Ireland.
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John von Neumann: You just get used to them
“In mathematics, you don’t understand things. You just get used to them.” —John von Neumann, Mathematician, Engineer, and Computer Scientist.
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John Stuart Mill: Collision with error
“The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if…
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Andrew Singer: Art of debugging
“The art of debugging is figuring out what you really told your program to do rather than what you thought you told it to do.” —Andrew Singer.
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Ruskin Bond: Red roses and French beans
“Red roses for young lovers. French beans for longstanding relationships.” —Ruskin Bond, author.
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Howard Marks: Levered portfolios
“The magnification of gains and losses stemming from leverage is typically symmetrical: a given amount of leverage amplifies gains and losses similarly. But levered portfolios face a downside risk to which there isn’t a corresponding upside: the risk of ruin. The most important adage regarding leverage reminds us to ‘never forget the six-foot-tall person who…
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Don Norman: Hardest part of design
“The hardest part of design is keeping features out.” —Don Norman.
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Alan Kay: Change in perspective
“A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points.” —Alan Kay, computer scientist.
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Studs Terkel: Talk to one another
“I want people to talk to one another no matter what their difference of opinion might be.” —Studs Terkel, author and broadcaster.
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Katherine Anne Porter: Past
“The past is never where you think you left it.” —Katherine Anne Porter, writer and activist.
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Howard Marks: Optimism at the top, pessimism at the bottom
“The herd applies optimism at the top and pessimism at the bottom. Thus, to benefit, we must be skeptical of the optimism that thrives at the top, and skeptical of the pessimism that prevails at the bottom.” —Howard Marks.
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Hal Borland: Knowing trees, knowing grass
“Knowing trees, I understand the meaning of patience. Knowing grass, I can appreciate persistence.” —Hal Borland, author and journalist.
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Annie Dillard: How we spend our lives
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” —Annie Dillard, author.
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Mark Abley: Modern English
“Modern English is the Wal-Mart of languages: convenient, huge, hard to avoid, superficially friendly, and devouring all rivals in its eagerness to expand.” —Mark Abley, writer and editor.
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Leonard Cohen: Leafy life
“When your life is a leaf that the seasons tear off and condemn They will bind you with love that is graceful and green as a stem.” —Leonard Cohen, Sisters of Mercy.
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Alix Kates Shulman: Love, the hard way
“… most of us learned about love the hard way. Even warnings are probably useless, for somehow, despite the severest warnings of parents and friends, hundreds, thousands of women have forgotten themselves at the last minute and succumbed to the lies, promises, flatteries, or mere attentions of lusting, lovely men, landing themselves in complicated predicaments from which some of them never recovered…
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Alan Kay: Computer science inverts the normal
“Computer science inverts the normal. In normal science, you’re given a world, and your job is to find out the rules. In computer science, you give the computer the rules, and it creates the world.” —Alan Kay.
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Bono: Hammer it into shape
“The world is more malleable than you think and it’s waiting for you to hammer it into shape.” —Bono, musician and social activist.
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Logan Pearsall Smith: Denunciation of the young
“The denunciation of the young is a necessary part of the hygiene of older people, and greatly assists in the circulation of the blood.” —Logan Pearsall Smith.
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Matt Groening: Love is a snowmobile
“Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra, which suddenly flips over, pinning you underneath. At night the ice weasels come.” —Matt Groening, Love is Hell.
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Mary Lou Williams: Jazz, spirit of love
“Jazz arises from a spirit of love, it comes from the mind and heart and goes through the fingertips.” —Mary Lou Williams, pianist, arranger, and composer.
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Seth Klarman: When to sell or buy
“There is only one valid rule for selling: all investments are for sale at the right price. Decisions to sell, like decisions to buy, must be based upon underlying business value. Exactly when to sell — or buy — depends on the alternative opportunities that are available. Should you hold for partial or complete value…
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Rabindranath Tagore: Death
“Death is not extinguishing the light; it is putting out the lamp because the dawn has come.” —Rabindranath Tagore, poet, philosopher, author, songwriter, painter, educator, composer, Nobel laureate.
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Peggy Joyce: Alimony
“Alimony is a system by which, when two people make a mistake, one of them continues to pay for it.” —Peggy Joyce.
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Sigmund Freud: What progress
“What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.” —Sigmund Freud, neurologist, founder of psychoanalysis.
