Author: LINUS FERNANDES
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William Cowper: Foolish precedents
“To follow foolish precedents, and wink with both our eyes, is easier than to think.” —William Cowper.
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Thomas Jefferson: Not one redeeming feature
“I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition (Christianity) one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology.” —Thomas Jefferson.
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Sun Tzu: Unassailable
“The art of war teaches us to rely not on the likelihood of the enemy’s not coming, but on our own readiness to receive him; not on the chance of his not attacking, but rather on the fact that we have made our position unassailable.”—Sun Tzu.
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Lenny Bruce: Marijuana
“Marijuana will be legal some day, because the many law students who now smoke pot will someday become congressmen and legalize it in order to protect themselves.” —Lenny Bruce.
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Dominique Lapierre: India!
“India! A land of incomparable beauty and variety, and of hideous prospects like the slums of Bombay and Calcutta. A land where the sublime often stood side by side with the very worst this world can offer, but where both elements were always more vibrant, more human and ultimately more alluring than anywhere else.” —Dominique…
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Robert Green Ingersoll: Wild beast
“Courage without conscience is a wild beast.” —Robert Green Ingersoll.
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Tom Robbins: Kick his ass
‘”You mean, if you allow the master to be uncivil, to treat you any old way he likes, and to insult your dignity, then he may deem you fit to hear his view of things?” “Quite the contrary. You must defend your integrity, assuming you have integrity to defend. But you must defend it nobly,…
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Max Kanat-Alexander: Minor detail
“Some of the best programming is done on paper. Putting it into the computer is just a minor detail.” ― Max Kanat-Alexander.
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Andrew Sullivan: Monsters remain human beings
“Monsters remain human beings. In fact, to reduce them to a subhuman level is to exonerate them of their acts of terrorism and mass murder — just as animals are not deemed morally responsible for killing. Insisting on the humanity of terrorists is, in fact, critical to maintaining their profound responsibility for the evil they…
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Niccolo Machiavelli: New system
“It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage, than the creation of a new system. For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by the preservation of the old institutions and merely lukewarm defenders in those who would gain…
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Jean Piaget: New things
“The principal goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done; men and women who are creative, inventive, and discoverers, who can be critical and verify, and not accept, everything they are offered.” —Jean Piaget.
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Paul Dirac: Exact opposite
“In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in the case of poetry, it’s the exact opposite.” —Paul Dirac.
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James Thurber: The Fairly Intelligent Fly
‘A large spider in an old house built a beautiful web in which to catch flies. Every time a fly landed on the web and was entangled in it the spider devoured him, so that when another fly came along he would think the web was a safe and quiet place in which to rest.…
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Percy Bysshe Shelley: Charity
“Ah! what a divine religion might be found out if charity were really made the principle of it instead of faith.” —-Percy Bysshe Shelley.
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Charles Tomlinson: Locks
“A commercial, and in some respects a social, doubt has been started within the last year or two, whether or not it is right to discuss so openly the security or insecurity of locks. Many well-meaning persons suppose that the discussion respecting the means for baffling the supposed safety of locks offers a premium for…
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Jerry Seinfeld: Show-business survival
“It’s one thing to create. The other is you have to choose. ‘What are we going to do, and what are we not going to do?’ This is a gigantic aspect of show-business survival. It’s kind of unseen, what’s picked and what is discarded, but mastering that is how you stay alive.” — Jerry Seinfeld.
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Mark Twain: Public opinion
“Its name is Public Opinion. It is held in reverence. It settles everything. Some think it is the voice of God.” —Mark Twain.
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Brendan Behan: Shoot me in my absence
“When I came back to Dublin I was courtmartialed in my absence and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in my absence.” —Brendan Behan.
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Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: Empty attic
“You see, I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at…
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Paul Samuelson: I change my mind
“Well when events change, I change my mind. What do you do?”—Paul Samuelson, winner of 1970 Nobel Prize in Economics, about how his models of inflation during WWII kept changing over time, and he was criticized for “not being able to make up his mind.”
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James Baldwin: Books
“You think your pains and heartbreaks are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who have ever been alive.” —James Baldwin.
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Frank Lloyd Wright: Of the hill
“No house should ever be on any hill or on anything. It should be of the hill, belonging to it.” —Frank Lloyd Wright.
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Mick Jagger: Letting yourself go
“It’s all right letting yourself go as long as you can let yourself back.” —Mick Jagger.
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Herman Melville: Humanity over humanity
“Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed.” —Herman Melville.
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Laine Campbell & Charity Majors: Scale
“…scale has four pathways…• Scale vertically, via resource allocation. aka scale up • Scale horizontally, by duplication of the system or service. aka scale out • Separate workloads to smaller sets of functionality, to allow for each to scale independently, also known as functional partitioning • Split specific workloads into partitions that are identical, other…
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Bjarne Stroustrup: Two kinds of languages
“There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.” ―Bjarne Stroustrup.
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Carlos Arguelles: Waves
“When you surf, which waves you jump on and at what time you do makes all the difference.” — Carlos Arguelles.
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C Northcote Parkinson: Important
“The man who is denied the opportunity of taking decisions of importance begins to regard as important the decisions he is allowed to take.” —C. Northcote Parkinson.
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Oktal: .Net
“I think Microsoft named .Net so it wouldn’t show up in a Unix directory listing.” — Oktal.
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Rainer Rilke: Infinite distances
“Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see each other whole against the sky.” —Rainer Rilke.
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Karl Popper: Social creatures
“We are social creatures to the inmost centre of our being. The notion that one can begin anything at all from scratch, free from the past, or unindebted to others, could not conceivably be more wrong.” —Karl Popper.
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Sinead O’Connor: When you live with the Devil
“When you live with the Devil you learn there’s a God very quickly.” —Sinead O’Connor.
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Sinead O’Connor: Fire them instantly
“If you were the boss of a company and some of the employees of your company were known to sexually abuse children, you would fire them instantly.” —Sinead O’Connor.
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Sinead O’Connor: God and religion
“I think there’s a difference between God and religion.” —Sinead O’Connor.
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Sinead O’Connor: Haven for criminals
“As long as the house of The Holy Spirit remains a haven for criminals the reputation of the church will remain in ruins.” —Sinead O’Connor.
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Sinead O’Connor: Twitter
“Twitter is really for lonesome people, isn’t it? And I was desperately, desperately lonely.” —Sinead O’Connor.
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Sinead O’Connor: Abuse of children
“I don’t believe in heaven or hell. I don’t believe in any sort of burning. I don’t believe it’s right to teach children that God is somebody that will punish them if they misbehave, that God isn’t somebody who understands. That’s an abuse of children.” —Sinead O’Connor.
