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Doris Lessing: Only one way to read
“There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag – and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or…
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Charlie Chaplin: I don’t want to be an emperor
“I’m sorry but I don’t want to be an emperor. That’s not my business. I don’t want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone if possible; Jew, gentile, black man, white.” —Charlie Chaplin.
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Larry Tisch: Move the dial
“The most important thing is to stay focused on what matters. Most little things ultimately have no effect on an enterprise. It’s the big deals – and the big decisions that do. Don’t spend too much time on little things. The important choices and opportunities are the ones that move the dial.” —Larry Tisch.
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Thomas Szasz: Clear thinking
“Clear thinking requires courage rather than intelligence.” —Thomas Szasz.
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George Santayana: Gregarious animal
“A man is a gregarious animal, and much more so in his mind than in his body. He may like to go alone for a walk, but he hates to stand alone in his opinions.” —George Santayana.
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Arnold Toynbee: Civilizations in decline
“Civilizations in decline are consistently characterized by a tendency towards standardization and uniformity.” —Arnold Toynbee.
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Mark Fewster: Automating chaos
“It is far better to improve the effectiveness of testing first than to improve the efficiency of poor testing. Automating chaos just gives faster chaos.” —Mark Fewster.
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L Peter Deutsch: Human and divine
“To iterate is human, to recurse divine.” – —L. Peter Deutsch.
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Michael Sinz: Programming
“Programming Is Like S*x: One mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life.” — Michael Sinz.
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Charles Evans Hughes: Power, peril, hope
“No greater mistake can be made than to think that our institutions are fixed or may not be changed for the worse. … Increasing prosperity tends to breed indifference and to corrupt moral soundness. Glaring inequalities in condition create discontent and strain the democratic relation. The vicious are the willing, and the ignorant are unconscious…
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Donald Knuth: Beware of bugs
“Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.” —Donald Knuth.
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Strauss Zelnick: Real intelligence
“If you’re busy showing off your brains, you’re probably not listening closely enough, thinking hard enough or reaching the smartest conclusions.” —Strauss Zelnick.
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Charles Baudelaire: Kinsman in the clouds
“The poet is a kinsman in the clouds / Who scoffs at archers, loves a stormy day; / But on the ground, among the hooting crowds, / He cannot walk, his wings are in the way.” —Charles Baudelaire.
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Alexi Pappas: Don’t blame time
“’I don’t have enough time’ is not a useful phrase when it comes to anything related to your dream. It’s okay to actively choose to do something or not, but don’t blame time.” —Alexi Pappas.
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Johann Cryuff: Practically impossible
“What I know for certain is that the conclusions I would draw from experience are different from the ones based only on figures. Because if Lionel Messi scores three times out of every ten attempts, he might be criticized by someone who sees only the statistics for being just 30 per cent effective. I’d say:…
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Edward Gibbon: School of genius
“Conversation enriches the understanding but solitude is the school of genius.” —Edward Gibbon.
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Joan Didion: Live in it
“I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To…
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Richard Feynman: Fall in move with some activity
“Fall in love with some activity, and do it! Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn’t matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough. Work as hard and as much as you want to on the things you like to do the…
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Maya Angelou: Untold story
“There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside of you.” —Maya Angelou.
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Lord Chesterfield: Distrust
“Distrust all those who love you extremely upon a very slight acquaintance and without any visible reason.” —Lord Chesterfield.
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Washington Irving: Love is never lost
“Love is never lost. If not reciprocated, it will flow back and soften and purify the heart.” —Washington Irving.
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N V Plyter: It still isn’t your turn
“Sometime when you least expect it, Love will tap you on the shoulder… and ask you to move out of the way because it still isn’t your turn.” —N.V. Plyter.
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Kenneth Tynan: Conformity becomes corruption
“How far should one accept the rules of the society in which one lives? To put it another way: at what point does conformity become corruption? Only by answering such questions does the conscience truly define itself.” —Kenneth Tynan.
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Val Kilmer: Secret Service
“The Secret Service is a strange group. They don’t really have a leader. It’s not set up like a military. Each one is supposed to be able to act like a leader when something comes up.” —Val Kilmer.
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Jodi Piccoult: Why we love
“You don’t love someone because they’re perfect, you love them in spite of the fact that they’re not.” —Jodi Piccoult.
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Milan Kundera: True moral test
“Mankind’s true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.” —Milan Kundera.
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George Clason: Protest to the contrary
“That what each of us calls our ‘necessary expenses’ will always grow to equal our incomes unless we protest to the contrary.” —George Clason.
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Leo Buscaglia: My garden, my world
“A single rose can be my garden… a single friend, my world.” —Leo Buscaglia.
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Larry Winget: Integrity
“Every time you’re tempted to slack off or do or be a little less than you could, remember that you are a person of integrity who lives by the simple creed: do what you said you would do, when you said you would do it, the way you said you would do it.” —Larry Winget.
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Will Rogers: Liberty
“Liberty don’t work as good in practice as it does in speeches.” —Will Rogers.
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Daniel Dennett: Scholar
“A scholar is just a library’s way of making another library.” —Daniel Dennett.
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Les Schwab: Guts
“I’ve often said that sometimes guts pays off more than brains, because, if I had followed advice, and, if I had had a formal business education behind me, I never would have started the profit sharing contract in the form I did.” —Les Schwab.
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Josh Wolfe: Real insight
“I think the most valuable thing that AI is going to do, when you ask it questions and it comes up with the answers, assuming those answers are accurate and cross-correlated and double-checked, [is going to be when] they actually say, ‘Here are the five questions you didn’t ask.’ That is going to unleash real…
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Jeff G Bone: Punk
“Well, punk is kind of anti-ethical, anyway. Its ethics, so to speak, include a disdain for ethics in general. If you have to think about some-thing so hard, then it’s bullshit anyway; that’s the idea. Punks are anti-ismists, to coin a term. But nonetheless, they have a pretty clearly defined stance and image, and THAT…
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A J P Taylor: Nothing more corrupting
“There is nothing more agreeable in life than to make peace with the Establishment — and nothing more corrupting.” —A.J.P. Taylor.
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Marc Andreessen: Fake people
“You ask increasingly detailed questions and people have trouble making things up and things just fuzz into obvious BS, and fake founders basically have the same problem. They’re able to relay a conceptual theory of what they’re doing… But as they get into the details, it just fuzzes out. Whereas the true people that you…
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Mary Oliver: Visited this world
“When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real. I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened, or full of argument. I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.” —Mary Oliver.
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Baltasar Gracián: Counsel
“When you counsel someone, you should appear to be reminding him of something he had forgotten, not of the light he was unable to see.” —Baltasar Gracián.
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Jeff Bezos: Self-fulfilling prophecy
“Thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy.” —Jeff Bezos.
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Fred Rogers: Share responsibility
“We live in a world in which we need to share responsibility. It’s easy to say “It’s not my child, not my community, not my world, not my problem.” Then there are those who see the need and respond. I consider those people my heroes.” —Fred Rogers.
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Kobe Bryant: Long game
“If I wanted to implement something new into my game, I’d see it and try incorporating it immediately. I wasn’t scared of missing, looking bad, or being embarrassed. That’s because I always kept the end result, the long game, in my mind.” —Kobe Bryant.
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Henry Singleton: Stay flexible
“I know a lot of people have very strong and definite plans that they’ve worked out on all kinds of things, but we’re subject to a tremendous number of outside influences and the vast majority of them cannot be predicted. So my idea is to stay flexible.” —Henry Singleton.
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Alan Kay: Communications junkies
“Humans are communications junkies. We just can’t get enough.” —Alan Kay.
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Penelope Lively: Walking lexicons
“We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse: we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard.” —Penelope Lively.
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Christopher Fry: Halo
“What, after all, is a halo? It’s only one more thing to keep clean.” —Christopher Fry.
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Alan Cooper: Value of a prototype
“The value of a prototype is in the education it gives you, not in the code itself.” —Alan Cooper.
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Steve Jobs: Dent in the universe
“We’re here to put a dent in the universe.” —Steve Jobs.
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John Leonard: Memory of a small boldness
“In the cellars of the night, when the mind starts moving around old trunks of bad times, the pain of this and the shame of that, the memory of a small boldness is a hand to hold.” —John Leonard.
