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Jean Cocteau: Poet’s job
“Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet’s job. The rest is literature.” —Jean Cocteau.
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Mark Twain: Cowardice
“The surest protection against temptation is cowardice.” —Mark Twain.
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Nathaniel Hawthorne: Power of inflicting harm
“There are few uglier traits than this tendency — witnessed in men no worse than their neighbors — to grow cruel, merely because they possessed the power of inflicting harm.” —Nathaniel Hawthorne.
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Roger Ebert: Capital punishment
“The ability of so many people to live comfortably with the idea of capital punishment is perhaps a clue to how so many Europeans were able to live with the idea of the Holocaust: Once you accept the notion that the state has the right to kill someone and the right to define what is…
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David Letterman: Television
“Everyone has a purpose in life. Perhaps yours is watching television.” —David Letterman.
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Julie Burchill: Pretty face
“It has been said that a pretty face is a passport. But it’s not, it’s a visa, and it runs out fast.” —Julie Burchill.
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Pearl Zhu: Harmonize board
“A board can be harmonized through leadership humility, insightful business understanding, trustful culture and learning agility.” —Pearl Zhu.
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Linus Torvalds: I only coded it
“How should I know if it works? That’s what beta testers are for. I only coded it.” —Linus Torvalds.
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Redd Foxx: Health nuts
“Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing.” —Redd Foxx.
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Thurgood Marshall: America can do better
“We must dissent from the fear, the hatred, and the mistrust. We must dissent from a nation that buried its head in the sand waiting in vain for the needs of its poor, its elderly, and its sick to disappear and just blow away. We must dissent from a government that has left its young…
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Michael Joseph: Authors are easy to get on with
“Authors are easy to get on with — if you’re fond of children.” —Michael Joseph.
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Karl Popper: Rational attitude
“No rational argument will have a rational effect on a man who does not want to adopt a rational attitude.” —Karl Popper.
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Milton Berle: Committee
“A committee is a group that keeps the minutes and loses hours.” —Milton Berle.
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Fred Reuss: Great song
“I went to a Grateful Dead Concert and they played for SEVEN hours. Great song.” —Fred Reuss.
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Orson Welles: Three other people
“My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four. Unless there are three other people. “ — Orson Welles.
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Benjamin Spock: Religion
“Like my parents, I have never been a regular church member or churchgoer. It doesn’t seem plausible to me that there is the kind of God who watches over human affairs, listens to prayers, and tries to guide people to follow His precepts — there is just too much misery and cruelty for that. On…
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G Gordon Liddy: Easter Bunny
“There’s something different about us —different from people of Europe, Africa, Asia … a deep and abiding belief in the Easter Bunny.” —G. Gordon Liddy.
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Kerri Miller: Understanding changes
“If you’re actually doing TDD, you’re throwing away tests all the time, as your understanding of what the code is changes.” —Kerri Miller.
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Antoine de Saint-Exupery: Endless immensity of the sea
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” —Antoine de Saint-Exupery.
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Pearl Zhu: Progress
“Progress is in simplification, which often follows complexity.” —Pearl Zhu.
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Martyn A Ould: Things will fall apart
“…it is dangerous to think of roles nested in some sort of hierarchy: hierarchies smack strongly of decomposition and if we try to decompose responsibility by cutting it up into lumps we shall lose the notion of cooperation and collaboration, which is what makes so much happen in organizations. Things will fall apart.” —Martyn A…
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Martyn A Ould: Not because they are themselves
“…in an organization, people do things not because they are themselves but because they have a responsibility in the organization; they are perhaps paid to carry out that responsibility: they have a role in the organization.” —-Martyn A Ould, Business Process Management: A Rigorous Approach.
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Henry Ford: Keep your mind young
“Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.” —Henry Ford.
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Anne Frank: Giving
“No one has ever become poor by giving.” —Anne Frank.
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Susan Bridges: Essence of life
“The essence of life takes place in the neutral zone phase of transition. It is in that interim spaciousness that all possibilities, creativity and innovative ideas can come to life and flourish.”—Susan Bridges.
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Jean Jacques Rousseau: Wisdom
“What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness?” —Jean Jacques Rousseau.
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Vladimir Lenin: Goal of socialism
“The goal of socialism is communism.” ––Vladimir Lenin.
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Grant Wood: While I was milking a cow
“All the really good ideas I ever had came to me while I was milking a cow.” —Grant Wood.
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G K Chesterton: Tradition and the Church
“The Church has defended tradition in a time which stupidly denied and despised tradition. But that is simply because the Church is always the only thing defending whatever is at the moment stupidly despised. It is already beginning to appear as the only champion of reason in the twentieth century, as it was the only…
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Emma Goldman: No greater fallacy
“There is no greater fallacy than the belief that aims and purposes are one thing, while methods and tactics are another.” —Emma Goldman.
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Sun Tzu: Blend and harmonize
“Having collected an army and concentrated his forces, he must blend and harmonize the different elements thereof before pitching his camp.”—Sun Tzu.
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Kehlog Albran: Best of friends
“Even the best of friends cannot attend each other’s funeral.” —Kehlog Albran, The Profit.
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William Styron: Several lives
“A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.” —William Styron.
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Matthew Danish: Unix
“This is Unix we’re talking about, remember. It’s not supposed to be nice for the applications programmer.” —Matthew Danish on debian-devel.
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Michael T Fisher & Martin L Abbott: Monitor levels
‘“Is there a problem?” monitors are best answered by aligning the monitors to the measurements of shareholder and stakeholder value creation. Real-time business metrics and customer experience metrics should be employed. • “Where is the problem?” monitors may very well be out-of-the-box third-party or open source solutions that are relatively simple to deploy. Be careful…
