A lot of secular, modern people claim to be disillusioned whenever they learn that any smart person is religious. That's applicable to Newton as it is to any other religious smart person.
All information looks like noise until you break the code.
All people have religions. It's like we have religion receptors built into our brain cells, or something, and we'll latch onto anything that'll fill that niche for us.
And it happened all the time that the compromise between two perfectly rational alternatives was something that made no sense at all.
Any event largely organized by elementary school teachers was likely to come off extremely well from a logistical and crowd-control standpoint.
Any property that's open to common use gets destroyed. Because everyone has incentive to use it to the max, but no one has incentive to maintain it.
Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker's game because they almost always turn out to be- or to be indistinguishable from- self-righteous 16-year-olds possessing infinite amounts of free time.
Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker's game because they almost always turn out to be- or to be indistinguishable from- self-righteous sixteen-year-olds possessing infinite amounts of free time.
As convenient as it is for information to come to us, libraries do have a valuable side effect: they force all of the smart people to come together in one place where they can interact with one another.
Boredom is a mask frustration wears.
For a Westerner to trash Western culture is like criticizing our nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere on the grounds that it sometimes gets windy, and besides, Jupiter's is much prettier. You may not realize its advantages until you're trying to breathe liquid methane.
Gold is the corpse of value...
I don't like sewing machines. I don't understand how a needle with a thread going through the tip of it can interlock the thread by jamming itself into a little goddamn spool. It's contrary to nature and it irritates me.
It is commonly the case with technologies that you can get the best insight about how they work by watching them fail.
It is exciting to discover electrons and figure out the equations that govern their movement; it is boring to use those principles to design electric can openers. From here on out, it's all can openers.
It is the fate of operating systems to become free.
It is what you don't expect... that most needs looking for.
Jack the sound barrier. Bring the noise.
Middle class prosperity is lapidary; the flow of cash rounds and smooths a person like water does riverbed stones.
Most of the brain's work is done while the brain's owner is ostensibly thinking about something else, so sometimes you have to deliberately find something else to think and talk about.
Once a person has all the things they need to live, everything else is entertainment.
See, the world is full of things more powerful than us. But if you know how to catch a ride, you can go places.
Software development, like professional sports, has a way of making thirty-year-old men feel decrepit.
That we occasionally violate our own stated moral code does not imply that we are insincere in espousing that code.
The corporations have already planted their own bombs. All we have to do is light the fuses.
The difference between ignorant and educated people is that the latter know more facts. But that has nothing to do with whether they are stupid or intelligent.
The difference between stupid and intelligent people- and this is true whether or not they are well-educated- is that intelligent people can handle subtlety.
The simpler the molecule, the better the drug. So the best drug is oxygen. Only two atoms. The second-best, nitrous oxide- a mere three atoms. The third-best, ethanol- nine. Past that, you're talking lots of atoms... Atoms are like people. Get lots of them together, never know what they'll do.
This is exactly how the World Wide Web works: the HTML files are the pithy description on the paper tape, and your Web browser is Ronald Reagan.
Whenever serious and competent people need to get things done in the real world, all considerations of tradition and protocol fly out the window.
Windows 95 and MacOS are products, contrived by engineers in the service of specific companies. Unix, by contrast, is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic.
Wired people should know something about wires.
Found 32 occurence(s) in 52,059 quotation(s).
Categories: Quotes of the day
KGB Quotation Database Search page design and software
contributed by Rafal Sulejman.
