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First things first, but not necessarily in that order.
In John Flanagan and Andrew McCulloch's Meglos
And so it begins.
Kosh, in J. Michael Straczynski's Babylon 5: "Chrysalis"
The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
A book of quotations... can never be complete.
Preface, Canadian Quotations and Phrases: Literary and Historical
Perhaps the reader may ask, of what consequence is it whether the author's exact language is preserved or not, provided we have his thought? The answer is, that inaccurate quotation is a sin against truth. It may appear in any particular instance to be a trifle, but perfection consists in small things, and perfection is no trifle.
"Misquotation," The Canadian Magazine, October 1898
Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.
In reality, though, the first thing to ask of history is that it should point out to us the paths of liberty. The great lesson to draw from revolutions is not that they devour humanity but rather that tyranny never fails to generate them.
"When the People Are in Power"
He who wonders discovers that this in itself is wonder.
The most merciful thing in the world... is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.
"The Call of Cthulhu"
He did not mean to be cruel. If anybody had called him so, he would have resented it extremely. He would have said that what he did was done entirely for the good of the country. But he was a man who had always been accustomed to consider himself first and foremost, believing that whatever he wanted was sure to be right, and therefore he ought to have it. So he tried to get it, and got it too, as people like him very often do. Whether they enjoy it when they have it is another question.
The Little Lame Prince
To hate is to study, to study is to understand, to understand is to appreciate, to appreciate is to love. So maybe I'll end up loving your theory.
A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms.
"Non-fiction", on the other hand, declares itself to be the carrier of fact, an expression of reality, and thus of truth. Why then does most fact-based work have a remarkably short shelf life? The reply might be that additional facts come along. That we are learning all the time. In that case, it was never an expression of reality or truth. And even if the facts are overtaken, the arguments built upon them should not date with such terrifying rapidity. Decade-old serious "non-fiction" often seems arcane, irrelevant. The written style itself seems to become old-fashioned. Two-centuries-old decent "fiction" on the other hand can easily remain fresh.
On Equilibrium
Government, today, is growing too strong to be safe. There are no longer any citizens in the world; there are only subjects. They work day in and day out for their masters; they are bound to die for their masters at call. Out of this working and dying they tend to get less and less.
One trouble with being efficient is that it makes everybody hate you so.
The Calgary Eyeopener, March 18, 1916
ABROAD, adj. At war with savages and idiots. To be a Frenchman abroad is to be miserable; to be an American abroad is to make others miserable.
The Enlarged Devil's Dictionary
Nobody can be exactly like me. Sometimes even I have trouble doing it.
It is easy -- terribly easy -- to shake a man's faith in himself. To take advantage of that to break a man's spirit is devil's work. Take care of what you are doing. Take care.
Candida
It is ordinary for us to poison rivers also; yea and the very elements whereof the world doth stand, are by us infected: for even the air itself, wherein and whereby all things should live, we corrupt to their mischief and destruction.
The Natural History, tr. Philemon Holland
I am a design chauvinist. I believe that good design is magical and not to be lightly tinkered with. The difference between a great design and a lousy one is in the meshing of the thousand details that either fit or don't, and the spirit of the passionate intellect that has tied them together, or tried. That's why programming -- or buying software -- on the basis of "lists of features" is a doomed and misguided effort. The features can be thrown together, as in a garbage can, or carefully laid together and interwoven in elegant unification, as in APL, or the Forth language, or the game of chess.
Two paradoxes are better than one; they may even suggest a solution.
Monty Python's usual schoolboy humour is here let loose on a period of history appropriately familiar to every schoolboy in the West, and a faith which could be shaken by such good-humoured ribaldry would be a very precarious faith indeed.
In their report on Life of Brian
If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, "Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number?" No. "Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence?" No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.
Those who write software only for pay should go hurt some other field.
In gnu.misc.discuss
You'll have to leave my meals on a tray outside the door because I'll be working pretty late on the secret of making myself invisible, which may take me almost until eleven o'clock.
"Captain Future, Block That Kick!"
The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.
Many people, other than the authors, contribute to the making of a book, from the first person who had the bright idea of alphabetic writing through the inventor of movable type to the lumberjacks who felled the trees that were pulped for its printing. It is not customary to acknowledge the trees themselves, though their commitment is total.
Machine Learning
Yes, Agassiz does recommend authors to eat fish, because the phosphorus in it makes brain. So far you are correct. But I cannot help you to a decision about the amount you need to eat -- at least, not with certainty. If the specimen composition you send is about your fair usual average, I should judge that a couple of whales would be all you would want for the present. Not the largest kind, but simply good middling-sized whales.
We all live to a formula. Maybe the secret lies in keeping that formula secret.
Dear Boullée
We have just reached the outer fringes of the Solar System. Can any sane man possibly argue that we should stop there?
"Remembrance Day, 2010 A.D.", in Scotchman's Return and Other Essays
I said I liked being half-educated; you were so much more surprised at everything when you were ignorant.
My Family and Other Animals
My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.
Trivia rarely affect efficiency. Are all the machinations worth it, when their primary effect is to make the code less readable?
The Elements of Programming Style
The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand.
There is more. There is much more. It all adds up to a great deal less.
Reviewing Heaven's Gate
It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God -- but to create him.
I can't believe in the God of my Fathers. If there is one Mind which understands all things, it will comprehend me in my unbelief. I don't know whose hand hung Hesperus in the sky, and fixed the Dog Star, and scattered the shining dust of Heaven, and fired the sun, and froze the darkness between the lonely worlds that spin in space.
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.
The sooner you make your first five thousand mistakes the sooner you will be able to correct them.
Scientia sine arte nihil est; ars sine scientia nihil est.
No word meaning "art" occurs in Aivilik, nor does "artist": there are only people. Nor is any distinction made between utilitarian and decorative objects. The Aivilik say simply, "A man should do all things properly."
Eskimo
Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.
I keep the subject of my inquiry constantly before me, and wait till the first dawning opens gradually, by little and little, into a full and clear light.
The more I have studied him, the more Newton has receded from me. It has been my privilege at various times to know a number of brilliant men, men whom I acknowledge without hesitation to be my intellectual superiors. I have never, however, met one against whom I was unwilling to measure myself, so that it seemed reasonable to say that I was half as able as the person in question, or a third or a fourth, but in every case a finite fraction. The end result of my study of Newton has served to convince me that with him there is no measure. He has become for me wholly other, one of the tiny handful of supreme geniuses who have shaped the categories of the human intellect, a man not finally reducible to the criteria by which we comprehend our fellow beings.
Never at Rest. A Biography of Isaac Newton
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