Quotes and Conundrums


"The most dangerous thing in the world is to try to leap a chasm in two jumps."

David Lloyd George


"We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology."

Carl Sagan


"The public cannot be too curious concerning the characters of public men."

Samuel Adams


"Above all else, the Devil cannot stand to be mocked."

C. S. Lewis


"He who dares not offend cannot be honest."

Thomas Paine


"Some people see things that are and ask, Why? Some people dream of things that never were and ask, Why not? Some people have to go to work and don't have time for all that shit."

George Carlin


"The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the Constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first."

Thomas Jefferson


"The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. School days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence. They are full of dull, unintelligible tasks, new and unpleasant ordinances, and brutal violations of common sense and common decency."

H.L. Mencken


"Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for - in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it."

Ellen Goodman


"I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy."

Oscar Wilde


"Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the universe trying to build bigger and better idiots. So far, the universe is winning."

Rick Cook


"The best programmers are not marginally better than merely good ones. They are an order-of-magnitude better, measured by whatever standard: conceptual creativity, speed, ingenuity of design, or problem-solving ability."

Randall E. Stross


"Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen."

Edward V. Berard


"PHP is a minor evil perpetrated and created by incompetent amateurs, whereas Perl is a great and insidious evil, perpetrated by skilled but perverted professionals."

Jon Ribbens


"Perl - the only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption."

Keith Bostic


"Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter."

Eric S. Raymond


"On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament]: 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."

Charles Babbage


"A C program is like a fast dance on a newly waxed dance floor by people carrying razors."

Waldi Ravens


"I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone."

Bjarne Stroustrup


"I don't care if it works on your machine! We are not shipping your machine!"

Vidiu Platon


"Sometimes it pays to stay in bed on Monday, rather than spending the rest of the week debugging Monday's code."

Christopher Thompson


"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it."

Brian W. Kernighan


"Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live."

Martin Golding


"In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they're not."

Yogi Berra



Return to Port Of Call Home Page
Return to August/September 2011 Table of Contents