Somebody said it . . .


An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.
- G. K. Chesterton
Source: http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/26278.html)

I can't understand it. I can't even understand the people who can understand it.
- Queen Juliana (Queen of the Netherlands until her abdication in 1980)
(I've always wondered who said that)
Source: http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/1151.html)

Grown-ups never understand anything for themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Kyle Wilson's axioms of software development:

It is impossible, by examining any significant piece of completed code, to determine within a factor of two how many man-hours it took to produce that code.

And the corollary:

If you can't tell how long a piece of code would take when you have the finished product available, what chance do you think you have before the first line of code is written?
- Kyle Wilson (http://gamearchitect.net/Articles/SoftwareIsHard.html)


"Best practice" is intended as a default policy for those who don't have the necessary data or training to do a reasonable risk assessment.
- Eugene Spafford

Don't look at what the industry is doing, look at what they're not doing and focus on that. That's where the real disruptive technology comes from.
- Alexei Erchak (founder of Luminus Devices)

Rights are rights. None of us can or should pick and choose whose rights we will defend and whose rights we will ignore.
- Justice Minister Irwin Cotler (during final debate on a Canadian law which legalizes gay marriage)

I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are still truly good at heart. I simply can't build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness; I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too; I can feel the sufferings of millions; and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty will end, and that peace and tranquillity will return again ... I must uphold my ideals, for perhaps the time will come when I shall be able to carry them out.
- Anne Frank

The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.
- B. F. Skinner, Contingencies of Reinforcement

Beware the 12-division strategy for a 10-division Army.
- retiring Army, Chief of Staff Eric K. Shinseki

It's like ham and eggs. The chicken is involved. The pig is committed.
- Martina Navratilova (explaining how she views her commitment to tennis)

Why is it a privilege for a soldier to die for your country, but a burden for a corporation to pay taxes?
- unknown
("stolen" from a pseudo-.signature in a reader's comment at http://ideas.4brad.com/archives/000064.html)

In the treaty councils the commissioners have claimed that our country had been sold to the Government. Suppose a white man should come to me and say, 'Joseph, I like your horses, and I want to buy them.' I say to him, 'No, my horses suit me, I will not sell them.' Then he goes to my neighbor, and says to him: 'Joseph has some good horses. I want to buy them, but he refuses to sell.' My neighbor answers, 'Pay me the money, and I will sell you Joseph's horses.' The white man returns to me and says, 'Joseph, I have bought your horses, and you must let me have them.' If we sold our lands to the Government, this is the way they were bought.
- Chief Joseph

Definitions of success:

Moving from failure to failure without any loss of enthusiasm.
- Winston Churchill
To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.
Generally attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson although it seems quite unlikely that he actually wrote it. The first "appearance" appears to have been an entry in a 1904 contest in the Brown Book Magazine although it's even possible that Robert Louis Stevenson wrote it. See Success (idea) for more info.

Let me be a free man - free to travel, free to shop, free to work, free to trade, where I choose, free to choose my own teachers, free to follow the religion of my fathers, free to think and talk and act for myself - and I will obey every law, or submit to the penalty.
- Chief Joseph (in an 1879 speech to the U.S. Government)

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 'Mister' Rogers

Learning a few new ways of opening and closing programs and spending an hour studying new commands is easier than spending all weekend every six months or so trying to get a computer running again.
- Al Fasoldt This irrefutable truth has been and will continue to cause Microsoft some serious problems over the next while . . .
Source: Microsoft's dilemma: Fix Windows or give up trying?

What's hard is convincing people that if they understood the underlying computer science, they could write the code in the language which best suited the particular application, rather than being stuck writing in Java, or whatever HLL is popular at the time.

and

What too many people miss is the fact that if you can't break a problem down into its fundamental algorithms, or translate those algorithms into an arbitrary language, your days as a programmer will be few, irrespective of how well you know a particular language.
- gillbates (Slashdot pseudonym)
Source: Bitter Java (a review of a Java book that actually sounds useful)

Do only what only you can do.
- Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (1930-2002)
when asked how to select a topic for research
Source: obituary for E.W. Dijkstra
More Dijkstra quotes from various places:

I'd rather regret the things that I have done than the things that I have not.
- Lucille Ball

Perhaps Linux shouldn't be regarded as an operating system at all, but more as a sophisticated multi-player game with a large number of enthusiastic players. You can lose yourself in Linux for hours, tweaking here, updating there. It's great fun if you like that sort of thing. But if you need to produce a document, spreadsheet or presentation, you're still likely to be able to do it faster and better by sticking with the Microsoft devil you know.
- Andrew Thomas
Source: Why free software is a hard sell

Without Turing, I'd be either out of a job, or working for the Nazis.
- unknown IT technician
Source: Alan Mathison Turing 1912-1954

The difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to make sense.
- Tom Clancy

If you're not corrupt, you just don't have enough power.
- Slashdot posting (Jonavin)

This child has talent. She needs a better box of paints.
- E2 posting (located here on 2002/12/31)
This quote is attributed to a fresco artist who made the remark upon seeing the work of a young Lois Lenski (1893-1974), an illustrator of children's books.


Fortunately the authorities did not know that Turing was a homosexual. Otherwise we might have lost the war.
- Jack Good (one of the people who worked with Turing at Bletchley Park)
A bit of background might be in order:
Alan Turing played a MAJOR role in both the development of the earliest computers and the breaking of the German Enigma codes during the Second World War. There are those who believe that without the intelligence gained from the decrypted Enigma messages, the war might have been lost (i.e. Britain defeated or forced to come to terms with Germany, the consequences of which could have been the US coming to terms with Germany so that it could concentrate on Japan). There is no doubt that the war would have lasted much longer.

After the war, Turing continued to develop his ideas about computing and continued to work on various top secret projects for certain parts of the British government. Turing's homosexuality was eventually exposed (he was convicted of being a homosexual under a British law of the time).

Turing committed suicide in 1954. Shortly before his suicide, it was becoming apparent that the British authorities were interfering with Turing's ability to work on secret projects because of his homosexuality. Many believe that he committed suicide either directly or indirectly because of harassment from the "authorities" over his homosexuality.


One cannot guess the real difficulties of a problem before having solved it.
- Carl Ludwig Siegel

The most terrible thing about death is that a life-time's reading is laid to waste.
- Anon

Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune.
- Kin Hubbard

To teach superstitions as truth is a most terrible thing.
- Hypatia of Alexandria (click here for more information)

Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all.
- Hypatia of Alexandria (click here for more information)

Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.
- Arthur C. Clarke

Predicting the future is easy. Getting it right is the hard part.
- Howard Frank, director of the Information Technology Office at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Arlington, Virginia, U.S.A.
Source: Computerworld June 3, 1996 page 70

I believe in free speech as long as you say the right thing.
- Ralph Klein, Premier of the Province of Alberta, Canada, during the 1997 provincial election campaign (his party won roughly 75% of the seats)
Source: widely reported by various Alberta newspapers.

My question: who gets to decide what's the right thing?

I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education.
- Wilson Mizner

Stripped from the veil of Microsoft's protestation that it merely engaged in highly competitive behavior, Microsoft's deceptive statements regarding the viability and scope of the WISE Program are, at their core, like a classic "bait-and-switch" tactic perpetrated on the targeted ISVs, developers, and UNIX users whom Microsoft sought to convert to Windows use and on its WISE Program partner Bristol whom Microsoft coopted into the role of facilitator of this tactic.
- Judge Janet C. Hall, United States District Judge on page 55 of her August 31, 2000 ruling awarding punitive damages of $1,000,000 to Bristol Technology Inc. from Microsoft Corporation for the "reckless and wanton" deceptive trade practices used by Microsoft against Bristol (Civil action 3.98-CV-1657 (JCH), District of Connecticut.
Source: Taken from the judge's ruling (i.e. in the public record)

Star Office actually looks so much like (Microsoft) Office that some people get confused and start saving their documents before they print.
- Linus Torvalds (speaking at Spring Comdex/99 in Chicago, April 19, 1999)

The truth is the truth. An opinion is an opinion. Don't confuse the two.
- Larry McVoy

On networking architecture: Do you want protocols that look nice or protocols that work nice?
- Mike Padlipsky, internet architect

On programming skill: Average programmers should be rounded up and placed in internment camps to keep them away from keyboards.
- attributed to a "Well known Linux personage"

Architect: Someone who knows the difference between that which could be done and that which should be done.
- Larry McVoy

Be more concerned with your character than with your reputation. Your character is what you really are while your reputation is merely what others think you are.
- Dale Carnegie

Friends help you move. Real friends help you move dead bodies.
- Anon

If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time--a tremendous whack.
- Winston Churchill

Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.
- Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)

Even if the voices are not real, they have some good ideas.
- Anon

Don't criticize a man until you've walked a mile in his shoes, that way when you criticize him you're a mile away and have his shoes.
- unknown
(stolen from a posting to Slashdot)

During a three-day period, the Frontier Group prepared 350 different software packages in five days in an effort to get the alpha version of TurboLinux for IA-64 out.
Quoted from a CNET article describing the first TurboLinux Alpha release for the Intel Itanium processor.

"It's not a historian's job to be liked," he said, adding that his "domestic staff" over the years including many young women from other cultures, including a Barbadian, a Punjabi, a Sri Lankan and a Pakistani. "All (were) very attractive girls with very nice breasts."
- David Irving (Holocaust denier, racist, Nazi polemicist and twister of the truth)
(quoted in an article reporting that Irving had lost his libel suite against Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin books)
Personal sidebar: it is a historian's job to be respectful of the truth - a part of the job description apparently lost on David Irving.

Perfection is reached, not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away.
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
(taken from the Chapter 1 page of The Jini Specification by Arnold, O'Sullivan, Scheifler, Waldo and Woolrath and published by Sun Microsystems)

I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.
- Thomas Watson (1874 - 1956), Chairman of IBM, 1943

The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better than a 'C', the idea must be feasible.
- A Yale University management professor in response to student Fred Smith's paper proposing reliable overnight delivery service (Smith went on to found Federal Express Corp.)

Back in the 1970s we didn't have the space shuttle to get all excited about. We had to settle for men walking on the crummy moon.
- Russell Beland, Springfield - from a Washington Post contest in which participants were asked to tell Gen-Xers how much harder they had it in the old days.

Diana . . . proved in the last year that she needed no royal title to continue to generate her particular brand of magic.
- excerpt from Earl Spencer's Funeral Oration for his sister Diana, Princess of Wales on September 6, 1997. The BBC's coverage of the funeral can be found here.

Security rule #489: One of the weakest links in any system's security is the user.

Corollary (#489 b): If you get what you asked for, don't be suprised.
- Chad Miller (Philosophy of Security mailing list participant)

Mistreatment of Jews in Germany may be considered virtually eliminated.
- Cordell Hull (U.S. Secretary of State), 1933.

Why, they couldn't hit an elephant at this dis_____.
- Last words of General John. B. Sedgwick, Union Army officer at the Battle of Spotsylvania, 1864, U.S. Civil War.

Now comes the mystery.
- Last words of Henry Ward Beecher, evangelist, d. March 8, 1887

I am about to -- or I am going to -- die: either expression is correct.
- Last words of Dominique Bouhours, French grammarian, d. 1702

I'm bored with it all.
- Last words of Winston Churchill before slipping into a coma. He died nine days later on January 24, 1965

When you go home
Tell them of us and say
For your tomorrow
We gave our today
- Inscription on the British 2nd Division Memorial at Kohima

When Hitler attacked the Jews, I was not a Jew, therefore, I was not concerned.

And when Hitler attacked the Catholics, I was not a Catholic, and therefore, I was not concerned.

And when Hitler attacked the unions and industrialists, I was not a member of the unions and I was not concerned.

Then, Hitler attacked me and the Protestant church -- and there was nobody left to be concerned.
- Reverend Martin Niemoller (U.S. Congressional Record p. 31636, 1968-10-14)

There are variations on the same passage . . .

First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a communist.

Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade-unionists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a trade-unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out - because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me - and there was no one left to speak for me.
- Reverend Martin Niemoller

I can't find the exact reference for this one so I'll have to present it in story form:

During the Battle of Britain, Churchill would sometimes visit Fighter Command's Operations Room. Towards the end of one visit during which Churchill witnessed a particularily intense day of fighting, Churchill is said to have asked one of the officers in charge 'what were our reserves?'. Churchill was apparently somewhat taken aback by the response - 'none'.


Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.
- W.S. Churchill to General Ismay on the way back from a visit to Fighter Command on August 16, 1940. On this particular day, every single squadron in the area was engaged (this is probably the day that the question in the previous story was asked). The sentence was repeated in a speech by Churchill to Parliament on August 20, 1940.

A man once asked Mozart how to write a symphony. Mozart told him to study at the conservatory for six or eight years, then apprentice with a composer for four or five more years, then begin writing a few sonatas, pieces for string quartets, piano concertos, etc. and in another four or five years he would be ready to try a full symphony. The man said, "But Mozart, didn't you write a symphony at age eight?" Mozart replied, "Yes, but I didn't have to ask how."
- unknown

Hacker /n./ 1. A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary. 2. One who programs enthusiastically (even obsessively) or who enjoys programming rather than just theorizing about programming. 3. A person capable of appreciating hack value. 4. A person who is good at programming quickly. 5. An expert at a particular program, or one who frequently does work using it or on it; as in `a Unix hacker'. (Definitions 1 through 5 are correlated, and people who fit them congregate.) 6. An expert or enthusiast of any kind. One might be an astronomy hacker, for example. 7. One who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations.
- The Jargon File
I can't resist pointing out that none of the above definitions describe activity which is even remotely illegal or unethical. People who break into computer systems (i.e. any form of unauthorized access regardless of why) aren't hackers. At best they are trespassers, villains and/or vandals. They are most definitely not worthy of any honest person's respect.


Our business model works even if all Internet software is free. We are still selling operating systems. What does Netscape's business model look like (if that happens)? Not very good.
- Bill Gates in a June 10, 1996 interview with London's Financial Times

The recent assertions that Microsoft had its current Internet strategy in play as early as December 1993 are utter nonsense.
- John Dvorak, PC Magazine in late 1998 during the Microsoft Antitrust trial (quote taken from here (actually, taken from their 981216 Wednesday's Quotable section)

Microsoft's biggest and most dangerous contribution to the software industry may be the degree to which it has lowered user expectations.
- Esther Schindler, OS/2 Magazine (quote taken from here (broken link))

When the history of the late twentieth century is written, Microsoft will be viewed as having had a primarily negative impact on the computing industry. They will be described as a major corporation whose products and business practices significantly impeded the rate of innovation in the computing industry.
- Daniel Boulet, editor of this page, in about 1995 (i.e. long before the start of the infamous Microsoft Antitrust Trial)

In support of the previous statement and keeping in mind that most real innovation (i.e. fresh new ideas) come out of small groups of people, I bring you the following gem:

Asked how small software companies could compete on products that Microsoft wants to fold into Windows, [Microsoft chief operating officer Bob] Herbold told Bloomberg News they could either fight a losing battle, sell out to Microsoft or a larger company or 'not go into business to begin with.'
- Newsweek, March 1998 (quote taken from here (broken link))

Microsoft is a company that is desperately resisting change. Its strategy is two-tiered. One is to desperately hang onto what it's got: making the operating system important even though we're moving into a world where the OS becomes steadily less important. At the same time, it is desperately looking for the next high-growth field that it'll make money on. So when the OS finally does start to decline, it will find a new field. It's targeted two areas: one is media and the other is services. Everything it's doing is going into that. It is a classic case of a change-hating company; it is desperately trying to retard change.
- Paul Saffo, Institute for the Future (quote taken from here (broken link))

Do look after our visiting suits, they come from a strange land and have strange rituals like "Trade Shows". Be assured they find our rituals of talking about technical material in detail just as strange. They have been living under an oppressive binary-only single OS regime, and as refugees need sympathy and education. It's very hard to teach someone the value of freedom but please do try. And I'm told we do share some common rituals. Our "flame war" is apparently held in person in their land and called "project meeting".
- Alan Cox (major Linux kernel developer) in an article discussing the implications arising from the appearance of suits in the Linux community. warning: there are enough typos in the article that it gets a bit hard to follow in places.

Not exactly a quote but I couldn't resist:

Q. What's the difference between a used car salesman and a computer salesman?
A. A used car salesman knows how to drive a car.
From Slashdot
Daniel Boulet
click for my home page
http://www.bouletfermat.com/danny/quotes.html