Quotes

Permalink: https://quotes.s.zeid.me/

Emphasis mine unless otherwise noted.

• This is stuff that for-profit corporations can’t and won’t do, because the return on the investment is not in the next quarter—it’s in the next generation. Forward-thinking investment is a key responsibility of government—sometimes, they need to be reminded.
  —Matt O’Dowd, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ACW7GVKCxs

• The earth is only the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in a cradle forever.
  —Konstantin Tsiolkovsky

• If it were a story it would be set on the seafront of a long beach. A beach without beginning and without end. The story of a man who walks along this shore and perhaps never meets anyone. His gaze lingers occasionally to look at some object or fragment brought from the sea. The footprints of a crab or a solitary seagull. I always take the sand, the sky, some clouds, the sea. Only the waves change, always the same and different, smaller. larger. Shorter. Longer.
  —Ludovico Einaudi, Le Onde booklet

• I get wrong. But I also get proportionality. And if you don’t get both, you don’t deserve to have the power of the United States government behind you. […] Somehow, we need to get beyond the “I’m right so I’m right to nuke you” ethics that dominates our time. That begins with one word: Shame.

  One word, and endless tears.
  —Lawrence Lessig, “Prosecutor as bully”, on the killing of Aaron Swartz

• The different sound each instrument possesses tells a story, evokes emotion and each plays a part to create a whole picture. Stories can be abstract but through music we can create a clear image in the listener’s imagination. The musician feeds into this narrative as we’re always giving the audience a part of our lives, our story, we are completely vulnerable.
  —http://www.islandsongs.is/location/selvogur/

• People place their hand on the Bible and swear to uphold the Constitution; they don’t put their hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible.
  —Jamie Raskin

• Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.
  —Mark Twain

• My friend, still seemingly perplexed, asked me, “So if it’s not about genitals, what is it about trans women’s bodies that you find most attractive?”

  I paused for a second to consider the question. Then I replied that it is almost always their eyes. When I look into them, I see both endless strength and inconsolable sadness. I see someone who has overcome humiliation and abuses that would flatten the average person. I see a woman who was made to feel shame for her desires and yet had the courage to pursue them anyway. I see a woman who was forced against her will into boyhood, who held on to a dream that everybody in her life desperately tried to beat out of her, who refused to listen to the endless stream of people who told her that who she was and what she wanted was impossible.
  —Julia Serano, Whipping Girl, Chapter 16
  (emphasis mine)

• Religion is like a penis: it’s okay to have one, it’s okay to be proud of it, but it’s not okay to shove it down your child’s throat.

• Here and elsewhere we shall not obtain the best insight into things until we actually see them growing from the beginning…
  —Aristotle, Politics

• When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.
  —C.S. Lewis

• My function is not to reassure people. I want to make them uncomfortable. To send them out of the place arguing and talking.
  —Ewan MacColl, The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Music (1st ed.) by Paul Du Noyer, p. 226

• Sin lies only in hurting others unnecessarily. All other “sins” are invented nonsense.
  —Robert A. Heinlein

• That’s not bullshit; it’s re-purposed bovine waste.
  —John Oliver, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_F5GxCwizc#t=9m30.9s

• You’ve planted seeds of fear and hate in all who would be free.
  At harvest time, the fruit will be for you and not for me.
  —Ewan MacColl, “Black and White”

• You can’t propose that something be a universal space and at the same time keep control of it.
  —Tim Berners-Lee, https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/FAQ.html#true

• [I]f you try to prevent [your kids] from doing something as harmless as playing with the toy they want to play with, they are going to end up resenting you.
  —/u/sixstringhook, https://np.reddit.com/r/DIY/comments/3orbna/kitchen_playset_from_an_old_entertainment_center/cvzsy60

• Wow, I made my code 1000x faster! That means I can make it 2048x slower now!
  —neobrain (https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/User-neobrain)

• “I’ve set the wedding date. I’ve not asked her out yet.”—how software projects are managed.
  https://twitter.com/venkat_s/status/617052918491918336

• I didn’t give a shit! THUG LIFE! Okay?
  —trihex, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzSI_qUyw0U#t=29.49s

• Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
  —Benjamin Franklin

• In real open source, you have the right to control your own destiny.
  —Linus Torvalds, http://seattletimes.com/html/businesstechnology/2002059632_linus11.html

• Hard work pays off later, laziness pays off now.
  —Macklemore
  (Note: don’t take this quote seriously! Or do, but focus on the hard work part.)

• Someone who can’t accept that they could be wrong isn’t someone you can trust–because they care more about their reputation than about you!
  http://disruptingdinnerparties.com/2013/10/08/got-consent-5-responsibility/?relatedposts_exclude=3931

• One time, this guy handed me a picture of him, he said, “Here’s a picture of me when I was younger.” Every picture is of you when you were younger. “Here’s a picture of me when I’m older.” “You son-of-a-bitch! How’d you pull that off? Lemme see that camera… what’s it look like?”
  —Mitch Hedberg

• Whenever your opinions or beliefs are so intertwined with your self-image you couldn’t pull them away without damaging your core concepts of self, you avoid situations which may cause harm to those beliefs.
  —David McRaney, http://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/06/23/confirmation-bias/

• Corporations are people only when they want to be.
  —me, https://www.reddit.com/comments/1iwctu//cb8sotv?context=2
  • And we’re people only when they want us to be.
    —/u/ANGRY_BILLY, https://www.reddit.com/comments/1iwctu//cb8tly2?context=3

• All politics is theater. I just wish there was a better cast.
  —Eric Whitacre, https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=10151844822967229&id=6290062228

• Programming is like sex: make one mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life.

• I thought Intel had mandatory drug testing? Or is that just for the engineers?
  —Linus Torvalds, https://web.archive.org/web/20150705111309/https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/7Dobu48Sxcp

• There are two types of people who laugh at the law: those who break it and those who make it.
  —Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

• Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.
  —George Orwell

• It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
  —Upton Sinclair

• It is more important that innocence be protected than it is that guilt be punished, for guilt and crimes are so frequent in this world that they cannot all be punished.

  But if innocence itself is brought to the bar and condemned, perhaps to die, then the citizen will say, “whether I do good or whether I do evil is immaterial, for innocence itself is no protection,” and if such an idea as that were to take hold in the mind of the citizen that would be the end of security whatsoever.
  —John Adams, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Adams#Boston_Massacre

• When someone named “analrapechrist” thinks your comments are so misinformed that they implore you to die in a fire, then it’s time to seriously rethink your priorities in life.
  —/u/griffer00, https://www.reddit.com/r/offmychest/comments/1h0ss8//caq7zcd?context=4

• Debug carefully and always carry a big stack.
  —Rob Campbell, Mozilla; https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/05/firefox-developer-tool-features-for-firefox-23/

• Fanatics in power and the funnel of a tornado have this in common – the narrow path in which they move is marked by violence and destruction.
  —Oscar Ostlund

• Most men fear getting laughed at or humiliated by a romantic prospect while most women fear rape and death.
  —Gavin de Becker, The Gift of Fear

• If you make a Venn diagram about people who are assholes and people who don’t want to deal with the repercussions of their actions, it’s actually just a circle.
  —/u/Robby5566, https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/111qts/my_ex_boyfriend_had_his_mother_call_and_break/c6iofzn?context=1

• ’Cause making the [Facebook] settings page look pretty is more important than being able to see who’s online.
  —me

• checking for something to drink while compiling… err: no fridge found!

• I want to bring people together and to provoke emotions of happiness or sadness with my music. I like the familiarity of the music I love, of all of the many songs that I have heard in my life. I try to write music that will become just as familiar to people in the same way, talking to them with a simple truth that touches their hearts.
  —Ludovico Einaudi

• If you show any ability to do things most people can’t, it will become part of your job description.
  —/u/thekadar81, https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/mmzd2/door_bells_are_now_part_of_it/c32c4x5

• No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

  Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
  —Steve Jobs, 2005 Stanford Commencement Speech

• Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government!
  —Monty Python

• The greatest risk is to risk nothing at all.
  —Leo Buscaglia

• What they lose through the lack of an ongoing relationship seems to be so incredibly valuable to them, so their desire to keep it, or their feeling of loss when they are not able to preserve the interaction, is so extreme that it drives them to do things you would not normally expect people to do.
  —Julian Assange, http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/julian-assange-the-rolling-stone-interview-20120118?print=true

• You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, “Look at that, you son of a bitch.”
  —Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell

• There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.
  —Alan J. Perlis

• To force yourself to forget something is to force yourself to remember it.

• From Dilbert calendar

  • Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.
    —Will Rogers

  • Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.
    —Bertrand Russell

  • Never explain. Your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe it anyway.
    —Elbert Hubbard (not Elron Hubbard)
    “Your enemies” can also be substituted with “strangers”.

  • There is something wrong in a government where they who do the most have the least. There is something wrong when honesty wears a rag, and rascality a robe; when the loving, the tender, eat a crust, while the infamous sit at banquets.
    —Robert G. Ingersoll

  • I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.
    —Charles Dickens

  • There is nothing sadder in this world than to awake Christmas morning and not be a child.
    —Erma Bombeck

  • If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.
    —Carl Sagan

  • Your true value depends entirely on what you are compared with.
    —Bob Wells

• People make time for who they want to make time for. People text, call, and reply to people they want to talk to. If they wanted to be around you, they would.