"Ideas don't have to be true to be influential. The future harmony
of our society depends on our ability to understand and respect
one another." -- Paul William Roberts (Globe and Mail, 2006/02/11)

"Passivity & cynicism has always come easily to the educated."
    -- Ed Broadbent (Capilano College, March 17, 2001)

"Bureaucracy triumphs when process triumphs over results."
    -- Stephane Dion (interview in January 2007)

I hear and I forget.
I see and I believe.
I do and I understand.                  
    -- Confucius (551-479 BC)

"You can always pick up your needle and move to another groove."
    -- Timothy Leary (b.1920)

"Curiosity killed the cat, but for awhile I was a suspect."
    -- Steven Wright (b.1955)

"I had a dream, which was not all a dream."
    -- Lord Byron (1788-1824) "Darkness," line 1

"There is nothing wrong with sobriety in moderation."
    -- John Ciardi

"Whoever ceases to be a student has never been a student."
    -- George Iles

"A mind once stretched by a new idea never regains its original dimension."
    -- Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894)

"Amusement to an observing mind is study."
    -- Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881)

"There is much pleasure to be gained in useless knowledge."
    -- Bertrand Russell (1872-1967)

"There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval."
    -- George Santayana (1863-1952), "War Shrines"

"Sic transit gloria mundi."
[So passes away the glory of this world]
    -- Thomas a' Kempis (1380-1471)

"Maybe this world is another planet's Hell."
    -- Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)

"Take away the right to say 'fuck' and you take away the right to
say 'fuck the government.'"
    -- Lenny Bruce (1923-1966)


"Life is hard."
    -- Chris Godsil (my graph algorithms prof from the University of Waterloo)

"Bureaucracy is a challenge to be conquered with a righteous attitude, a
tolerance for stupidity, and a bulldozer when needed."
    -- Anonymous

"A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't
even know existed can render your own computer unusable."
    -- Leslie Lamport

[In speaking of users suspension of judgement in believing everything
 they read on the internet]
"Is real risk of information technology is that it enables the ultra-rapid
 spread of malicious memes?"
    -- Mick Topping <mick@mtopping.com> (from comp.risks)

"Source code in files. How quaint."
    -- Kent Beck

"I have been told that one of the reasons for the longevity of the Roman
bridges is that their designers had to stand under them when they were first
used.  It may be time to put a similar discipline into the software field."
    -- Henry Baker

"The problem with allies is they sometimes have ideas of their own."
    -- Winston Churchill

"The only thing worse than fighting a war with allies is trying to
fight a war without allies."
    -- Winston Churchill

"The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks
to live at the expense of everyone else."
    -- Frédéric Bastiat

"To deride the hopes of progress isthe ultmate fatuity, the last
word in poverty of spirit and meanness of mind." -- Peter Medawar

"Better to be silent and thought a fool than to open one's mouth
and remove all doubt."  -- Samuel Clemens

"A man who has committed a mistake and doesn't correct it is committing
another mistake." -- Confucious

"Travel expands the mind, but loosens the bowels."

Jain philosophers to King Alexander:
    "King Alexander, every man can possess only so much of the earth's
    surface as this we are standing on. You are but human like the rest
    of us, save that you are always busy and up to no good, travelling
    so many miles from your home' a nuisance to yourself and to others!
    ... You will soon be dead, and the you will own just as much of the
    earth as will suffice to bury you."
	(as per A Sen (2004). The Argumentative Indian. p.15)

"Silence is a powerful enemy of social justice." -- Amartya Sen (2004).
    The Argumentative Indian, p.39

"Just consider how terrible the day of your death will be.
 Others will go on speaking, and you will not be able to argue back."
   -- Ram Mohun Ray

"Every new technology carries with it an opportunity to invent a
new crime."
   -- Laurence Urgenson (1987)

"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But,
in practice, there is." -- Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut

"We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals.
We know now that it is bad economics." -- Franklin D. Roosevelt

"(Everyone agrees about the necessity of sacrifice just as long as it's
your neighbour's)" -- Irene Nemirovsky (translation, p353 of appendix from
Suite Francaise)

"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations that
we can do without thinking about them." -- Alfred North Whitehead (1911)

"Never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to incompetence."

"Hoping to confer no hurt, indifference finally grows lethal." (Cynthia
Ozick)

"Because we take to novels our own ideas of what we feel they must
offer, we often find, in unusual or original work, only what we expect
to find, and we reject or miss what we aren't looking for." (VS Naipaul.
India: A Wounded Civilization, p18)

"There are two key questions which I believe we as Christian persons
ought from time to time ask ourselves: what kind of a person am I
becoming, and what kind of world am I helping to come into being?"
(Edward Scott, former head of Anglican church of Canada)

"Is it nothing to you all ye that pass by?" (Vancouver cenotaph, Victory
Square)

"People demand four things of government: consistency, authenticity,
character and competence." G&M Editorial on Ernie Eves, Sept 27, 2003

Stein's Law, a principle enunciated by the late Herbert Stein, chairman
of the Council of Economic Advisers during the Nixon administration. One
variant: "Things that can't go on forever, don't." 

"What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the
attention of its recipients" -- Herbert Simon


"People demand four things of government: consistency, authenticity,
character and competence." -- Globe and Mail Editorial on Ernie Eves
from Sept 27, 2003 


Computer Science Quotes:
"Software is invisible and unvisualizable" -- Fred Brooks

"Imagination or visualization, and in particular the use of diagrams,
has a crucial part to play in scientific investigation." -- Rene Descartes

"We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us." -- Marshall McLuhan

"The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers" -- Hamming

"Ultimately, the real power of human cognition is the ability to
flexibly construct functional systems that accomplish our goals by
bringing bits of structure into coordination."
-- Ed Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild

"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

"Software systems are like cathedrals: first you build them, then
you pray" (Sam Redwine Jr, as relayed by Dewayne Perry at ICSE 2009)

"If the map and terrain disagree, trust the terrain." -- Steve McConnell

"Categorizing always produces reduction in true complexity. [...]
Any reduction of the world around us can have explosive consequences
since it rules out some sources of uncertainty; it drives us to a
misunderstanding of these fabric of the world." (Black Swan, p16)