This page does not attempt to catalog every famous quote that has been said. Rather, it is a list of quotes that inspire me in some way.

General Quotes

  • There are two kinds of people: those who do regular backups and those who never had a hard drive failure. — Unknown

  • The wisest mind has something yet to learn. — George Santayana

  • Not only do e-mail senders overestimate their ability to communicate feelings, but e-mail recipients also overestimate their ability to correctly decode those feelings. — Kruger and Epley, "Egocentrism Over E-mail"

  • We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them. — Albert Einstein

  • What is not so powerful (about the web) is the mantra that everyone’s opinion is just as valuable as everyone else’s. Not true. Some people have boring and trivial opinions, and they express these opinions in boring and trivial language. — Gerry McGovern

  • Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them. — Bill Vaughan

  • As long as there has been one God, there has been killing in His name. — The DaVinci Code

  • Men who have gone to college I find to be amazingly ignorant. They don’t seem to know anything. — Thomas Edison

  • Sometimes it pays to stay in bed on Monday, rather than spending the rest of the week debugging Monday’s code. — Dan Salomon

  • No matter how far you’ve gone down the wrong road, turn back. — Turkish Proverb

  • If you have build a perfect demonstration do not remove all traces of the scaffolding by which you have raised it. — Clark Maxwell

  • Yeah, I can teach Japanese to a monkey in 46 hours. The key is just finding a way to relate to the material. — Rubin, from the movie RoadTrip (2000)

  • The road goes on forever and the party never ends.

  • A jack-of-all-trades is king of none. — P.K. Thomajan

  • Digital loss is worse than a fire. At least with a fire there is evidence you lost something. Once data is gone, its just a memory. — Dan Allen

  • I charge 25 cents to turn the knob and $1999.75 to know which knob to turn — On why Joe the Plumber charges so much money for a 5 minute visit

  • I know I am getting better at golf because I am hitting fewer spectators. — Gerald R. Ford

  • In book publishing, as in life, one always has to measure how to do one’s best with the resources one has. That is not an easy feat as we all know! — Mary Piergies, Manning Publications

  • Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law' because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual. — Thomas Jefferson

  • When software development teams create new value too quickly and without consideration for the future, they tend to create software with increasingly high implementation costs. Inevitably, bad practices will catch up to these teams when they have to revisit the software for future comprehension and modification. Adding new value to existing software can be very expensive if the software is difficult to comprehend. — Robert J. Miller

  • I guess in reality you work because you have to; but, open source can really help bring meaning to everything - because you can dig down into the code, modify and create. When you think about it, maybe you want to work with passionate people. Maybe employers want passionate employees. — http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7250#comment-2109

Other Phrases

  • a severe snow dusting — Emery Ford

  • I may be going against the grain, but it is the direction with which I am most familiar — Dan Allen

Early open source thought?

In the Novum Organum, Francis Bacon writes:

…​the Sun enters the palace and the privy alike and is not polluted thereby. We raise not a Capitol or Pyramid to the pride of man, but a Holy Temple in his mind on the model of the Universe, which model we imitate. For whatsoever deserves to exist deserves to be known, and knowledge is the image of Existence. Now the mean and the splendid alike exist…​