Old quotes that have graced the home page

• That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.

  -- Thomas Jefferson (1813)

• The proper method for hastening the decay of error, is not, by brute force, or by regulation which is one of the classes of force, to endeavour to reduce men to intellectual uniformity; but on the contrary by teaching every man to think for himself.

  -- William Godwin

• For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:
  a time to be born, and a time to die;
  a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
  a time to kill, and a time to heal;
  a time to break down, and a time to build up;
  a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
  a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
  a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
  a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
  a time to seek, and a time to lose;
  a time to keep, and a time to throw away;
  a time to tear, and a time to sew;
  a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
  a time to love, and a time to hate;
  a time for war, and a time for peace.

  Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

• Let grief be your sister,
      she will whether or no.
  Rise up from the stump of sorrow,
      and be green also,
      like the diligent leaves.

  A lifetime isn't long enough for the
       beauty of this world
  and the responsibilities of your life.

  -- from "Flare", by Mary Oliver

• We must never cease to stand up for our values. We have to show that our open society can pass this test, too, And that the answer to violence is even more democracy, even more humanity, but never naïveté.

  -- Jens Stoltenberg, Ministerpresident of Norway, after the youth camp massacre

• Ein Märchen der Eskimo erklärt den Ursprung des Lichts folgendermaßen:

  „Der Rabe, der in der ewigen Nacht keine Nahrung finden konnte, begehrte nach dem Licht, und es ward hell über der Erde.“

  Ist das Begehren echt, begehrt man wirklich das Licht, so bringt das Begehren nach dem Licht das Licht hervor.

  
  -- attributed to
  Simone Weil, Philosophin (1909-1943)

• "Was die Erfahrung aber und die Geschichte lehren, ist dieses, daß Völker und Regierungen niemals etwas aus der Geschichte gelernt und nach Lehren, die aus derselben zu ziehen gewesen wären, gehandelt haben." (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, herausgegeben von Dr. Eduard Gans, Duncker u Humblot, 1837, S. 9, zitiert nach der Rezension von Dr. Carl Rosenberg in Literarische Zeitung, Band 4, Herausgeber Johann Karl Friedrich Büchner und Karl Brandes, 1938, Nr. 40, Rezension 3006. Translation often found online: If the lessons of history teach us anything, it is that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us)
  
  .

• Put people first, processes second, then deal with technology and finally structure.

  -- Management saying I can't trace to the source, perhaps Peter Drucker.

• We must encourage [each other] - once we have grasped the basic points - to interconnecting everything else on our own, to use memory to guide our original thinking, and to accept what someone else says as a starting point, a seed to be nourished and grow. For the correct analogy for the mind is not a vessel that needs filling but wood that needs igniting - no more - and then it motivates one towards originality and instills the desire for truth. Suppose someone were to go and ask his neighbors for fire and find a substantial blaze there, and just stay there continually warming himself: that is no different from someone who goes to someone else to get to some of his rationality, and fails to realize that he ought to ignite his own flame, his own intellect, but is happy to sit entranced by the lecturn, and the words trigger only associative thinking and bring, as it were, only a flush to his cheeks and a glow to his limbs; but he has not dispelled or dispersed, in the warm light of philosophy, the internal dank gloom of his mind.

  -- Plutarch

• If you want something said, ask a man.
  If you want something done, ask a woman

  -– Margret Thatcher, 1965

• A cantankerous press, an obstinate press, a ubiquitous press must be suffered by those in authority in order to preserve the even greater values of freedom of expression and the right of the people to know.

  -–Judge Murray Gurfein, June 1971

• Der meiste Schaden, den der Computer potenziell zur Folge haben könnte, hängt weniger davon ab, was der Computer tatsächlich kann oder nicht kann, als vielmehr von den Eigenschaften, die das Publikum dem Computer zuschreibt. Der Nichtfachmann hat überhaupt keine andere Wahl, als dem Computer die Eigenschaften zuzuordnen, die durch die von der Presse verstärkte Propaganda der Computergemeinschaft zu ihm dringen. Daher hat der Informatiker die enorme Verantwortung, in seinen Ansprüchen bescheiden zu sein.

  -- Joseph Weizenbaum

• My favorite thing about plagiarists is how most of them can't spell "plagiarism."

  -- from comments on a blog post

• "Stehen Frauen an der Spitze der Regierung, so ist der Staat in Gefahr, denn sie handeln nicht nach den Anforderungen der Allgemeinheit, sondern nach zufälliger Neigung und Meinung."

  -- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831)

• "Frauen sind listiger, praktischer und neigen weniger zu roher Gewalt."

  -- Ingrid Noll (1935-)

• A mature person is one who does not think only in absolutes, who is able to be objective even when deeply stirred emotionally, who has learned that there is both good and bad in all people and all things, and who walks humbly and deals charitably with the circumstances of life, knowing that in this world no one is all-knowing and therefore all of us need both love and charity.

  ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

• A programmer who can't write readable prose is as incompetent as one who can't produce working code.

  -- from Geoff Kuenning's sig on comp.risks

• A computer without COBOL and Fortran is like a piece of chocolate cake without ketchup and mustard.

  -- Slashdot "saying of the day"

• Die Urteilsbegründung bestätigt für das Fernmeldegeheimnis eine Weisheit über den Umgang mit dem technisch Machbaren und postuliert, „dass nicht jede Maßnahme, die für die Strafverfolgung nützlich und im Einzelfall auch erforderlich sein kann, verfassungsrechtlich zulässig ist“. Man ist versucht, diesen Satz den schrillen Sicherheitstrompetern auf ein T-Shirt drucken zu lassen. In gespiegelter Schrift, damit sie es bei der Selbstreflexion stets vor Augen haben.

  -- Constanze Kurz, Aus dem Maschinenraum

• You guard against decay, in general, and stagnation, by moving, by continuing to move.

  -- Mary Daly (1928-2010)

• I never set out to be weird. It was always the other people who called me weird.

  -- Frank Zappa

• Es hat keinen Zweck über die Männer zu jammern. Wir müssen lernen, mit dem vorhandenen Material zu arbeiten.

  -- Eva Heller

• It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.

  -- John Maynard Keynes

• For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:
  a time to be born, and a time to die;
  a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
  a time to kill, and a time to heal;
  a time to break down, and a time to build up;
  a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
  a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
  a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
  a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
  a time to seek, and a time to lose;
  a time to keep, and a time to throw away;
  a time to tear, and a time to sew;
  a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
  a time to love, and a time to hate;
  a time for war, and a time for peace.

  Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

• "I'm equally certain that we will continue to pray for justice to roll down as waters, and for that day when there will be peace in the valley, and for that day when every man and every woman will sit under his or her own vine and fig tree and none will be afraid, and for that day when black will not be asked to get back, brown can stick around, yellow will be mellow, the red man can get ahead, man, and white will embrace what is right! Amen!"

  The Rev. Joseph Lowery, a contemporary of the Rev. Martin Luther King, during Inaugural benediction for Barak Obama.

• Freedom is always the freedom of dissenters. The essence of political freedom depends not on the fanatics of 'justice', but rather on all the invigorating, beneficial, and detergent effects of dissenters. If 'freedom' becomes 'privilege', the workings of political freedom are broken.

  -- Rosa Luxemburg
  murdered on Jan. 15, 1919

• Rosa sat, so Martin could walk;
  Martin walked, so Obama could run;
  Obama ran, so our children could fly.

  -- Popular SMS making the rounds in USA

• Fußball ist wie Schach, nur ohne Würfeln.

  -- Lukas Podolski

• I have made it a rule to go to bed when there wasn't anybody interesting left to sit up with; and I have made it a rule to get up when I had to.

  -- Mark Twain

• It's not the heat that is bothering me, it's the high temperatures.

  -- Andy

• The four basic elements in America: Television, Dunkin' Donuts, Botox and crack.

  -- Gayle Tufts

• The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.

  -- Douglas Adams

• Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.

  -- Leonardo da Vinci

• Every truth has four corners: as a teacher I give you one corner, and it is for you to find the other three.

  -- Confucius, from "Quotations on Teaching, Learning, and Education"

• Geniale Naturen erleben wiederholte Pubertät, während andere Leute nur einmal jung sind.

  -- Johann Wolfgang Goethe

• "...- Ingenting undgår mig. Ingen undgår mig." (Nothing escapes me, no one escapes me)

  -- Ingmar Bergmann, The Seventh Seal

• If you an imagine interstellar civilizations with galactic wormhole superhighways, why can't you imagine a female astronaut?

  -- Corie Ralston in "She's such a geek"

• I always disagree ... when people end up saying that we can only combat Communism, Fascism or what not if we develop an equal fanaticism. It appears to me that one defeats the fanatic precisely by not being a fanatic oneself, but on the contrary by using one's intelligence. In the same way, a man can kill a tiger because he is not like a tiger and uses his brain to invent the rifle, which no tiger could ever do.

  ~ George Orwell

• 

• Education is what you get when you read the fine print; experience is what you get when you don't.

  -- Pete Seeger

• Knowledge for the sake of understanding, not merely to prevail, that is the essence of our being. None can define its limits, or set its ultimate boundaries.

  ~ Vannevar Bush

• A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.

  -- attributed to Herman Oliver Albright

• Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently.
  
  They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can praise them, disagree with them, quote them, disbelieve them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them.
  
  Because they change things. They invent. They imagine. They heal. They explore. They create. They inspire. They push the human race forward. Maybe they have to be crazy.
  
  How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art? Or sit in silence and hear a song that’s never been written? Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels? We make tools for these kinds of people. While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius.
  
  Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

  -- Apple's "Think Different" ad, 2000

• Thought for the day: Never be afraid to try something new. Remember that a lone amateur built the Ark. A large group of professionals built the Titanic.

  -- Anonymous

• A computer gives the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship.

  -- Sherry Turkle

• A professor is someone who talks in other people's sleep.

  attributed to W.H.Auden

• It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

  ~ Upton Sinclair

• Organisms are not billiard balls, propelled by simple and measurable external forces to predictable new positions on life's pool table. Sufficiently complex systems have greater richness. Organisms have a history that constrains their future in myriad, subtle ways.

  ~ Stephen Jay Gould

• Education, for most people, means trying to lead the child to resemble the typical adult of his society... But for me, education means making creators... You have to make inventors, innovators, not conformists.

  ~ Jean Piaget

• Oh, the comfort — the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person — having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together; certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then with the breath of kindness blow the rest away.

  ~ Dinah Craik

• You damned sadist, you want to make your readers think.

  -- E. E. Cummings to Ezra Pound

• I like quoting Einstein. Know why? Because nobody dares contradict you.

  ~ Studs Terkel

• „Chornobyl is a word we would all like to erase from our memory. It [opened] a Pandora's box of invisible enemies and nameless anxieties in people's minds, but which most of us probably now think of as safely relegated to the past. Yet there are two compelling reasons why this tragedy must not be forgotten. First, if we forget Chornobyl, we increase the risk of more such technological and environmental disasters in the future. Second, more than seven million of our fellow human beings do not have the luxury of forgetting. They are still suffering, every day, as a result of what happened 14 years ago. Indeed, the legacy of Chornobyl will be with us, and with our descendants, for generations to come."

  --Kofi Annan, April 2000

  

  An International Conference in Kyiv, Ukraine

• The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards.

  Anatole France, in The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard

• Die Wikipedia ist eine minimal gesteuerte, dialogisch-dynamische Textproduktion mit offenem Ausgang.

  -- Herbert Hrachovec
  Vortrag: Existenzialismus, Bildung, Wikis
  Februar 2006, Berlin

• A woman has got to be able to say, and not feel guilty, `Who am I, and what do I want out of life?' She mustn't feel selfish and neurotic if she wants goals of her own, outside of husband and children.

  Betty Friedan, 1921-2006

• Natürlich drücken wir unserer Mannschaft die Daumen, und ich glaube, die Chancen sind gar nicht schlecht. Die Frauenfußball- Nationalmannschaft ist ja schon Fußballweltmeister, und ich sehe keinen Grund, warum Männer nicht das Gleiche leisten können wie Frauen.

  Dr. Angela Merkel
  German politician, New Year's Address 2006

• My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was less competition there.

  Indira Gandhi
  Indian politician (1917 - 1984)

• ... slideware often reduces the analytical quality of presentations. In particular, the popular PowerPoint templates (ready-made designs) usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis.

  --Edward Tufte
  in The Cognitive style of PowerPoint

• Education would be much more effective if its purpose were to ensure that by the time they leave school every student should know how much they don't know, and be imbued with a lifelong desire to know it.

  -- Sir William Haley

• Many people would sooner die than think; In fact, they do so.

  -- Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970)

• A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

  -- William James

• Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.

  Martin Luther King Jr.

• Mir imponieren nur die Ratschläge und Grundsätze, die der Ratgebende selbst beherzigt.

  -- Rosa Luxemburg

• A man who has the knowledge but lacks the power to express it is no better off than if he never had any ideas at all.
  -- Thucydides, ~400 BC

  [And today, if you have no ideas, you buy software patents off dying companies that were granted for technologies that are in essence prior art, and then you sue the pants off people who had good ideas themselves. See Kodak vs. Java - and I now refuse to buy any Kodak products! Yeremin sums it up nicely on Slashdot: "I am a software developer and amateur photography enthusiast, and I have recently learned about Kodak's patent infringement suit against Sun Microsystems. It is a shame that companies with failing business models consistently try to earn money through litigation rather than production and innovation. I realize that the proliferation of digital photography has caused hardship for the Eastman Kodak Company, but the use of this vague and overbroad patent against the software industry is unconscionable. As a direct result of this litigation, I will never again purchase another Kodak product, and I will encourage my family and colleagues to do the same. Malicious litigation is not an acceptable substitute for honest business."]

• How many members of the Bush Administration are needed to replace a lightbulb? The answer is SEVEN:

  • One to deny that a lightbulb needs to be replaced,
  • one to attack and question the patriotism of anyone who has questions about the lightbulb,
  • one to blame the previous administration for the need of a new lightbulb,
  • one to arrange the invasion of a country rumored to have a secret stockpile of lightbulbs,
  • one to get together with Vice President Cheney and figure out how to pay Halliburton Industries one million dollars for a lightbulb,
  • one to arrange a photo-op session showing Bush changing the lightbulb while dressed in a flight suit and wrapped in an American flag,
  • and finally one to explain to Bush the difference between screwing a lightbulb and screwing the country.

  Anonymous,
  from the American Voices Abroad Mailing List

• The United Nations
  INTERNATIONAL COVENANT ON CIVIL AND POLITICAL RIGHTS

  Article 7

  No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
  
  
• We must encourage [each other] - once we have grasped the basic points - to interconnecting everything else on our own, to use memory to guide our original thinking, and to accept what someone else says as a starting point, a seed to be nourished and grow. For the correct analogy for the mind is not a vessel that needs filling but wood that needs igniting - no more - and then it motivates one towards originality and instills the desire for truth. Suppose someone were to go and ask his neighbors for fire and find a substantial blaze there, and just stay there continually warming himself: that is no different from someone who goes to someone else to get to some of his rationality, and fails to realize that he ought to ignite his own flame, his own intellect, but is happy to sit entranced by the lecturn, and the words trigger only associative thinking and bring, as it were, only a flush to his cheeks and a glow to his limbs; but he has not dispelled or dispersed, in the warm light of philosophy, the internal dank gloom of his mind .
  -- Plutarch

• They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
  -- Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759

• If I want to achive something, I will surely find a way.
  If I do not want to do something, I can always find a reason why it is impossible.
  -- Russian saying

• Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.
  -- Heinrich Heine

• War is not healthy for children and other living things.
  -- Peace slogan from the 1960s

• What do you expect from a country where the bombs are smarter than the government?
  -- Letter to the Editor, Spiegel, 31.3.2003

• My tolerance for idiots is inversely proportional to my age.
  -- Me, although I am sure someone else has already said this

• Never look down to test the ground before taking your next step: only he who keeps his eye fixed on the far horizon will find his right road.
  -- Dag Hammarskjöld

• Three things give the student the possibility of surpassing his teacher: ask a lot of questions, remember the answers, teach.
  -- Jan Amos Coménius

• No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
  -- John Donne

• Feminism is the radical notion that women are people.
  -- Cheris Kramarae & Paula Treichler, A Feminist Dictionary

• Ich glaube, daß wahre Gleichberechtigung erst dann erzielt ist, wenn Frauen in politische Ämter gewählt werden, die genauso inkompetent sind, wie viele der Männer, die bereits dort sind.
  -- Diverse Politikerinnen: Maureen Reagan, Francoise Giroud
  
  
• "There are three kinds of death in this world. There is heart death, brain death, and there is being off the network."
  -- Guy Almes
  
• "...man sieht nur mit dem Herzen gut, das Wesentliche bleibt den Augen verborgen..."
  -- Antoine de Saint Exupery, " Der kleine Prinz"
  
  
• I haven't failed. I've found 10,000 things that don't work. 
  -- Benjamin Franklin
  
• We finished the Y2K transition last Fridak. From Mondak we will be looking at the problems likelk to occur when the kear shifts from 1999 to 2000....
  -- From a joke list on the Year 2000
• Was nutzt es einem Menschen, wenn er die ganze Welt gewinnt, dabei aber sich selbst verliert und Schaden nimmt?
  -- Markus 8,36 und Taufspruch meines Sohnes
• Lore ipsum:
  Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit... [There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain.]
  -- Cicero, in de Finibus]
• "Wer erneuern will, hat alle die zum Feind, denen es unter den alten Bedingungen gut ergangen ist."
  -- Machiavelli
• Today, the average computer user lives under a reign of terror where he or she is subjected to loss of data at the whim of a blue screen that appears at unexplainable times. We have lost 2000 years' of progress in rationalist thinking and reverted to superstitious and animist behavior where users chant magic incantations at their computer without understanding the meaning but hoping that the outcome will be blessed.
  -- Jakob Nielsen