You can learn a lot about people from their interests, and the quotations they like to cite, so here are
42 quotations, in no particular order
Avoid people with no sense of humour. They have bad heads, bad hearts, or both.
“Do you know a cure for me?” “Why yes,” he said, “I know a cure for everything. Salt water.” “Salt water?” I asked him. “Yes,” he said, “in one way or the other. Sweat, or tears, or the salt sea.”
If two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is doing the thinking.
The intellectual content of an activity is inversely proportional to the number of people watching it.
It is never too late to be what you might have been.
I never saw a mob rush across town to do a good deed.
If I had my life to live over, I’d dare to make more mistakes next time. I’d relax. I would limber up. I would be sillier than I’ve been this trip. I would take fewer things seriously. I would take more chances. I would take more trips, climb more mountains, and swim more rivers. I would eat more ice cream and less beans. I would have more actual troubles but fewer imaginary ones.
You see, I’m one of those people who live sensibly and sanely hour after hour, day after day. Oh, I’ve had my moments and, if I had it to do over again, I’d have more of them. In fact, I’d try to have nothing else. Just moments, one after the other, instead of living so many years ahead of each day.
I’ve been one of those persons who never goes anywhere without a thermometer, a hot water bottle, a raincoat and a parachute. If I had it to do over again, I would travel lighter than I have.
If I had my life to live over, I would start barefoot earlier in the spring and stay that way later in the fall. I would go to more dances. I would ride more merry-go-rounds. I would pick more daisies.
Make everything as simple as possible ... but no simpler.
The cheapest, fastest, and most reliable components of a computer system are those that aren’t there.
GOOD
FAST
CHEAP
... pick any two
Have you ever thought ... about whatever man builds, that all of man’s industrial efforts, all his calculations and computations, all the nights spent over working draughts and blueprints, invariably culminate in the production of a thing whose sole and guiding principle is the ultimate principle of simplicity?
In any thing at all, perfection is finally attained, not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away.
The best book on programming for the layman is "Alice in Wonderland", but that’s because it’s the best book on anything for the layman.
Cute is the enemy of beauty. Convenience is the enemy of excellence. Fashion is the enemy of integrity.
Why, of course, the people don’t want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece?
Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship.
Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.
Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.
There are only three things in life that matter: binding up the wounds, to avoid wounding, and to improve the view from the window.
The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.
A perfectly healthy sentence is extremely rare.
Writers take words seriously—perhaps the last professional class that does—and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader.
No one who has once taken the language under his care can ever again be really happy.
There is only one basic plot: things aren’t what they seem.
I often wonder whether or not education is fulfilling its purpose. A great majority of the so-called educated people do not think logically and scientifically. Even the press, the classroom, the platform, and the pulpit in many instances do not give us objective and unbiased truths. To save man from the morass of propaganda, in my opinion, is one of the chief aims of education. Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction.
The fundamental cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.
The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.
Science is what we have learned about how not to fool ourselves.
"Science" is hard to define, but if the word appears in the name, it probably isn’t.
Science deals in disprovable assertions. If something can not, in theory at least, be disproved by experiment and/or observation, then it is not in the domain of science.
Corollary: nothing can be proven in science, only supported or suggested. However, every good scientific theory suggests situations that would be impossible if the theory were valid, and hence provides a means to disprove itself.
I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.
God doesn’t know the difference between physics and chemistry.
Eppur si muove. [translation: It moves all the same.]
Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition.
Down the Yangtze the awful prediction has been fulfilled. You expect this river trip to be an experience of the past — and it is. But it is also a glimpse of the future. In a hundred years or so, under a cold uncolonized moon, what we call the civilized world will all look like China, muddy and senile and old-fangled: no trees, no birds, and shortages of fuel and metal and meat; but plenty of pushcarts, cobblestones, ditch-diggers, and wooden inventions. Nine hundred million farmers splashing through puddles and the rest of the population growing weak and blind working the crashing looms in black factories.
Forget rocket-ships, super-technology, moving sidewalks and all the rubbishy hope in science fiction. No one will ever go to Mars and live. A religion has evolved from the belief that we have a future in outer space; but it is a half-baked religion — it is a little like Mormonism or the Cargo Cult. Our future is this mildly poisoned earth and its smoky air. We are in for hunger and hard work, the highest stage of poverty — no starvation, but crudeness everywhere, clumsy art, simple language, bad books, brutal laws, plain vegetables, and clothes of one colour. It will be damp and dull, like this. It will be monochrome and crowded — how could it be different? There will be no star wars or galactic empires and no more money to waste on the loony nationalism in space programmes. Our grandchildren will probably live in a version of China. On the dark brown banks of the Yangtze the future has already arrived.
I am too skeptical to believe in the impossibility of anything.
I keep six honest serving-men
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When,
And How and Where and Who.
Everybody needs money; that’s why they call it “money”.
The Interpreter
We only see,
From pictures in the mind,
And they are always,
Interpretations.
Interpretations,
From a biased interpreter.
Entropy requires no maintenance.
I cannot conceive of a god who rewards and punishes his creatures or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves. Neither can I — nor would I want to — conceive of an individual that survives his physical death. Let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egotism, cherish such thoughts. I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and a glimpse of the marvelous structure of the existing world, together with the devoted striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the Reason that manifests itself in nature.
The factory of the future will have only two employees: a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment.
There is no way to peace, peace is the way.
… to an Englishman, a hundred miles is a long way; to an American, a hundred years is a long time.
As Canadian as possible under the circumstances.