We’re no longer judging you by what sort of widgets your factory makes. We’re judging you by what we can expect from you in the future.
[...]
No one ever bought anything in the elevator-purpose is to make it so compelling, the person will stay after the ride is over
[...]
1. Insulate yourself from anonymous angry people
2. Expose yourself to art you don’t yet understand
3. Precisely measure the results that are important to you and stay blind to the metrics that don’t matter
4. Fail often
5. Ship
6. Lead, don’t manage so much
7. Seek out uncomfortable situations
8. Make an impact on the people who matter to you
9. Be better at your baseline skills than anyone else
10. Copyedit less, invent more
11. Give more speeches
12. Ignore unsolicited advice
[...]
Placebos are underrated by almost everyone.
It’s almost never necessary to use a semicolon.
Seek out habits that help you overcome fear or inertia. Destroy those that do the opposite.
– Seth

The silliest woman can manage a clever man, but it needs a very clever woman to manage a fool.
– Rudyard Kipling, Plain Tales

The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.
– Douglas Adams

Often, as with the big pharmacies, the script is fine but it is the illumination that scars us.
– Just My Type

You see, I think he better than anyone understood that while ideas ultimately can be so powerful, they begin as fragile, barely formed thoughts, so easily missed, so easily compromised, so easily just squished.
– Jonathan Ive

When the train of history hits a curve, the intellectuals fall off.
– Karl Marx

Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and persistently thought considers them: the starred sky above me and the moral law inside me.
– Kant

Twist!
– Liz Lemon in 30 Rock, announcing there’s been a twist in the story

Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.
– John F Kennedy

I would say that modern software engineering is the ongoing refinement of the ever-increasing degrees of decoupling. Yet, while the history of software shows that coupling is bad, it also suggests that coupling is unavoidable. An absolutely decoupled application is useless because it adds no value. Developers can only add value by coupling things together. The very act of writing code is coupling one thing to another. The real question is how to wisely choose what to be coupled to.
– Juval Löwy

The purpose is the intensification of consciousness.
– John Haught

This is narrative ballast.
– Oracle Night

Cynics may shake their heads but cynics never do much anyway except shake their heads
– Subway poster from the Freelancers Union

Software requirements is a communication problem
– unknown

Two things about economics. (1) Incentives matter. (2) There’s no such thing as a free lunch.
Two things about computer programming. (1) Every problem can be solved by breaking it up into a series of smaller problems. (2) The computer will always do exactly what you tell it to.
Two things about software engineering. (1) Writing the code is the easy part. Writing it so someone else can understand it later is the important part. (2) Make it work, then make it elegant, then make it fast.
– unknown

Most people aren’t [reasonable], even though they’d protest that they are. They prefer to be coaxed or wheeled, or even driven. That way they never make a mistake.
[...]
It’s an affectation to consider yourself too spiritual to understand anything mechanical. It is a petty and a very silly form of vanity. Everyone starts by knowing nothing about anything, but God gives him–and even her–brains to find out with. Failure to use them is not a virtue to be praised; even in women it is a gap to be deplored
– The Day of the Triffids

The vibration of the world is changing.
[...]
Past a certain point all meditation techniques must end because they are just techniques. The real meditation is a natural exploration of the mind.
– Sam Zeiger

The essence of strategy is choosing to perform activities differently than rivals do.
A company can outperform rivals only if it can establish a difference that it can preserve.
Strategy is making trade-offs in competing. The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.
– Michael E Porter, What is Strategy

What is a feeling if not a thought groping its way into articulation
– unknown

Most history is guessing, and the rest if prejudice
[...]
We are no longer confident that atoms, much less organisms, will respond in the future as we think they have responded in the past.
[...]
History cannot be a science — it can only be an industry (by ferreting out the facts), an art (by establishing a meaningful order in the chaos of materials), and a philosophy (by seeking perspective and enlightenment).
[...]
Since Nature has not read very carefully the American Declaration of Independence or the French Revolutionary Declaration of the Rights of Man, we are all born unfree and unequal. Nature loves difference as the necessary material of selection and evolution. Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias.
[...]
A youth boiling with hormones will wonder why he should not give full freedom to his sexual desires; and if he in unchecked by custom, morals, or laws, he may ruin his life before he matures sufficiently to understand that sex is a river of fire that must be banked and cooled by a hundred restraints if it is not to consume in chaos both the individual and the group.
[...]
The conservative who resists change is as valuable as the radical who proposes it. It is good that new ideas should be heard, for the sake of the few that can be used; but it is also good that new ideas should be compelled to go through the mill of objection, opposition, and contumely.
[...]
Dividing economic history into three stages — hunting, agriculture, industry.
[...]
We must remind ourselves again that history as usually written is quite different from history as usually lived: the historian records the exceptional because it is interesting–because it is exceptional.
[...]
Roman morals began to “decay” soon after the conquered Greeks passed into Italy (146 B.C.), but Rome continued to have great statesmen, philosophers, poets, and artists until the death of Marcus Aurelius (A.D. 180). Politically Rome was at nadir when Caesar came (60 B.C.); yet it did not quite succumb to the barbarians till A.D. 465. May we take as long to fall as did Imperial Rome!
[...]
Much of our moral freedom is good: it is pleasant to be relieved of theological terror, to enjoy without qualm the pleasures that harm neither others nor ourselves, and to feel the tang of the open air upon our liberated flesh.
[...]
Only when priests used the fears [of hidden forces in the earth, rivers, oceans, trees, winds, and sky] and rituals to support morality and law did religion become a force vital and rival to the state.
[...]
If history supports any theology this would be a dualism like the Zoroastrian or Manichaean: a good spirit and an evil spirit battling for control of the universe and men’s souls.
[...]
Just as the moral development of the Hellenes had weakened their belief in the quarrelsome and adulterous deities of Olympus, so the development of the Christian ethic slowly eroded Christian theology. Christ destroyed Jehovah.
[...]
As long as there is poverty there will be gods.
[...]
We conclude that the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation.
[...]
The longest-lasting regime of socialism yet known to history was set up by the Incas in what we now call Peru, at some time in the thirteenth century.
[...]
There may be a redivision of the land, but the natural inequality of men soon re-creates an inequality of possessions and privileges, and raises to power a new minority with essentially the same instincts as in the old. The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character, the only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionists are the philosophers and saints.
[...]
Peace is an unstable equilibrium, which can be preserved only be acknowledged supremacy or equal power.
[...]
We shall here define progress as the increasing control of the environment by life.
– Will and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History

Charity degrades and demoralizes
[...]
The worst slave owners were those who were kind to their slaves
[...]
There is a certain type of misanthropy which is much better as a social attitude than this cheap, charitable optimism
– Slavoj Zizek

Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire
[...]
Sometimes a few birds, a horse, have saved the ruins of an amphitheater.
[...]
This City is so horrific that its mere existence, the mere fact of its having endured–even in the middle of a secret desert–pollutes the past and the future and somehow compromises the stars. So long as this City endures, no one in the world can ever be happy or courageous.
[...]
Whatsoever one man does, it is as though all men did it.
[...]
Like every writer, he measured other men’s virtues by what they had accomplished, yet asked that other men measure him by what he planned someday to do.
– Borges

You think the truth will make men free. But it only makes them angry.
[...]
- What language do you want it in?
- Whatever suits you best, Alvaro
[...]
He used his mind to make his body stop trembling.
– Charles McCarry, The Tears of Autumn

What happened in your life to make you believe people are good?
– unknown

Welcome to the new decade: Java is a restricted platform, Google is evil, Apple is a monopoly and Microsoft are the underdogs
– unknown

The power of accurate observation is frequently called cynicism by those who don’t have it.
– George Bernard Shaw

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
– H. G. Wells

I’m all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let’s start with typewriters.
– Frank Lloyd Wright

Interesting – I use a Mac to help me design the next Cray.
– Seymoure Cray, when he was told that Apple Inc. had recently bought a Cray supercomputer to help them design the next Mac

The covers of this book are too far apart.
– Ambrose Bierce

I heard someone tried the monkeys-on-typewriters bit trying for the plays of W. Shakespeare, but all they got was the collected works of Francis Bacon.
– Bill Hirst

Wit is educated insolence.
– Aristotle

There are no facts, only interpretations.
– Friedrich Nietzsche

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
– Galileo Galilei

“Like me, ” Jenny Fields wrote her son, “it appears you are going to be the beneficiary of one of the many popular misunderstandings of our time.”
[...]
One-eyed and no-tongued, thought Garp, my family will pull together.
– John Irving, The World according to Garp

Steve blamed most of the current troubles on the police. “The police have now got so good,” he said, “that we’re more constrained than before. We just don’t have the time that we used to have. The moment a fight starts we’re immediately surrounded by dogs and horses. That’s why everyone has started using knives. I suppose it might sound stupid but because the policing has got so good we’ve got to the point where we have to inflict the greatest possible damage in the least amount of time, and the knife is the most efficient instrument for a quick injury. In fact these knifings — because there is so little time — have become quite symbolic. [...] If the policing was not so good, I’m sure the knifings would stop.
[...]
Every crowd has a threshold; all crowds are initially held in place by boundaries of some kind. There are rules that say: this much, but no more. A march has a route and a destination. A picket line is precisely itself: an arrangement of points that cannot be crossed. A political rally: there is the politician, the rally’s event, at its center. A parade, a protest, a procession: there is the police escort, the sidewalk, the street, the overwhelming fact of the surrounding property. [...] Existing so intensely in the present that it is possible for an individual, briefly, to cease being an individual, to disappear into the power of numbers.
– Bill Buford, Among the Thugs

You have two options: delete the database, or try to reverse SHA1
– Hassan

And the process by which a take-over occurs is frighteningly simple–in view of its effects on community, workers, shareholders, and management. A paper manufacturer in Oregon appears cheap to the twenty-six-year-old playing with his computer late one night in New York or London. He writes his calculations on a telex, which he sends to any party remotely interested in paper, in Oregon, or in buying cheap companies. Like the organizer of a debutante party, the twenty-six-year-old keeps a file on his desk of who is keen on whom. But he isn’t particularly discriminating in issuing invitations. Anyone can buy because anyone can borrow using junk bonds. The papermaker in Oregon is now a target.

The next day the papermaker reads about himself in the “Heard on the Street” column of the Wall Street Journal. His stock price is convulsing like a hanged man because arbitrageurs like Ivan Boesky have begun to buy his company’s shares in hopes of making a quick buck by selling out to the raider. The papermaker panics and hires an investment banker to defend him, perhaps even the same twenty-six-year-old responsible for his misery. Five other twenty-six-year-oldws at five hitherto unoccupied investment banks read the rumors and begin to scourge the landscape for a buyer of the paper company. Once a buyer is found, the company is officially “in play”. At the same time the army of young overachievers check their computers to see if other paper companies in America might not also be cheap. Before long the entire paper industry is up for grabs.
– From Liar’s Poker (“How Can We Make You Happier?”)

- Was your first sexual experience with a man or with a woman?
- I was too polite to ask.
– Gore Vidal, in a TV interview

This is a racecar after all: You don’t sit in it, you wear it.
– http://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/news/4215249

Not time to worry yet, Scout.
– To Kill a Mockingbird

Grok
[...]
I used to think I was serving humanity. Then I discovered that humanity does not want to be served; on the contrary it resents any attempt to serve it.
[...]
Most people were candidates for protective restraint
[...]
Gratitude is a euphemism for resentment
[...]
Bible contains practical advice for most emergencies
[...]
I am only an egg
– Stranger in a Strange Land

Q: What 11-letter word do all Yale graduates spell incorrectly?
A: Incorrectly.
[...]
Wouldn’t the sentence “I want to put a hyphen between the words Fish and And and And and Chips in my Fish-And-Chips sign” have been clearer if quotation marks had been placed before Fish, and between Fish and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and Chips, as well as after Chips?”
– Martin Gardner

Those three things—autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward—are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying. It is not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It’s whether our work fulfills us.
– The Outliers by Gladwell

He told it from the beginning and in order with the wonderful memory of those who cannot read or write.
[...]
I obscenity in thy milk
– For Whom the Bell Tolls

This [some 40 antioxidants] is what you ingest when you eat food flavored with thyme. Some of these chemicals are broken down by your digestion, but others go on to do various as-yet-undetermined things to your body: turning some gene’s expression on or off, perhaps, or intercepting a free radical before it disturbs a stand of DNA deep in some cell. It would be great to know how this all works, but in the meantime we can enjoy thume in the knowledge that it probably doesn’t do any harm (since people have been eating it forever) and that it might actually do some good (since people have been eating it forever), and even if it does nothing at all, we like the way it tastes.
[...]
Cooking is one of the most important health consequences of buying food from local farmers.
[...]
Attending a recent conference on nutrition and health, of all things, I was astounded to see that in addition to the copious buffet at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, our hosts wheeled out a copious buffet halfway between breakfast and lunch and then again halfway between lunch and dinner, evidently worried that we would not be able to survive the long crossing form one meal to the next without a between-meal meal.
– In Defense of Food

Testing is the infinite process of comparing the invisible to the ambiguous in order to avoid the unthinkable happening to the anonymous.
– unknown

Life takes pride in not appearing uncomplicated. If it relied on simplicity, it probably would not succeed in moving us to do all those things that we are not easily moved to do . . .
[...]
For property is poverty is fear; only to have possessed something and to have let go of it means carefree ownership!
[...]
And you suddenly realize, while holding this little recovering animal, that life is recovering from death. And you hold it up. Generations of birds, and all of the forests over which they pass, and all of the skies into which they will rise. And is any of this easy? No: you are very strong to carry the heaviest burden in such an hour.
[...]
It might just be the case that only the very last sentence contains that small and possibly inconspicuous word through which everything we had struggled to learn and everything we had failed to understand will be transformed suddenly into magnificent sense.
[...]
Ah, we count the years and introduce divisions here and there and stop and begin anew and waver between these options. But everything that we encounter is so very much of one piece, and so intimately related to everything else, and has given birth to itself, grows and is then raised so much to come into its own, that we basically just need to be there, if only unassumingly, if only authentically, the way the earth is there in its affirmation of the seasons, light and dark and wholly in space, longing to be supported by nothing but that web of influences and forces where the stars feel secure.
[...]
All of our insights occur after the fact.
[...]
Nothing locks people in error as much as the daily repetition of error
[...]
In a good marriage each person appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude
[...]
One has this recurring experience in every conflict and confusion: that one is alone
[...]
The widely asked question whether one “believes in god” seems to me based on the wrong premise, as if god could be reached at all by means of human striving and overcoming
[...]
Art is childhood
[...]
Childhood is a land entirely independent of everything [...] Why not grow older and more mature in this land?
[...]
Parents should never want to teach us life; for they teach us their life.
[...]
Ah, if our parents were only born with us, how much backtracking and bitterness we would be spared.
[...]
Each person ought to be guided only to the point where he becomes capable of thinking by himself, working by himself, learning by himself. [...] Schools ought to think above all in terms of individuals and not in terms of grades.
[...]
Our time is neither more distinguished nor lesser than any other. [...] it is also jealous of the future.
[...]
For an object to become art, it must have a higher degree of inner oscillation which, owing to its nature, exceeds that of objects in daily usage or expressions in daily conversation.
[...]
Religion is art for those who are not creative.
[...]
God is the most ancient work of art. He has been preserved very poorly and many parts have been added later, in approximations. But it is of course incumbent upon any educated person to be able to talk about him and to have seen the remnants.
[...]
I personally feel a greater affinity to all those religions in which the middleman is less essential or almost entirely suppressed. To have kept him “suffering,” if I may put it thus, has increasingly become the effort and achievement of Christian mentality.
[...]
Joy is inexpressibly more than happiness. Happiness befalls people, happiness is fate, while people cause joy to bloom inside themselves. Joy is plainly a good season for the heart; you is the ultimate achievement of which human beings are capable.
[...]
Ah, how premature Christ was.
[...]
Violence is a coarse tool and one that cannot be rehearsed.
[...]
If human beings only stopped referring to cruelty in nature as a way of making excuses for their own! The human forgets with what infinite innocence even the most terrifying event in nature takes place. [...] the most horrible occurrence, as it were, is ultimately nothing else than an expression of nature’s abundance.
[...]
To take love seriously, to endure it, and to learn it the way one learns a profession–that is what young people need to do. [...] [People] have turned love into a game and pleasant distraction because they thought that games and distractions are more blissful than work.
[...]
[Death] recognized not as a state of being withered but presumed to be the intensity that quite exceeds us.
[...]
Our conventions have tried to turn this complicated and extreme relation [to love someone] into something easy and effortless and created the illusion that anyone is capable of love.
– Rilke, Letters on Life

Cultural, intellectual and spiritual pleasures are of greater value than mere physical pleasure because the former would be valued higher than the latter by competent judges. A competent judge, according to Mill, is anyone who has experienced both the lower pleasures and the higher.
[...]
The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest-Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure.
[...]
It is not the agent’s own greatest happiness that matters “but the greatest amount of happiness altogether.”
[...]
It is better to be a human dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied
– J S Mill, Utilitarianism

Life is a gift horse in my opinion
– Salinger, Nine Stories

A slave, properly so called, is a being who has not learnt to help himself.
[...]
[The three fundamental conditions]
These were- 1. That the people should be willing to receive it. 2. That they should be willing and able to do what is necessary for its preservation. 3. That they should be willing and able to fulfil the duties and discharge the functions which it imposes on them.
[...]
Responsibility is null when nobody knows who is responsible. Nor, even when real, can it be divided without being weakened.
– J S Mill, Representative Government

The believe-it-or-not superlatives are so extreme and Tom Swiftian they make you smile. The L.H.C. is not merely the world’s largest particle accelerator but the largest machine ever built. At the center of just one of the four main experimental stations installed around its circumference, and not even the biggest of the four, is a magnet that generates a magnetic field 100,000 times as strong as Earth’s. And because the super-conducting, super-colliding guts of the collider must be cooled by 120 tons of liquid helium, inside the machine it’s one degree colder than outer space, thus making the L.H.C. the coldest place in the universe.
– unknown

Eating an orange
While making love
Makes for bizarre enj-
oyment thereof.
– Tom Lehrer

The truths which are ultimately accepted as the first principles of a science, are really the last results of metaphysical analysis
– J.S. Mill, Utilitarianism

A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people
– The Declaration of Independence

The said States hereby severally enter into a firm league of friendship with each other
– Articles of Confederation

The drug hit him like an express train, a white-hot column of light mounting his spine from the region of his prostate, illuminating the sutures of his skull with x-rays of short-circuited sexual energy. His teeth sang in their individual sockets like tuning forks, each one pitch-perfect and clear as ethanol. His bones, beneath the hazy envelope of flesh, were chromed and polished, the joints lubricated with a film of silicone. Sandstorms raged across the scoured floor of his skull, generating waves of high thin static that broke behind his eyes, spheres of purest crystal, expanding…The anger was expanding, relentless, exponential, riding out behind the betaphenethylamine rush like a carrier wave, a seismic fluid, rich and corrosive.
– Neuromancer

Umami turns a soup from salt water into a food
– unknown

Knowing where to look — and remembering what you have seen — is a hallmark of experience and expertise.
– unknown

News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress; all the rest is advertising.
– Lord Northcliffe, a newspaper magnate

The empire is nothing but a zodiac of the mind’s phantasms.
[...]
“On the day when I know all the emblems,” he asked Marco, “shall I be able to possess my empire, at last?”
And the Venetian answered: “Sire, do not believe it. On that day you will be an emblem among emblems”
[...]
“I have thought of a model city from which I deduce all the others,” Marco answered. “It is a city made only of exceptions, exclusions, incongruities, contradictions. If such a city is the most improbably, by reducing the number of abnormal elements, we increase the probability that the city really exists. So I have only to subtract exceptions from my model, and in whatever direction I proceed, I will arrive at one of the cities which, always as an exception, exist. But I cannot force my operation beyond a certain limit: I would achieve cities too probable to be real.”
[...]
Knowledge of the empire was hidden in the pattern drawn by the angular shifts of the knight, by the diagonal passages opened by the bishop’s incursions, by the lumbering, cautious tread of the king and the humble pawn, by the inexorable ups and downs of every game.
[...]
“I speak and speak,” Marco says, “byt the listener retains only the words he is expecting. [...] It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.
[...]
The Venetian knew that when Kublai became vexed with him, the emperor wanted to follow more clearly a private train of thought; so Marco’s answers and objections took their place in a discourse already proceeding on its own, in the Great Khan’s head. That is to say, between the two of them it did not matter whether questions and solutions were uttered aloud or whether each of the two went on pondering in silence. In fact, they were silent [...]
– Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Be subtle! Be subtle! And use your spies for all kinds of business
– The Art of War

Men who are successful with women are merely those who have experienced more rejection.
– unknown

Don’t act like a drunk man. Act like a drunk man trying hard to be sober.
– unknown

The secret of happiness is something to do.
– unknown

Good work is not done by “humble” men. [...] A man who is always asking “Is what I do worth while?” and “Am I the right person to do it?” will always be ineffective himself and a discouragement to others. He must shut his eyes a little and think a little more of his subject and himself than they deserve.
[...]
It is undeniable that a gift for mathematics is one of the most specialized talents, and that mathematicians as a class are not particularly distinguished for general ability or versatility.
[...]
A man’s first duty, a young man’s at any rate, is to be ambitious. Ambition is a noble passion which may legitimately take many forms [...] but the noblest ambition is that of leaving behind one something of permanent value.
[...]
Bertrand Russell’s horrible dream: He was in the top floor of the University Library, about A.D. 2100. A library assistant was going round the shelves carrying an enormous bucket, taking down book after book, glancing at them, restoring them to the shelves or dumping them into the bucket. At last he came to three large volumes which Russell could recognize as the last surviving copy of Principia mathematica. He took down one of the volumes, turned over a few pages, seemed puzzled for a moment by the curious symbolism, closed the volume, balanced it in his hand and hesitated…
[...]
A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas. A mathematician has no material to work with but ideas, and so his patterns are likely to last longer, since ideas wear less with time than words. The mathematicians’s patterns must be beautiful; the ideas, like the colours or the words, must fit together in a hermonious way. Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.
[...]
Music can be used to stimulate mass emotion, while mathematics cannot; and musical incapacity is recognized (no doubt rightly) as mildly discreditable, whereas most people are so frightened of the name of mathematics that they are ready, quite unaffectedly, to exaggerate their own mathematical stupidity.
[...]
The “seriousness” of a mathematical theorem lies, not in its practical consequences, which are usually negligible, but in the significance of the mathematical ideas which it connects.
[...]
Reductio ad absurdum is one of a mathematician’s finest weapons. It is a far finer gambit than any chess gambit: a chess player may offer the sacrifice of a pawn or even a piece, but a mathematician offers the game.
– Hardy, A Mathematician’s Apology

Ecosystems outlast organisms.
– unknown

An intelligent creature can doubt its own existence, can decide whether to exist, and can hesitate. We can waver when deciding, because we can offset short-term benefit against the long-term benefit.
– unknown

Four Stages of Control: Transact. Anticipate. Manipulate. Generate.
– unknown

It’s hugely important that we control what goes into our bodies just like we control what we read or see on TV or who we spend time with. These are finite resources.
– unknown

People buy what you believe in, not what you’re selling. The most successful vendors say why, then how, then what.
– unknown

You have achieved a perfection in design when you can’t take anything away.
– unknown

Simplicity – predictable, functional, low cost, stackable. The most innovative concepts are complexity that is simple because it’s made of layers of simple concepts.
– unknown

Most successful bosses are similar to psychopaths: detached, egocentric, discard ppl at whim.
– unknown

Never put your name on anything you’re not 100% proud of.
– unknown

When all else fails, use fire.
– unknown

You’ll never understand the nevernude.
– Arrested Development

Mankind is overcivilized.
– unknown

A capitalist society thrives on the sanctity of contracts.
– unknown

Humans are the only animals anxious about what differentiates them from other animals.
– unknown

Do you sometimes see the future as it has already passed behind, even if only for a few moments ahead.
[...]
Dreams are our memories from another world, another time.
– my friend

Ideas have their time, and it’s not for us to choose when they arrive. But when they do, they almost always occur to many people at more or less the same time, often in a slightly disguised form whose underlying unity becomes apparent only later. This is perhaps not too surprising, the same seeds taking root in many a fertile mind. A bit harder to explain, though, is the moment in time when an idea comes to fruition. Often all of the ingredients are available, and yet no one thinks to put two-and-two together and draw what seems, in retrospect, to be the obvious inference. Until, suddenly, everyone does. Why didn’t we think of that ages ago? Nothing was stopping us, we just didn’t notice the opportunity!
– unknown

ADHD is not an epidemic! we should not be anesthetizing our children, we should wake them up
– unknown

The final outcome is a compression of the hundreds of failed attempts.
[...]
You know, there’s a lot of laughter in an insane asylum…
[...]
I got your back… aligned with my knife.
[...]
The banjo orchestra is a narrative compression of America’s cultural heritage.
[...]
Don’t call my cat stupid.
[...]
No reason to be self-loathing, my life is great.
[...]
Don’t be arrogant, you learn all the time.
[...]
Science is like getting an answer. Art is like asking the question.
[...]
What a momentous event, when continents collide.
[...]
The only thing worse than not knowing something is thinking you’re seen it before.
[...]
How much do you think Google can know about you, if they wanted? How much can’t it! It can know all your behaviors, all your fantasies, all the illegal things you do. And of what it can, how much do you think it does know about you!
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Know one person who’s really rich, two people who can get really rich, four people who are as rich as you, and eight people who are poorer.
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When in a state of altered consciousness we learn everything there is to learn about everyone else and nothing about ourselves.
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The more one travels, the more likely they are to alter their consciousness
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Humanity’s purpose is to document the ascent
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Look death in the lazy eye!
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Imagine four clowns in a square, hugging.
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True love is realizing that being with the other person is your purpose in life. Also, realizing that the other person being unhappy makes you unhappy.
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“Family” is a very strong concept. It transcends time, and can’t be shaken by little things.
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Doing what attempts to please everyone a little may end up displeasing everyone a lot.
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You don’t pull ideas out of your head; they push themselves to it
– me