Quotes

General

“If you don’t know where you’re going, you’re unlikely to end up there.” – Forrest Gump

“I know you believe you understood what you think I said, but I am not sure you realize what you heard is not what I meant.” – Unknown

“I have always felt, that the Geneva Convention is a dangerous piece of stupidity because it leads people to believe that war can be civilized. It can’t.” – Capt. John Tonkin

“Check the spelling, first automatically and then by hand. After awl, their are spelling miss steaks that the chequer can knot ketch.” – The Pragmatic Programmer

“When everybody actually is out to get you, paranoia is just good thinking.” – The Pragmatic Programmer

“Professionals are predictable, it’s the amateurs that are dangerous.” – Unknown

“Never forget that your weapon is made by the lowest bidder.” – Unknown

“My friend, the panda will never fulfill his destiny, nor you yours until you let go of the illusion of control” – Oogway, “Kung Fu Panda”.

“There is a saying: yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift. That is why it is called the present” – Oogway, “Kung Fu Panda”.

“Humans! They lived in the world where the grass continued to be green and the sun rose every day and flowers regularly turned into fruit, and what impressed them? Weeping statues. And wine made out of water! A mere quantum-mechanistic tunnel effect, that’d happen anyway if you were prepared to wait zillions of years. As if the turning of sunlight into wine, by means of vines and grapes and time and anzymes, wasn’t a thousand times more impressive and happened all the time…”
― Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

“People don’t like change. But make the change fast enough and you go from one type of normal to another.” ― Terry Pratchett, “Making Money”

“Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber.” – Plato

“As a slow-witted human being I have a very small head and I had better learn to live with it and to respect my limitations and give them full credit, rather than try to ignore them, for the latter vain effort will be punished by failure.” – Edsger W. Dijkstra

“Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.” – Niels Bohr

“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” – George Bernard Shaw

“Being a professional is not having a title. Being a professional is knowing what you are doing” – Unknown

“Beware of scientific fundamentalists who try to tell you everything is pretty much worked out, and only a few routine details are left to do. It is just when the majority of scientists believe such things that the next revolution in our world-view creeps into being…” – Terry Pratchett, “The Science of Discworld”

“Things are the way they are because they got that way” – Gerald Weinberg

“‘Can a man still be brave if he’s afraid?’ he heard his own voice saying, small and far away. And his father’s void replied to him. ‘That is the only time a man can be brave'” – Bran, Game of Thrones, Book one of A Song of Ice and Fire, by George R. R. Martin

“A goal is a dream with a deadline” – Napoleon Hill

“My definition of an expert in any field is a person who knows enough about what’s really going on to be scared.” – P. J. Plauger

“A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.” – attributed to Thomas Jefferson

“A miracle is something that seems impossible but happens anyway” – Griffin, Men In Black 3

“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity” – Hanlon’s razor

“When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.” or “The first effect of not believing in God is to believe in anything.” – G.K. Chesterton

“We like to think we make complicated decisions based on rational analysis, but most of the time, we actually make an emotional decision and then invent a rational analysis to justify it.” – Seth Godin

“At least a billion people on earth at this moment who would consider their prayers answered if they could trade places with you.” – Sam Harris

“Don’t imagine having things that you don’t have. Rather, pick the best of the things that you do have and think of how much you would want them if you didn’t have them.” – Marcus Aurelius

“Before you criticize a man, walk a mile in his shoes. That way, when you do criticize him, you’ll be a mile away and have his shoes.” – Steve Martin

“Don’t take criticism from someone you wouldn’t take advice from.” – Dakota Meyer

“The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.” – Albert Einstein

Programming (and Tech in general)

“It has been discovered that C++ provides a remarkable facility for concealing the trivial details of a program – such as where its bugs are.” – David Keppel

“The only way for errors to occur in a program is by being put there by the author. No other mechanisms are known. Programs can’t acquire bugs by sitting around with other buggy programs.” – Harlan Mills

“There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.” – Alan J.Perlis

“Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.” – Brian W. Kernighan.

“Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.” – Martin Golding

“Computer Science: A study akin to numerology and astrology, but lacking the precision of the former and the success of the latter.” – Stan Kelly-Bootle

“It is a cliché in our business that the first 90 percent of the work is easy, the second 90 percent wears you down, and the last 90 percent – the attention to detail – makes a good product.” – Ron Avitzur

“Ten years ago, researchers into formal methods (and I was the most mistaken among them) predicted that the programming world would embrace with gratitude every assistance promised by formalization to solve the problems of reliability that arise when programs get large and more safety-critical. Programs have now got very large and very critical — well beyond the scale which can be comfortably tackled by formal methods. There have been many problems and failures, but these have nearly always been attributable to inadequate analysis of requirements or inadequate management control. It has turned out that the world just does not suffer significantly from the kind of problem that our research was originally intended to solve.” – Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” – Sir Arthur C. Clarke

“Data is ones and zeroes | Software is ones and zeroes and hard work” – The Third Bit

“The problem with quick and dirty is that the dirty remains long after the quick has been forgotten” – Steve C. McConnell

Conway’s Law: “A system reflects the organizational structure that built it” – Melvin Conway

“If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.” – Edsger Dijkstra

“Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.” – Martin Fowler

“Software undergoes beta testing shortly before it’s released. Beta is Latin for “still doesn’t work.”” – Unknown

“Programming is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.” – Rich Cook

“The problem with object-oriented languages is they’ve got all this implicit environment that they carry around with them. You wanted a banana but what you got was a gorilla holding the banana and the entire jungle. “ – Joe Armstrong, creator of Erlang programming language

Economics

“The problem with socialism is that sooner or later you run out of other people’s money” – Margaret Thatcher

“The stock market is very efficient in transferring wealth from the impatient to the patient.” – Warren Buffet

“In the Long Run we are all dead” – John Maynard Keynes

“An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn’t happen today.” – Laurence J. Peter