Engineering Quotes

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1,193 Engineering-related quotes – for inspiration and reflection.

Updated: 2024-12-14

This list of quotations has been compiled by members of the lab in an effort to draw attention to individuals, phrases, philosophies, and concepts from around the world and throughout history that serve to shape the thinking of engineers. Many of these quotes previously appeared, in regular rotation, on a projection screen above the door in the EDS; now you can enjoy them from wherever you are on earth. It's been suggested that, when the list hits 1,826 quotes, it should be turned into a 5-a-day app, desktop device, or calendar – let's see!

There are innumerable existing lists of similar quotes; in particular, many of the quotes in the article 101 Engineering Quotes from the Minds of Innovators align well with the ethos of the Engineering Design Studio, and appear on our list, as well.

Note 1: Many of the quotes below have been altered to be gender-neutral. If you're seeking an original quote, please double-check and cross-reference with available sources if you wish to use a quote in its original phrasing.

Note 2: Quotes, in general, suffer from the messy issue of accidental and intentional mis-attribution. The list below contains quotes that are intended to be correctly attributed to an individual who either first said the phrase or who became most known for the phrase (even if it might have been spoken by another human, as well).



“Obsolescence never meant the end of anything, it's just the beginning.”

Marshall McLuhan


“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”

Aristotle


“Rudeness is the weak person's imitation of strength.”

Eric Hoffer


“Humans are the only creatures who refuse to be what they are.”

Albert Camus


“You want to be extra rigorous about making the best possible thing you can. Find everything that's wrong with it and fix it.”

Elon Musk


“Don't be afraid to give up the good to go for the great.”

John D. Rockefeller


“A person will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to them to pull rather than push it.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein


“Associate yourself with people of good quality, for it is better to be alone than in bad company.”

Booker T. Washington


“The greatest educational dogma is also its greatest fallacy: the belief that what must be learned can necessarily be taught.”

Sydney J. Harris


“There are lots of bad reasons to start a company. But there’s only one good, legitimate reason, and I think you know what it is: it’s to change the world.”

Phil Libin


“I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned.”

Richard P. Feynman


“I refuse to let adversity allow me to be average.”

Mike Tyson


“The time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum [of money] involved.”

Parkinson's Law of Triviality


“It's OK to have your eggs in one basket as long as you control what happens to that basket.”

Elon Musk


“PI•DOO•MA (n.) — U.S. Department of Energy class 5 Cost Estimate, 50% error margins. (Pulled It Directly Out Of My Ass)”

US Department of Energy


“Nationalism is an infantile disease, the measles of humankind.”

Albert Einstein


“I hope that people will finally come to realize that there is only one 'race' - the human race - and that we are all members of it.”

Margaret Atwood


“Are you really sure that a floor can't also be a ceiling?”

M. C. Escher


“Wisdom tends to grow in proportion to one's awareness of one's ignorance.”

Anthony de Mello


“Curiosity is the essence of our existence.”

Gene Cernan


“The Universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.”

Neil deGrasse Tyson


“Imagine if every Thursday your shoes exploded if you tied them the usual way. This happens to us all the time with computers, and nobody thinks of complaining.”

Jef Raskin


“No one in the brief history of computing has ever written a piece of perfect software. It’s unlikely that you’ll be the first.”

Andy Hunt


“Great wine requires a mad man to grow the vine, a wise man to watch over it, a lucid poet to make it, and a lover to drink it.”

Salvador Dalí


“How could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads?”

Plato (The Allegory of the Cave)


“Somehow even a popular fallacy has an aspect of truth when it suits one's own case.”

Margaret Oliphant


“We can be knowledgeable with another's knowledge, but we cannot be wise with another's wisdom.”

Michel de Montaigne


“Anytime someone puts a lock on something you own, against your wishes, and doesn't give you the key, they're not doing it for your benefit.”

Doctorow's Law


“To provide meaningful architecture is not to parody history, but to articulate it.”

Daniel Libeskind


“I don't believe anything really revolutionary has ever been invented by committee... I'm going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone... Not on a committee. Not on a team.”

Steve Wozniak


“One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.”

Bertrand Russell


“What a folly to dread the thought of throwing away life at once, and yet have no regard to throwing it away by parcels and piecemeal.”

John Howe


“In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments — there are consequences.”

Robert G. Ingersoll


“Everybody you fight is not your enemy and everybody who helps you is not your friend.”

Mike Tyson


“So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work.”

Peter F. Drucker


“A person with a watch knows what time it is. A person with two watches is never sure.”

Segal's Law


“Science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.”

Thomas Huxley


“At every period of history, people have believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you risked ostracism or even violence by saying otherwise. If our own time were any different, that would be remarkable. As far as I can tell it isn't.”

Paul Graham


“There is no permanent place in this universe for evil.”

Thomas Carlyle


“A thimbleful of red is redder than a bucketful.”

Henri Matisse


“A critic is a person who creates nothing and thereby feels qualified to judge the work of creative people.”

Robert A. Heinlein


“Humans beings always do the most intelligent thing ...after they’ve tried every stupid alternative and none of them have worked.”

R. Buckminster Fuller


“The more unusual or interesting the data, the more likely they are to have been the result of an error.”

Twyman's Law


“Our problem right now is that we're so specialized that if the lights go out, there are a huge number of people who are not going to know what to do.”

Margaret Atwood


“If your fidelity to perfectionism is too high, you never do anything.”

David Foster Wallace


“You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.”

David Foster Wallace


“Space is an inspirational concept that allows you to dream big.”

Peter Diamandis


“It would be rather naive to imagine that Oprah doesn't have an Earth Evacuation Plan. You know Richard Branson does - his is in plain sight.”

John Hodgman


“We all see only that which we are trained to see.”

Robert Anton Wilson


“Leap, and the net will appear.”

John Burroughs


“One must keep a little back shop where one can be oneself without reserve. In solitude alone can one know true freedom.”

Michel de Montaigne


“Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.”

Zawinski's Law


“There will always be plenty of things to compute in the detailed affairs of millions of people doing complicated things.”

Vannevar Bush


“It is easy to sit up and take notice, What is difficult is getting up and taking action.”

Honore de Balzac


“One accurate measurement is worth a thousand expert opinions.”

Grace Hopper


“...an optimistic mind-set finds dozens of possible solutions for every problem that the pessimist regards as incurable.”

Robert Anton Wilson


“The supreme irony of life is that hardly anyone gets out of it alive.”

Robert A. Heinlein


“Good design is obvious. Great design is transparent.”

Joe Sparano


“The past may not hurt you, but it won't challenge you, either.”

Brad Meltzer


“I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it's for or against.”

Malcolm X


“No amount of anxiety makes any difference to anything that is going to happen.”

Alan Watts


“There is the opportunity to do more and better if you're smaller and more nimble.”

Marc Andreessen


“I shall be so brief that I have already finished.”

Salvador Dalí


“What is a rebel? A person who says no.”

Albert Camus


“When smashing monuments, save the pedestals. They always come in handy.”

Stanislaw Lem


“Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.”

Albert Camus


“Physics is a good framework for thinking. ... Boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there.”

Elon Musk


“Moonshots live in that place between audacious projects and pure science fiction.”

Astro Teller


“I'm always identifying some fallacy in my own life. I'm sort of making fun of myself by exploring and unpacking just why I'm sort of automatically thrown to be a certain way.”

Chuck Palahniuk


“Unless specified in your design documents, nails, superglue, and duct tape are not engineering materials.”

Anonymous


“Design for Disassembly.”

Anonymous


“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.”

Gall's Law


“No one likes documentaries.”

Alex Gibney


“Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.”

Salvador Dalí


“You will burn and you will burn out; you will be healed and come back again.”

Fyodor Dostoevsky


“Every human is a damn fool for at least five minutes every day; wisdom consists in not exceeding the limit.”

Elbert Hubbard


“As an online debate increases in length, it becomes inevitable that someone will eventually compare someone or something to Adolf Hitler or the Nazis.”

Godwin's Law


“I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.”

Bill Gates


“Paths are made by walking”

Franz Kafka


“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Samuel Beckett


“The best way to get rich on the Internet is to talk about how to get rich on the Internet.”

Unknown


“There will be two types of businesses in the next 5 years, those that are on the Internet, and those that are out of business.”

Bill Gates


“Predictions about future technology will fall within the Maes–Garreau point, the latest possible date that a prediction could both come true and still feasibly happen within the lifetime of the person making it.”

Maes–Garreau Law


“True happiness comes from the joy of deeds well done, the zest of creating things new.”

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry


“I don't believe a mistake-free learning environment exists.”

Astro Teller


“Democracy is not the law of the majority but the protection of the minority.”

Albert Camus


“Cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can’t fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.”

William S. Burroughs


“Build a person a fire, and they'll be warm for a day. Set a person on fire, and they'll be warm for the rest of their life.”

Terry Pratchett


“Great minds always tend to see virtue in misfortune.”

Honore de Balzac


“A certain amount of opposition is a great help. Kites rise against, not with, the wind.”

Lewis Mumford


“Write your values in pen, your tactics and strategies in pencil.”

Douglas Leone


“There’s never been such a premium on creativity. It must be used to cut through the clutter.”

Keith Weed


“A person's most valuable trait is a judicious sense of what not to believe.”

Euripides


“Judge a model not by its explanatory power but by its predictive power.”

Soichiro Hattori


“There’s a tremendous bias against taking risks. Everyone is trying to optimize their ass-covering.”

Elon Musk


“In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals that the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.”

Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy


“Colleges and universities are full of people who know how to get in the way. What we need are people who are good at helping things happen.”

Michael Roth


“I have a hunch that the unknown sequences of DNA will decode into copyright notices and patent protections.”

Donald Knuth


“Most pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.”

Søren Kierkegaard


“You can easily judge the character of a person by how they treat those who can do nothing for them.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


“A good leader takes a little more than their share of the blame, a little less than their share of the credit.”

Arnold H. Glasow


“If a company is profitable, the founder is in control. If it’s not, investors are in control.”

Sam Altman


“Don’t delude yourself into thinking something’s working when it’s not, or you’re gonna get fixated on a bad solution.”

Elon Musk


“No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of elders. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.”

Ernest Hemingway


“Flying down a tunnel of 1s and 0s is not how hacking is really done.”

Walter O'Brien


“All buildings are predictions. All predictions are wrong.”

Stewart Brand


“They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.”

Edgar Allan Poe


“Repeat, over and over again, in case anyone forgets it or believes the contrary, that we do not live in the best of all possible worlds.”

Luis Buñuel


“I don’t create companies for the sake of creating companies, but to get things done.”

Elon Musk


“In order to succeed greatly, you have to be prepared to fail greatly. If you can't do both of them, you've got a problem.”

Mike Tyson


“The need to be right is the sign of a vulgar mind.”

Albert Camus


“At one point, I thought life was about acquiring things. But as a I get older, life is totally about losing everything.”

Mike Tyson


“Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.”

Gilbert K. Chesterton


“Life is like a piano. What you get out of it depends on how you play it.”

Albert Einstein


“By denying scientific principles, one may maintain any paradox.”

Galileo Galilei


“I think my work-life balance is excellent. I work from when I wake up to when I go to bed, seven days a week. When I'm not working, I think about working.”

Jensen Huang


“Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn


“The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.”

Hannah Arendt


“Those are the same stars, and that is the same moon, that look down upon your brothers and sisters, and which they see as they look up to them, though they are ever so far away from us, and each other.”

Sojourner Truth


“Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do.”

Donald Knuth


“Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without.”

Confucius


“Some of the most crucial steps in mental growth are based not simply on acquiring new skills, but on acquiring new administrative ways to use what one already knows.”

Papert's principle


“When engineers and quantity surveyors discuss aesthetics and architects study what cranes do we are on the right road.”

Ove Arup


“Making money is often more fun than spending it, though I personally have never regretted money I’ve spent on friends, new experiences, saving time, travel, and causes I believe in.”

Sam Altman


“ze•bra (n.) — a surprising, often exotic, medical diagnosis when a more commonplace explanation is more likely.”

American Medical Slang


“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”

Henry David Thoreau


“A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few ideas as possible. There are no prima donnas in engineering.”

Freeman Dyson


“An attempt to hide, remove, or censor information will have the opposite and unintended consequence of further publicizing that information.”

Streisand Effect


“History is much more the product of chaos than of conspiracy.”

Zbigniew Brzezinski


“The designer of a new kind of system must participate fully in the implementation.”

Donald Knuth


“七転び八起き — Fall down seven times, get up eight.”

Japanese Proverb


“Focusing is about saying no.”

Steve Jobs


“When you struggle with a problem, that's when you understand it.”

Elon Musk


“Don't look for the meanings; look for the use.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein


“Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute”

Harold Abelson


“It is important to doubt and that the doubt is not a fearful thing, but a thing of great value.”

Richard P. Feynman


“Nothing stops you from hating both the player and the game.”

Anonymous


“My dream appliance circa 2050 has one big dial on it, and when I twist it to the right, my IQ goes up to 450.”

Bruce Sterling


“Interesting things happen when the creative impulse is cultivated with curiosity, freedom and intensity.”

Saul Bass


“I think you should always be seeking negative feedback.”

Elon Musk


“If you are in a spaceship that is traveling at the speed of light, and you turn on the headlights, does anything happen?”

Steven Wright


“The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.”

Arthur C. Clarke


“It is often easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission.”

Grace Hopper


“Diaper backward spells repaid. Think about it.”

Marshall McLuhan


“Risk more than others think is safe. Dream more than others think is practical.”

Howard Schultz


“Sometimes people think Y Combinator has big ideas about themes. But really, we just fund the best startups.”

Sam Altman


“Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.”

Greenspun's Tenth Rule


“Courage is the commitment to begin without any guarantee of success.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


“If you're going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you're going to be locked up.”

Hunter S. Thompson


“I have approximate answers, and possible beliefs, and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I’m not absolutely sure of anything.”

Richard P. Feynman


“Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.”

Bertrand Russell


“The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas.”

Alfred Whitney Griswold


“You have to suffer, struggle, and endeavor. You must do those hard things and work through them to appreciate what you accomplish.”

Jensen Huang


“The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer.”

Howard G. Cunningham


“There is a distinct difference between having an open mind and having a hole in your head from which your brain leaks out.”

James Randi


“Ideas are easy. Implementation is hard.”

Guy Kawasaki


“Don't let schooling interfere with your education.”

Mark Twain


“Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.”

Oscar Wilde


“A meeting is an event at which the minutes are kept and the hours are lost.”

Unknown


“However little television you watch, watch less.”

David McCullough


“Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”

W.B. Yeats


“The first rule of [insert buzzword] is to never shut up about [insert buzzword].”

Unknown


“Everything looks like a failure in the middle.”

Stewart Brand


“Design is where science and art break even.”

Mieke Gerritzen


“Knowing how to look is a way of inventing.”

Salvador Dalí


“We should attempt to bring nature, houses, and human beings together in a higher unity.”

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe


“[Steve] Jobs' incredible skill was as a storyteller, a salesman. He could captivate our imaginations and reel us in. He was more P.T. Barnum than Thomas Edison.”

Alex Gibney


“There is nothing more awful, insulting, and depressing than banality.”

Anton Chekhov


“When you want to know how things really work, study them when they're coming apart.”

William Gibson


“The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.”

James Branch Cabell


“Discipline is doing what you hate to do, but nonetheless doing it like you love it.”

Mike Tyson


“You're only as young as the last time you changed your mind.”

Timothy Leary


“Never offer what you'd hate someone for accepting.”

Tara Ploughman


“It’s kind of fun to do the impossible.”

Walt Disney


“To say that someone who invents a piece of knowledge or technology is responsible for all future uses is ridiculous.”

Astro Teller


“Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.”

Erich Fromm


“I think that the anti-Microsoft sentiment is simply due to their having been so successful selling a lot of crap.”

Steve Wozniak


“A ship in port is safe, but that is not what ships are for. Sail out to sea and do new things.”

Rear Admiral Grace Hopper


“Never chase the next hot thing. Stop trying to chase the wave. You will never catch it.”

Elon Musk


“The reasonable person adapts themself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to themself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable person.”

George Bernard Shaw


“Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.”

Linus Torvalds


“To recognize that nature has neither a preference for our species nor a bias against it takes only a little courage.”

James Randi


“Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.”

Karl Popper


“C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do, it blows away your whole leg”

Bjarne Stroustrup


“All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.”

Friedrich Nietzsche


“Pyr•rhic Vic•to•ry (n.) — A victory that inflicts such a devastating toll on the victor that it is tantamount to defeat.”

Wikipedia


“Art is solving problems that cannot be formulated before they have been solved. The shaping of the question is part of the answer.”

Piet Hein


“Every utopia faces the same problem: What do you do with the people who don't fit in?”

Margaret Atwood


“The main reason nerds are unpopular is that they have other things to think about.”

Paul Graham


“Some people want it to happen, some wish it would happen, others make it happen.”

Michael Jordan


“Everything not forbidden is compulsory.”

Totalitarian Principle (Quantum Mechanics)


“The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.”

90-90 Rule (Tom Cargill, Bell Labs)


“Never be limited by other people’s limited imaginations.”

Dr. Mae Jemison


“We always want to make sure that our machines haven’t by accident learned something that isn’t what we intended.”

Susan Wojcicki


“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”

Arthur Schopenhauer


“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”

Marcel Proust


“The Malagasy imagine the future as flowing into the back of their heads, or passing them from behind, then becoming the past as it stretches out in front of them. The past is in front of their eyes because it is visible, known and influential.”

Richard Lewis


“Sam Bankman-Fried said that he was a utilitarian, and he believed that the ways that people tried to justify rules like ‘don’t lie’ and ‘don’t steal’ within utilitarianism didn’t work, and he thought that the only moral rule that mattered was doing whatever would maximize utility, so essentially trying to create the greatest good for the greatest number of people or beings. He said he didn’t think rules like ‘don’t lie’ or ‘don’t steal’ fit into that framework.”

Caroline Ellison


“The question is not 'to be or not to be', it is what we should be until we are not.”

Søren Kierkegaard


“What good does it do us to have our belly full of meat if it is not digested, if it is not transformed into us, if it does not nourish and support us?”

Michel de Montaigne


“Until you do what you believe in, you don't know whether you believe it or not.”

Leo Tolstoy


“Take responsibility for making your own life beautiful.”

Timothy Leary


“To be, in a word, unborable…. It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish”

David Foster Wallace


“What is the difference between someone who is convinced and one who is deceived? None, if they are well deceived.”

Friedrich Nietzsche


“Bech•del Test (n.) — A movie must have at least two women in it; who talk to each other; about something other than a man.”

Alison Bechdel


“The fool doth think themself wise, but the wise indivual knows themself to be a fool.”

Touchstone, As You Like It, V.1.2217


“Everyone who believes in telekinesis, raise my hand.”

James Randi


“Adding more humans to an already late software project makes it even later.”

Brooks's Law


“Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.”

John W. Gardner


“When we build, let us think that we build forever.”

John Ruskin


“Conspiracy theories are an irresistible labor-saving device in the face of complexity.”

Henry Louis Gates


“Do nothing, and everything is done.”

Lao Zi


“Great wisdom is generous; petty wisdom is contentious. Great speech is impassioned, small speech cantankerous.”

Zhuang Zi


“Any architectural work that does not express serenity is an error.”

Luis Barragán


“An object should be judged by whether it has a form consistent with its use.”

Bruno Munari


“Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.”

Warren Buffet


“The ruins of the unsustainable are the 21st century’s frontier.”

Bruce Sterling


“The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.”

Aldous Huxley


“Find some fun way to get a little more oil on your hands or mud on your boots. Sometimes, that's what it takes to take down some of the really big problems.”

Astro Teller


“Tomorrow composts today.”

Bruce Sterling


“It is not the brains that matter most, but that which guides them — the character, the heart, generous qualities, progressive ideas.”

Fyodor Dostoevsky


“It is the classic fallacy of our time that a moron run through a university and decorated with a Ph.D. will thereby cease to be a moron.”

H. L. Mencken


“There is in the worst of fortune the best of chances for a happy change.”

Euripides


“We can influence the future but not see it.”

Stewart Brand


“Explanations exist; they have existed for all times, for there is always an easy solution to every human problems — neat, plausible, and wrong.”

H.L. Mencken


“A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.”

Lao Tzu


“The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.”

Lao Tzu


“We absolutely must leave room for doubt or there is no progress and no learning.”

Richard P. Feynman


“Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.”

Albert Camus


“One of the advantages of moving quickly is if you do something wrong you can change it.”

Marc Andreessen


“What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.”

Sigmund Freud


“Money is like gasoline during a road trip. You don’t want to run out of gas on your trip, but you’re not doing a tour of gas stations.”

Tim O'Reilly


“Stupidity has a knack of getting its way.”

Albert Camus


“Quality is never an accident. It is always the result of intelligent effort.”

John Ruskin


“Utopias rest on the fallacy that perfection is a legitimate goal of human existence.”

Lewis Mumford


“People don't change. They just slowly reveal who they really are.”

Anonymous


“In the long-term, the universe rewards resilience over rigidity.”

Anonymous


“Of course I'm crazy, but that doesn't mean I'm wrong.”

Robert Anton Wilson


“Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.”

Peter Ustinov


“Architects and engineers are among the most fortunate of humans since they build their own monuments with public consent, public approval and often public money.”

John Prebble


“One recognizes one's course by discovering the paths that stray from it.”

Albert Camus


“Nothing in this world is harder than speaking the truth, nothing easier than flattery.”

Fyodor Dostoevsky


“猿も木から落ちる — Even monkeys fall from trees.”

Japanese Proverb


“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

Argument from Ignorance


“Work like hell. I mean you just have to put in 80 to 100 hour weeks every week. [This] improves the odds of success. If other people are putting in 40 hour work weeks and you’re putting in 100 hour work weeks, then even if you’re doing the same thing you know that you will achieve in 4 months what it takes them a year to achieve.”

Elon Musk


“I think it is possible for ordinary people to choose to be extraordinary.”

Elon Musk


“You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.”

Friedrich Nietzsche


“The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.”

Carl Sagan


“Think of and look at your work as though it were done by your enemy. If you look at it to admire it, you are lost.”

Samuel Butler


“It is difficult to get a human to understand something when their salary depends upon not understanding it.”

Upton Sinclair


“Standing up to an evil system is exhilarating, and now I have a taste for it.”

Richard Stallman


“To think and to be fully alive are the same.”

Hannah Arendt


“We can't blame the technology when we make mistakes.”

Tim Berners-Lee


“Only three things happen naturally in organizations: friction, confusion, and underperformance. Everything else requires leadership.”

Peter F. Drucker


“Fall in love with some activity, and do it!”

Richard P. Feynman


“A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze.”

Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid's Tale)


“Being inoffensive, and being offended, are now the twin addictions of the culture.”

Martin Amis


“Very often the opinion of the clients must be disregarded in their own interest.”

John M. Johnson


“The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your doors, buy guns, close yourself off.”

Bill Hicks


“To create, one must first question everything.”

Eileen Gray


“If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?”

Laurence J. Peter


“The planning fallacy is that you make a plan, which is usually a best-case scenario. Then you assume that the outcome will follow your plan, even when you should know better.”

Daniel Kahneman


“A good programmer is someone who always looks both ways before crossing a one-way street.”

Doug Linder


“Do I need a blockchain?”

No


“People understand me so poorly that they don't even understand my complaint about them not understanding me.”

Søren Kierkegaard


“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

Benjamin Franklin


“You should be innovating so fast that you're invalidating your prior patents.”

Elon Musk


“This isn't my first Rodeo.”

Person at their Second Rodeo


“The main dangers in this life are the people who want to change everything — or nothing.”

Nancy Astor


“I am not ranting. I possess a perspective here that you people, who are locked in the ivory basements of your own sub-cultures, simply do not possess.”

Bruce Sterling (Distraction)


“Wisdom.... comes not from age, but from education and learning.”

Anton Chekhov


“The apple cannot be stuck back on the Tree of Knowledge; once we begin to see, we are doomed and challenged to seek the strength to see more, not less.”

Arthur Miller


“There is little value in insuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it. And there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment.”

John F. Kennedy


“If ease of use was the only requirement, everybody would still be riding tricycles.”

Douglas Engelbart


“It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it’s wrong.”

Richard P. Feynman


“Evaluating candidates using only numeric metrics, discounting non-quantifiable factors and attributes, may ultimately ignore the factors most relevant to the applicant's success in the position.”

McNamara Fallacy (on Admissions)


“When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.”

Elon Musk


“E.U.O.M.U.A.I.A.S.I.T.C. (Excessive use of made-up acronyms is a significant impediment to communication)”

Elon Musk


“We are free to change the world and start something new in it.”

Hannah Arendt


“I don’t invest in companies where my mental model is that they need to get themselves acquired in the next few years – or ever.”

Sam Altman


“Designers think everything done by someone else is awful, and that they could do it better themselves, which explains why I designed my own living room carpet, I suppose.”

Chris Bangle


“Only the madman is absolutely sure.”

Robert Anton Wilson


“What's another word for Thesaurus?”

Steven Wright


“I don’t think an economic slump will hurt good ideas.”

Rob Kalin


“Start-ups should be based on radical ideas. There should be a high failure rate for start-ups, because if there isn't their ideas aren't bold enough.”

Marc Andreessen


“When you’re forced to be simple, you’re forced to face the real problem. When you can’t deliver ornamentation, you have to deliver substance.”

Paul Graham


“When I walk into the Engineering Design Studio, I'm instantly inspired and want to know what's going on here.”

Kid Koala, 2017


“Don't fear moving slowly. Fear standing still.”

Chinese proverb


“Any Time You Want To Be The Best In The World At Anything, There Is Going To Be Disappointment”

Mike Tyson


“The key to performance is elegance, not battalions of special cases.”

Jon Bentley, Doug McIlroy


“Any person blaming tools for shoddy work is either unskilled at using them or has chosen them unwisely, or likely, both.”

Anonymous


“The imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of humans.”

Richard P. Feynman


“Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.”

Howard H. Aiken


“Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it.”

André Gide


“If there is a possibility of several things going wrong, the one that will cause the most damage will be the FIRST to go wrong”

Murphy's Law of Complex Systems


“We should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.


“The real question is not whether machines think but whether humans do.”

B.F. Skinner


“Give them the vision of Oz, show them the direction, convince them you can create the yellow brick road; the rest is civil engineering.”

Dirk Susharme


“No, you can’t force other people to change. You can, however, change just about everything else. And usually, that’s enough.”

Aaron Swartz


“Beneath this mask there is more than flesh. There is an idea, Mr. Creedy, and ideas are bulletproof.”

V


“The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.”

Hannah Arendt


“The bulk of discussion on programming language design centers on syntax, as opposed to semantics.”

Wadler's Law


“If you buy a ticket to hell, it isn't fair to blame hell.”

Elon Musk


“You simply cannot invent any conspiracy theory so ridiculous and obviously satirical that some people somewhere don't already believe it.”

Robert Anton Wilson


“Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.”

Elon Musk


“Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.”

Albert Camus


“One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload. There's always more than you can cope with.”

Marshall McLuhan


“Do unto others whatever you wish, for no matter whatsoever others wish, they can do nothing unto you.”

The Obsidian Rule of Autocracy


“It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.”

Hofstadter's Law


“Social media made y'all way too comfortable with disrespecting people and not getting punched in the face for it.”

Mike Tyson


“Why is there no Flat Mars Society!?”

Elon Musk


“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.”

Stephen Hawking


“wit•zel•sucht (n. German) — Excessive and abnormal joviality with morbid tendency to pun, make poor jokes, and tell pointless stories.”

Wikipedia


“Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage.”

Ray Bradbury


“Offer a financial reward for each exterminated poisonous snake, and eventually, enterprising individuals will begin breeding snakes.”

Cobra Effect


“Originality is merely an illusion.”

M. C. Escher


“For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.”

Richard P. Feynman


“I'm smart enough to know that I'm dumb.”

Richard P. Feynman


“The public is more familiar with bad design than good design. It is, in effect, conditioned to prefer bad design, because that is what it lives with. The new becomes threatening, the old reassuring.”

Paul Rand


“pro•noi•a (n.) — the suspicion that the Universe is conspiring on your behalf. (antonym: paranoia)”

Wiktionary


“The easy, conversational tone of good writing comes only on the eighth rewrite.”

Paul Graham


“The minority is always stronger than the majority, because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion.”

Søren Kierkegaard


“Whatever hits the fan will not be evenly distributed.”

Murphy's Law of Fans


“In a big company, you can do what all the other big companies are doing. But a startup can’t do what all the other startups do.”

Paul Graham


“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”

Nelson Mandela


“Few humans during their lifetime come anywhere near exhausting the resources dwelling within them. There are deep wells of strength that are never used.”

Richard E. Byrd


“Equality...is the result of human organization. We are not born equal. ”

Hannah Arendt


“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.”

Carl Sagan


“Many people tend to look at programming styles and languages like religions: if you belong to one, you cannot belong to others. But this analogy is another fallacy.”

Niklaus Wirth


“The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.”

Walt Disney


“The reason that university politics is so vicious is because stakes are so small.”

Henry Kissinger


“We have to remember that what we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.”

Werner Heisenberg


“If I only did what I can do, I wouldn’t do anything.”

Jacques Derrida


“There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly.”

R. Buckminster Fuller


“Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought.”

Matsuo Basho


“Over•view Eff•ect (n.) — A cognitive shift in awareness reported by some astronauts during spaceflight, often while viewing the Earth from outer space.”

Frank White


“We live in our fantasies and endure our realities.”

Robert Anton Wilson


“No loophole goes unexpoited.”

Unknown


“Technology is dominated by two types of people, those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand.”

Putt's Law


“Strive for perfection in everything you do. Take the best that exists and make it better. When it does not exist, design it.”

Sir Henry Royce


“Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going and the next thing I know I'm borrowing energy from the ideas themselves.”

Ray Bradbury


“Web3 is definitely not an enormous grift that's pouring lighter fluid on our already smoldering planet.”

Molly White


“An information retrieval system will tend not to be used whenever it is more painful and troublesome for a customer to have information than for them not to have it.”

Mooers's Law


“Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration.”

Donald Knuth


“Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.”

Hannah Arendt


“This is the precept by which I have lived: Prepare for the worst; expect the best; and take what comes.”

Hannah Arendt


“You cannot use butterfly language to communicate with caterpillars”

Timothy Leary


“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.”

Søren Kierkegaard


“New capabilities emerge just by virtue of having smart people with access to state-of-the-art technology.”

Robert E. Kahn


“Don’t explain your philosophy. Embody it.”

Epictetus


“I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.”

Robert A. Heinlein


“Uri Geller may have psychic powers by means of which he can bend spoons; if so, he appears to be doing it the hard way.”

James Randi


“Paper is always strongest at the perforation.”

Murphy's Law of Paper


“There will always be rocks in the road ahead of us. They will be stumbling blocks or stepping stones; it all depends on how you use them.”

Friedrich Nietzsche


“News is a third-hand acount of what happened six months ago.”

Garry Tan


“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forego their use.”

Galileo Galilei


“Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense.”

Carl Sagan


“The first rule of blockchain is to never shut up about blockchain.”

Unknown


“Running a startup is like being punched in the face repeatedly, but working for a large company is like being waterboarded.”

Paul Graham


“Systems are organic, living creations: if people stop working on them and improving them, they die.”

Steven Levy (Hackers)


“Those who believe without reason cannot be convinced by reason.”

James Randi


“If you can’t feed a team with two pizzas, it’s too large.”

Jeff Bezos


“Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible.”

M. C. Escher


“I do not take drugs. I am drugs.”

Salvador Dalí


“To the optimist, the glass is half full. To the pessimist, the glass is half empty. To the engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.”

Unknown


“If software's the only thing in your bag of tools, I'm not going to give you great odds.”

Astro Teller


“I can't shake the feeling that all these conspiracy theorists are in on it.”

Wynne McLaughlin


“Be antidisciplinary”

MIT Media Lab


“A stopped clock is correct twice a day, but a sundial can be used to stab someone, even at nighttime.”

John Hodgman


“Clothes make the person. Naked people have little or no influence on society.”

Mark Twain


“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”

Stewart Brand


“The intrinsic rate of human performance is exponential.”

Engelbart's Law


“We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.”

May Sarton


“Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and optimists about the past.”

Lewis Mumford


“Hope is passion for what is possible.”

Søren Kierkegaard


“For the most ambitious young people, the corporate ladder is obsolete.”

Paul Graham


“Conspiracy theories are the refuge of the disempowered.”

Roger Cohen


“Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed. ”

Friedrich Nietzsche


“Be willing to get fired for a good idea.”

Spike Jonze


“Divide and rule, a sound motto. Unite and lead, a better one.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


“It takes a real storm in the average person's life to make them realize how much worrying they have done over the squalls.”

Bruce Fairchild Barton


“Under Bayes' theorem, no theory is perfect. Rather, it is a work in progress, always subject to further refinement and testing.”

Nate Silver


“I retired from modelling a long time ago. It’s time I retired from tech, too.”

Lena Forsén (Miss November 1972)


“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

Martin Rees


“Beware of advice—even this.”

Carl Sandburg


“Your mind will give back to you exactly what you put into it.”

James Joyce


“Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.”

Michael Pollan


“Au•to•di•dac•ti•cis•m (n.) — The art of self-education without the guidance of masters or institutions.”

Wikipedia


“Don’t take too much advice... Just build things and find out if they work.”

Ben Silbermann


“Everything has been figured out, except how to live.”

Jean-Paul Sartre


“These days, the problem isn't how to innovate; it's how to get society to adopt the good ideas that already exist.”

Douglas Engelbart


“A person who chases two rabbits at once will catch none.”

German Idiom


“Get big quietly, so you don’t tip off potential competitors.”

Chris Dixon


“If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off.”

Chekhov's Gun


“Our ideals, laws and customs should be based on the proposition that each generation, in turn, becomes the custodian rather than the absolute owner of our resources and each generation has the obligation to pass this inheritance on to the future.”

Charles Lindbergh


“At a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking.”

Elon Musk


“Always go too far, because that's where you'll find the truth”

Albert Camus


“Creating fake facts does require a measure of haphazard research, insofar as they need to not just be possible, but also interesting.”

John Hodgman


“I don't necessarily agree with everything I say.”

Marshall McLuhan


“A person who is quietly confident makes the best leader.”

Fred Wilson


“It is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree -- make sure you understand the fundamental principles, ie the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to.”

Elon Musk


“Do not waste your time looking for an obstacle - maybe there is none.”

Franz Kafka


“The New Age? Its just the old age stuck in a microwave oven for fifteen seconds.”

James Randi


“The legibility of a copy is inversely proportional to its importance.”

Murphy's Law of Photocopies


“Knowing Murphy's Law doesn't help.”

Murphy's Metalaw


“Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.”

Goodhart's Law


“Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world.”

Isaac Asimov


“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”

Mohandas Gandhi


“One of the things you can definitely guarantee is where there are no customers, there are also no competitors.”

Jensen Huang


“An algorithm must be seen to be believed.”

Donald Knuth


“Free time and proximity to smart, motivated people. University students nearly always take for granted these super-powers and, looking back, wonder how they could vanish so quickly after graduation.”

Anonymous


“Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.”

Postel's Law (TCP Protocol)


“The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”

Campbell's Law


“It's better to create an ecology that gets all the world’s smartest people toiling in your garden for your goals. If you rely solely on your own employees, you’ll never solve all your customers' needs.”

Bill Joy


“Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.”

Albert Camus


“One who establishes their argument by noise and command shows that their reason is weak.”

Michel de Montaigne


“The pioneer spirit is still vigorous within this nation.”

Vannevar Bush


“Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.”

Richard P. Feynman


“Humans do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.”

G. K. Chesterton


“We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?”

Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid's Tale)


“You can lead a human to knowledge, but you can’t make it think!”

A Horse


“Life may be miraculous in its unlikelihood in the universe, but it would be a fallacy to suggest that its rareness makes it inextinguishable.”

John Hodgman


“If people did not sometimes do silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein


“Think deeply about things. Don’t just go along because that’s the way things are or that’s what your friends say. Consider the effects, consider the alternatives, but most importantly, just think.”

Aaron Swartz


“It is much more rewarding to do more with less.”

Donald Knuth


“Many academics I know do not have the temperament to thrive in the outside world. Now, this shouldn’t make us respect them any less; it’s just the way it is.”

Stephen J. Dubner


“Start with what is right rather than what is acceptable.”

Franz Kafka


“The concept of audit in turn has broken loose from its moorings in finance and accounting; its own expanded presence gives it the power of a descriptor seemingly applicable to all kinds of reckonings, evaluations and measurements.”

Marilyn Strathern


“The structure of any system designed by an organization is isomorphic to the structure of the organization.”

Conway's Law (Yourdon and Constantine)


“In the end it is how you fight, as much as why you fight, that makes your cause good or bad.”

Freeman Dyson


“I’m sure the universe is full of intelligent life. It’s just been too intelligent to come here.”

Arthur C. Clarke


“It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.”

Mark Twain


“The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning.”

Albert Camus


“Without a clear indicator of the author's intent, it is impossible to create a parody of extreme views such that it cannot be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of the views being parodied.”

Poe's Law


“Anyone can create an algorithm that they themselves can't imagine how to break. What is hard is creating an algorithm that no one else can break.”

Bruce Schneier


“Only by not forgetting the past can we be the master of the future.”

Ba Jin


“The Linux philosophy is ‘Laugh in the face of danger’. Oops. Wrong One. ‘Do it yourself’.”

Linus Torvalds


“A shatterproof object will always fall on the only surface hard enough to crack or break it.”

Murphy's Law of Selective Gravitation


“All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning.”

Albert Camus


“I have not failed, but found 1,000 ways to not make a light bulb.”

Thomas Edison


“My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together.”

Desmond Tutu


“There is no fool like an educated fool.”

Margaret Atwood


“Temp(°C) = 5 + N(chirps per 8s). The relationship between air temperature and the rate at which crickets chirp.”

Dolbear's Law


“Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.”

David Foster Wallace


“B•HAG (n.) — Big Hairy Audacious Goal. A a huge, seemingly-impossible, long-term objective that is easily understood and serves to inspire and rally stakeholders and outsiders alike during a process of transformation.”

Jim Collins


“I call the notion that we are nothing but killer apes the Beethoven fallacy. Beethoven was disorganized and messy, and yet his music is the epitome of order.”

Frans de Waal


“Every human is guilty of all the good they do not do.”

Voltaire


“Only in growth, reform, and change, paradoxically enough, is true security to be found.”

Anne Morrow Lindbergh


“Only feeble minds are paralyzed by facts.”

Arthur C. Clarke


“Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.”

Albert Camus


“Almost every dot-com idea from 1999 that failed will succeed.”

Marc Andreessen


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

Studs Terkel


“Politeness is the poison of collaboration.”

Edwin Land


“The road to wisdom? — Well, it's plain and simple to express: Err and err and err again but less and less and less.”

Piet Hein


“When a broken appliance is demonstrated for the repair technician, it will work perfectly.”

Murphy's Law of Appliances


“The probability of being observed is in direct proportion to the stupidity of ones actions.”

Crespins Law of Observation


“Let your dream devour your life, not your life devour your dream.”

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry


“People developed planes first and then took care of flight safety. If people were focused on safety first, no one would ever have built a plane.”

Mark Zuckerberg


“Not everything that can be counted counts. Not everything that counts can be counted.”

William Bruce Cameron


“You don’t learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing and falling over.”

Richard Branson


“花より団子 — Dumplings over Flowers.”

Japanese Proverb


“Anything you dream is fiction, and anything you accomplish is science, the whole history of humankind is nothing but science fiction.”

Ray Bradbury


“Don't ask hard questions of others, for soon you will be the one questioned”

The Rule of the Maximally Mediocre Classroom


“A hacker does for love what others would not do for money.”

Laura Creighton


“These young people naturally grow up with ideas different from ours, for they are born for times when we shall no longer be here”

Emile Zola


“In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind.”

Louis Pasteur


“The best things in life are beyond money; their price is agony and sweat and devotion.”

Robert A. Heinlein


“Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves.”

Aaron Swartz


“When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.”

Lao Tzu


“When we can't think for ourselves, we can always quote.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein


“Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before.”

Mae West


“No statement should be believed because it is made by an authority.”

Robert A. Heinlein


“I spend a lot of time reasoning through my decisions, which empowers employees because they learn how leaders think through problems.”

Jensen Huang


“First rule of engineering; beware prototypes. Along with, avoid anything made by an engineer who doesn't have all their own fingers”

Simon R. Green


“Once a new technology rolls over you, if you're not part of the steamroller, you're part of the road.”

Stewart Brand


“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.”

Richard P. Feynman


“The most common form of despair is not being who you are.”

Søren Kierkegaard


“Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.”

Donald Knuth


“The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity.”

Carl Jung


“Design creates culture. Culture shapes values. Values determine the future.”

Robert L. Peters


“I think the most important thing we can teach our kids for their long-term health and happiness is how to cook.”

Michael Pollan


“The start-ups that do well are the ones that are working all the time.”

Sam Altman


“Most people can learn a lot more than they think they can. They sell themselves short without trying.”

Elon Musk


“Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.”

Frank Zappa


“The real test of character is how you treat someone who has no possibility of doing you any good.”

George Orwell


“It usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech. Overnight success is a fallacy. It is preceded by a great deal of preparation.”

Mark Twain


“Human beings, thanks to culture and genetics, are inclined to be pessimistic, fearful, skeptical and believers in conspiracy theories.”

Seth Godin


“Evil thrives on apathy and cannot exist without it.”

Hannah Arendt


“Whether or not money can buy happiness, it can buy freedom, and that’s a big deal. Also, lack of money is very stressful.”

Sam Altman


“We need diversity of thought in the world to face the new challenges.”

Tim Berners-Lee


“I’ve learned that by doing things, things get done.”

Ray Bradbury


“Don't become a well rounded person. Well rounded people are smooth and dull. Become a thoroughly spiky person.”

Bruce Sterling


“Real education should educate us out of self into something far finer into a selflessness which links us with all humanity.”

Nancy Astor


“The pursuit of balance can create imbalance because sometimes something is true.”

Okrent's Law


“The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn't being said.”

Peter F. Drucker


“Hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done.”

Mark Zuckerberg


“Geniuses are like thunderstorms: they go against the wind, terrify people, clear the air.”

Søren Kierkegaard


“During dark times, real entrepreneurs come out. They are not competing with 10 look-alike companies for engineering talent, so it's a great time to invest and help build companies.”

Douglas Leone


“Hey, I’m a good software engineer, but I’m not exactly known for my fashion sense.”

Linus Torvalds


“There is nothing quite so useless, as doing with great efficiency, something that should not be done at all.”

Peter F. Drucker


“I can’t make you the smartest or the brightest, but it’s doable to be the most knowledgeable. It’s possible to gather more information than somebody else.”

Tony Fadell (Father of the iPod)


“The most knowledgeable person in one domain may be the most ignorant in another.”

Albert Camus


“When things begin accelerating wildly out of control, sometimes patience is the only answer. Press pause.”

Douglas Rushkoff


“America is the spirit of human exploration distilled.”

Elon Musk


“Everything has a natural explanation. The moon is not a god, but a great rock, and the sun a hot rock.”

Anaxagoras


“Tyr•an•ny of Small De•cis•ions (n.) — A situation where a series of small, individually rational decisions can negatively change the context of subsequent choices, even to the point where desired alternatives are irreversibly destroyed.”

Alfred E. Kahn


“Butterflies are self propelled flowers.”

Robert A. Heinlein


“The enjoyment of one's tools is an essential ingredient of successful work.”

Donald Knuth


“If we are to make reality endurable, we must all nourish a fantasy or two.”

Marcel Proust


“Everybody has a different Internet.”

Bruce Sterling


“Gutenberg made everybody a reader. Xerox makes everybody a publisher.”

Marshall McLuhan


“Space isn't remote at all. It's only an hour's drive away if your car could go straight upwards.”

Fred Hoyle


“It's only because of their stupidity that they're able to be so sure of themselves.”

Franz Kafka


“I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.”

Richard P. Feynman


“I know of no better life purpose than to perish in attempting the great and the impossible.”

Friedrich Nietzsche


“If a law is unjust, a person is not only right to disobey it, they are obligated to do so.”

Thomas Jefferson


“Do what's good for humans, modeled on how humans already do things; ignore what's convenient for computers.”

Stewart Brand


“We learn by rearranging what we know.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein


“As a programmer, it is your job to put yourself out of business. What you do today can be automated tomorrow.”

Doug McIlroy


“Teachers are those who use themselves as bridges, over which they invite their students to cross; then having facilitated their crossing, joyfully collapse, encouraging them to create bridges of their own.”

Nikos Kazantzakis


“The best way of keeping a secret is to pretend there isn't one.”

Margaret Atwood (The Blind Assassin)


“The engineer’s first problem in any design situation is to discover what the problem really is.”

Unknown


“The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program.”

Larry Niven


“I'm convinced that without bad design, the world would be a far less stimulating place; we would have nothing to marvel over and nothing to be nostalgic about.”

Carrie Phillips


“I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”

Douglas Adams


“They were building a Ferrari for every launch, when it was possible that a Honda Accord might do the trick.”

Elon Musk


“Trees sprout up just about everywhere in computer science.”

Donald Knuth


“The speed of software halves every 18 months.”

Gates's Law


“You want to do things you’re passionate about but also are useful to other people.”

Elon Musk


“Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”

Alan Kay


“Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire.”

Confucius


“I think that's the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.”

Elon Musk


“Reinventing beats inventing nearly every time.”

Stewart Brand (The Clock of the Long Now)


“A common fallacy: to imagine a measure will be easy because we have private motives for desiring it.”

George Eliot


“I'll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there's evidence of any thinking going on inside it.”

Terry Pratchett


“The internet brought many laudable things, but prosperity, stability, accountability and honest politics were not four of them.”

Bruce Sterling


“Whoever has the gold makes the rules.”

Gold and Rule


“Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.”

Albert Camus


“No one wants to learn by mistakes, but we cannot learn enough from successes to go beyond the state of the art.”

Henry Petroski


“I've never been a good estimator of how long things are going to take.”

Donald Knuth


“I think the only way to behave is as if nothing is private. And then fight to make what you care about legal and acceptable.”

Douglas Rushkoff


“Always remember, however, that there’s usually a simpler and better way to do something than the first way that pops into your head.”

Donald Knuth


“I made choices, and then, having made them, I had fewer choices.”

Margaret Atwood (The Testaments)


“Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost.”

Alfred Whitney Griswold


“If you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written.”

Muphry's Law


“The sun comes up just about as often as it goes down, in the long run, but this doesn't make its motion random.”

Donald Knuth


“Architecture is the art of how to waste space.”

Philip Johnson


“Thar’s only two possibilities: Thar is life out there in the universe which is smarter than we are, or we’re the most intelligent life in the universe. Either way, it’s a mighty sobering thought.”

Walt Kelly


“If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.”

Peter Handke


“Technology... is a queer thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other.”

Carrie Snow


“One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary humans. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary human.”

Elbert Hubbard


“Funded by the government just means funded by the people. Government, by the way, has no money. It only takes money from the people. Sometimes people forget that that's really what occurs.”

Elon Musk


“After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say 'I want to see the manager.'”

William S. Burroughs


“Don't handicap your children by making their lives easy.”

Robert A. Heinlein


“Sometimes you just have to jump out the window and grow wings on the way down.”

Ray Bradbury


“In programming, if someone tells you 'you’re overcomplicating this,' they’re either 10 steps behind you or 10 steps ahead of you.”

Andrew Clark


“Except for some effects that I attribute mostly to age, my intuitive thinking is just as prone to overconfidence, extreme predictions, and the planning fallacy as it was before I made a study of these issues.”

Daniel Kahneman


“I am in a very peculiar business: I travel all over the world telling people what they should already know.”

James Randi


“Why try to pursue what is completed?”

Mikhail Bulgakov


“The digital revolution is far more significant than the invention of writing or even of printing.”

Douglas Engelbart


“Everything goes wrong all at once.”

Quantum Interpretation of Murphy's Law


“Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness.”

Frank Gehry


“Simplicity is not the goal. It is the by-product of a good idea and modest expectations.”

Paul Rand


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

Martin Fowler


“I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.”

Confucius


“You can't think seriously about thinking without thinking about thinking about something.”

Seymour Papert


“You need the kind of objectivity that makes you forget everything you've heard, clear the table, and do a factual study like a scientist would.”

Steve Wozniak


“A designer is an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist.”

R. Buckminster Fuller


“I am not afraid of an army of lions led by a sheep; I am afraid of an army of sheep led by a lion.”

Alexander the Great


“The number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar.”

Dunbar's Number


“I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.”

Thomas Jefferson


“When test scores become the goal of the teaching process, they both lose their value as indicators of educational status and distort the educational process in undesirable ways.”

Donald T. Campbell (Campbell's Law on testing)


“If a grasshopper tries to fight a lawnmower, one may admire its courage but not its judgement.”

Robert A. Heinlein


“In my experience, if you have to keep the lavatory door shut by extending your left leg, it’s modern architecture.”

Nancy Banks-Smith


“You shouldn't do things differently just because they're different. They need to be... better.”

Elon Musk


“We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.”

George Orwell


“It's not so much staying alive, it's staying human that's important. What counts is that we don't betray each other.”

George Orwell


“All operating systems sucks, but Linux just sucks less.”

Linus Torvalds


“Teaching is the last refuge of feeble minds with a classical education.”

Aldous Huxley


“The first step is to establish that something is possible; then probability will occur.”

Elon Musk


“Testing can only prove the presence of bugs, not their absence”

Edsger W. Dijkstra


“Talk is cheap. Show me the code.”

Linus Torvalds


“Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing.”

Jimmy Wales


“You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”

Ray Bradbury


“I don't need an alarm clock. My ideas wake me.”

Ray Bradbury


“An individual will be more motivated to perform a particular activity if they know they will partake in a more desirable activity as a consequence.”

Premack's Principle


“Push the envelope, Disrupt, Innovate, Leverage, Get our ducks in a row, Streamline, Drill down, Take it offline, Interface, Boil the ocean, Align, Synthesize, Touch base, Circle back, Get down to brass tacks, Give 110%, Move the needle, Architect, Put it on the back burner, Cast a wide net, Lean in, Raise the bar, Move up the value chain, Run it up the flagpole, Put boots on the ground, Spend calories doing X, Flex your [design, creative, analytical, etc.] muscle, Take a step back, Circle the wagons, Punt (an idea), Peel the onion, Build it from the ground up”

Buzzword Bingo


“Language is the source of misunderstandings.”

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry


“How is the world ruled and how do wars start? Diplomats tell lies to journalists and then believe what they read.”

Karl Kraus


“As a freelance writer, I'd be asked to become an expert for various magazines on any subject, whether food or wine or history or the life span of veterinarians. I was completely unschooled in any of these things.”

John Hodgman


“Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about. Be kind. Always.”

Brad Meltzer


“If you try to make such projects, unseen by others, as perfect as any human could, you'll develop skills that other professionals don't have.”

Steve Wozniak


“No one learns as much about a subject as one who is forced to teach it.”

Peter F. Drucker


“The ability of computers to track us doubles every eighteen months.”

Zimmermann's Law


“If robots are granted citizenship, under what conditions is it permissible for any entity other than themselves to execute an 'upgrade'?”

Anonymous


“The industrial age was not about craftspeople trading peer to peer. It was about stopping that. You weren't supposed to be a craftsperson, you were supposed to be an employee.”

Douglas Rushkoff


“Anticipate the difficult by managing the easy.”

Lao Tzu


“Happiness consists in getting enough sleep. Just that, nothing more.”

Robert A. Heinlein


“The most innovative designers consciously reject the standard option box and cultivate an appetite for thinking wrong.”

Marty Neumeier


“For the individual citizen, everything which is not forbidden is allowed; but for public bodies, and notably government, everything which is not allowed is forbidden.”

Sir John Laws


“Beware the fury of a patient human.”

John Dryden


“It is not only for what we do that we are held responsible, but also for what we do not do.”

Molière


“In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But in practice, there is.”

Benjamin Brewster


“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.”

Henry David Thoreau


“One has to watch out for engineers - they begin with the sewing machine and end up with the atomic bomb.”

Marcel Pagnol


“Where there is no hope, we must invent it.”

Albert Camus


“Be silent as to services you have rendered, but speak of favours you have received.”

Seneca the Younger


“If you put a frog in boiling water, it'll jump straight out. If you put it in cold water and gradually bring it to the boil, it'll sit right there until it dies.”

John Niven


“You shouldn’t try to manufacture progress.”

Sam Altman


“When things begin accelerating wildly out of control, sometimes patience is the only answer. Press pause.”

Douglas Rushkoff


“Give someone a program; you frustrate them for a day; teach them how to program, and you frustrate them for a lifetime.”

David Leinweber


“At the moment of commitment the entire universe conspires to assist you.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


“The way to create something beautiful is often to make subtle tweaks to something that already exists, or to combine existing ideas in a slightly new way. This kind of work is hard to convey in a research paper.”

Paul Graham


“We're even wrong about which mistakes we're making.”

Carl Winfeld


“To get others to come into our ways of thinking, we must go over to theirs; and it is necessary to follow, in order to lead.”

William Hazlitt


“Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.”

Salvador Dalí


“History teaches that wars begin when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap.”

Ronald Reagan


“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 and repair.”

Douglas Adams


“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”

Albert Camus


“Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.”

Isaac Asimov


“I don't spend my time pontificating about high-concept things; I spend my time solving engineering and manufacturing problems.”

Elon Musk


“Good, to evil, seems evil”

Ray Bradbury


“Sa•la•mi Tac•tics (n.) — An aggressor can influence and eventually dominate a landscape, typically political, piece by piece. In this fashion, the opposition is eliminated 'slice by slice' until it realizes, usually too late, that it is virtually gone in its entirety.”

Wikipedia


“The remaining work increases as the deadline approaches.”

Unknown


“Manage things. Lead people.”

Grace Hopper


“God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I’m not crazy about.”

David Foster Wallace


“Doctor can bury their mistakes but architects can only advise their clients to plant vines.”

Frank Lloyd Wright


“An extraordinary amount of arrogance is present in any claim of having been the first in inventing something.”

Benoit Mandelbrot


“I define UNIX as 30 definitions of regular expressions living under one roof.”

Donald Knuth


“Leadership is about recognizing that there’s a greatness in everyone, and your job is to create an environment where that greatness can emerge.”

Bill Campbell


“Be careful who you choose as your enemy because that's who you become most like.”

Friedrich Nietzsche


“If you're going to eat a creature alive, you have to expect some screaming.”

John Hodgman


“Explore the situation. Statements are expendable. Don't keep on looking in the rearview mirror and defending the status quo which is outmoded the moment it happened.”

Marshall McLuhan


“Set a clear, easy-to-understand vision for your company, and make it be a mission people believe in.”

Sam Altman


“If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.”

Lao Tzu


“In the old days, you would chastise people for reinventing the wheel. Now we beg, 'Oh, please, please reinvent the wheel.'”

Alan Kay


“It is foolish to be convinced without evidence, but it is equally foolish to refuse to be convinced by real evidence.”

Upton Sinclair


“Intelligence is like four-wheel drive. It only allows you to get stuck in more remote places.”

Garrison Keillor


“When safety measures are implemented, people’s perception of risk decreases, and so people may feel that they can now afford to make riskier decisions.”

The Peltzman Effect


“One must never miss an opportunity of quoting things by others which are always more interesting than those one thinks up oneself.”

Marcel Proust


“We, in the modern world, expect that tomorrow will be better than today.”

James Burke (Day the Universe Changed)


“You can’t argue with facts. You’re not entitled to your own facts.”

Steven Levy


“I don't know why people hire architects and then tell them what to do.”

Frank Gehry


“Everything considered, a determined soul will always manage.”

Albert Camus


“If your actions mimic a locust's in a swarm, don't be surprised when 'farmers' enact broadly-scoped and definitive counter-measures.”

— Anonymous


“Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.”

Salvador Dalí


“Collect books, even if you don’t plan on reading them right away. Nothing is more important than an unread library.”

Austin Kleon


“I have discovered in life that there are ways of getting almost anywhere you want to go, if you really want to go.”

Langston Hughes


“An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field.”

Niels Bohr


“The most serious mistakes are not being made as a result of wrong answers. The true dangerous thing is asking the wrong question.”

Peter F. Drucker


“Nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel


“As a university student, if you don't need to work to pay tuition, set the price of your time to Zero, not because it's worthless, but because it's too valuable to exchange or any amount of cash to work on anything except that which ignites your passions.”

Anonymous


“Losing your way on a journey is unfortunate. But, losing your reason for the journey is a fate more cruel.”

H.G. Wells


“Outside-the-box, Next generation, Intentional, Progressive, In agreeance, Mission critical, Revolutionary, Leading, Cutting-edge, High-tech, Forward-thinking, Dynamic, Proactive, Bleeding-edge, Impactful, Actionable, Granular, Viral, Scaleable, Robust, Cut and dry, Transformative, Integrated, Holistic”

Buzzword Bingo


“Humor is the only reason to live.”

Marcel Duchamp


“The world would be a better place if more engineers, like me, hated technology. The stuff I design, if I'm successful, nobody will ever notice. Things will just work, and be self-managing.”

Radia Pearlman


“Information wants you to give me a dollar.”

Bruce Sterling


“When you take away verisimilitude, you do not automatically find the veridical but, perhaps, the implausible.”

Jean Baudrillard


“The border between the Real and the Unreal is not fixed, but just marks the last place where rival gangs of shamans fought each other to a standstill.”

Robert Anton Wilson


“I've never seen a job being done by a five-hundred-person engineering team that couldn’t be done better by fifty people.”

C. Gordon Bell


“Vast is the field of Science ... the more a person knows, the more they will find they have to know.”

Samuel Richardson


“Excusing bad programming is a shooting offence, no matter what the circumstances.”

Linus Torvalds


“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

Kurt Vonnegut


“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

Antoine de Saint-Exupery


“At that time (1909) the chief engineer was almost always the chief test pilot as well. That had the fortunate result of eliminating poor engineering early in aviation.”

Igor Sikorsky


“Violence is an expression of impotence.”

Hannah Arendt


“High expectations are the key to everything.”

Sam Walton


“No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.”

Joy's Law


“He who wonders discovers that this in itself is wonder.”

M. C. Escher


“Wherever smart people work, doors are unlocked.”

Steve Wozniak


“Great deeds are usually wrought at great risks.”

Herodotus


“We think basically you watch television to turn your brain off, and you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on.”

Steve Jobs


“But a city is more than a place in space, it is a drama in time.”

Patrick Geddes


“Small opportunities are often the beginning of great enterprises.”

Demosthenes


“If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the people to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”

Antoine de Saint-Exupery


“Politically, the weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil.”

Hannah Arendt


“A hacker is someone who enjoys playful cleverness, not necessarily with computers.”

Richard Stallman


“Any idiot can build a bridge that stands, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands.”

Unknown


“I think it would be great to be born on Earth and die on Mars. Just hopefully not at the point of impact.”

Elon Musk


“Intelligence is usually easy to tell in a 10-minute conversation. Determination is harder.”

Sam Altman


“The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.”

Alan Watts


“I don’t think people spend nearly enough time thinking about what they like and what they’re good at.”

Sam Altman


“As an architect, you design for the present, with an awareness of the past for a future which is essentially unknown.”

Norman Foster


“Nowadays most humans lead lives of noisy desperation.”

James Thurber


“That is not only not right; it is not even wrong.”

Wolfgang Pauli


“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

Hanlon's Razor


“I’ve actually not read any books on time management.”

Elon Musk


“In what moment or at what percentage does the ship stop being the same ship and become something else?”

Ship of Theseus


“If data is collected, it will, one day, be sold to the person you never wanted to have it.”

Anonymous


“That’s the real trouble with the world. Too many people grow up.”

Walt Disney


“Improvement means deterioration. (a stated improvement often actually hides a deterioration)”

Hutber's law


“The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.”

Paul Kedrosky


“I did write some code in Java once ...the island in Indonesia.”

Richard Stallman


“Work expands to fill the time available for completion.”

Parkinson's Law


“I don't think there's much distinction between surveillance and media in general. Better media means better surveillance.”

Bruce Sterling


“We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror.”

Marshall McLuhan


“A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.”

Douglas Adams


“Hell, there are no rules here; We're trying to accomplish something.”

Thomas Edison


“It's a fallacy to believe that age in itself brings wisdom, but one thing it infallibly brings is experience.”

Gillian Linscott


“Strategy is a commodity, execution is an art.”

Peter F. Drucker


“Slight not what's near through aiming at what's far.”

Euripides


“You don't lead by pointing and telling people some place to go. You lead by going to that place and making a case.”

Ken Kesey


“What we usually consider as impossible are simply engineering problems. there’s no law of physics preventing them.”

Michio Kaku


“You can't expect the institution to learn, if it doesn't accept any sense of justice.”

Alex Gibney


“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”

Richard Feynman


“I’d rather torture you into greatness because I believe in you”

Jensen Huang


“Since the Internet of Things is built on silicon, on the tremendous instability of modern electronics, it’s built on literal sand.”

Bruce Sterling (The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things)


“The last person I ever want working for me is someone who says ‘that’s not in my job description.”

Neil deGrasse Tyson


“It strikes me that American meeting culture is dominated by noisy people who have a lot of confidence, which is often unearned.”

Stephen J. Dubner


“Life is a commingling of the sacred and the profane, good and evil. To try and separate them is fallacy.”

Tom Robbins


“The recipe for great work is: very exacting taste, plus the ability to gratify it.”

Paul Graham


“The memory management on the PowerPC can be used to frighten small children.”

Linus Torvalds


“A lot of hacking is playing with other people, you know, getting them to do strange things.”

Steve Wozniak


“You need to understand things in order to invent beyond them.”

Bill Gates


“To argue with a fool is like lighting candles for the blind.”

Pierre-Claude-Victor Boiste


“If you want to have good ideas, you must have many ideas. Most of them will be wrong, and what you have to learn is which ones to throw away.”

Linus Pauling


“If we were all on trial for our thoughts, we would all be hanged.”

Margaret Atwood (Alias Grace)


“A design isn't finished until someone is using it.”

Brenda Laurel


“If you optimize everything, you will always be unhappy.”

Donald Knuth


“The victory always has a lot of parents but the defeat is always an orphan.”

Honore de Balzac


“It is not the beauty of a building you should look at; it's the construction of the foundation that will stand the test of time.”

David Allan Coe


“Don't walk behind me; I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.”

Albert Camus


“Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.”

James Baldwin


“I don’t need an alarm clock. My ideas wake me.”

Ray Bradbury


“The art of handling university students is to make oneself appear, and this almost ostentatiously, to be treating them as adults....”

Arnold Toynbee


“They use everything about the hog except the squeal.”

Upton Sinclair


“Work on that which creates the world you want to live in”

Anonymous


“Complex, statistically improbable things are by their nature more difficult to explain than simple, statistically probable things.”

Richard Dawkins


“The tough thing is figuring out what questions to ask, but […] once you do that, the rest is really easy.”

Elon Musk


“Fix the cause, not the symptom.”

Steve Maguire


“Education: That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.”

Ambrose Bierce


“Some people, when confronted with a problem, think 'I know, I'll use regular expressions.' Now they have two problems.”

Jamie Zawinski


“The highest forms of understanding we can achieve are laughter and human compassion.”

Richard P. Feynman


“If we all worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true is really true, there would be little hope of advance.”

Orville Wright


“Deep dive, Paradigm shift, Synergy, Core competency, Game-changer, Window of opportunity, Wheelhouse, Low-hanging fruit, Bandwidth, Learnings, Big picture, Many moving parts, Hard stop, 360 view”

Buzzword Bingo


“Linux is only free if your time has no value.”

Jamie Zawinski


“If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old.”

Peter F. Drucker


“Leadership is nature's way of removing morons from the productive flow.”

Dogbert


“The cost of developing a new drug roughly doubles every nine years.”

erooM's Law


“Our opportunity, as designers, is to learn how to handle the complexity, rather than shy away from it, and to realize that the big art of design is to make complicated things simple.”

Tim Parsey


“You do not write your life with words...You write it with actions. What you think is not important. It is only important what you do.”

Patrick Ness


“Whenever a major organization develops a new system as an official standard for X, the primary result is the widespread adoption of some simpler system as a de facto standard for X.”

Sowa's Law of Standards


“To convince someone of the truth, it is not enough to state it, but rather one must find the path from error to truth.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein


“Why look for conspiracy when stupidity can explain so much.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


“The system should treat all user input as sacred.”

Jef Raskin


“Any post correcting an error in another post will contain at least one error itself.”

Skitt's Law


“To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.”

Søren Kierkegaard


“Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.”

Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid's Tale)


“Superstition is the religion of feeble minds.”

Edmund Burke


“Use only that which works, and take it from any place you can find it.”

Bruce Lee


“Take big bites. Anything worth doing is worth overdoing. (Lazarus Long)”

Robert A. Heinlein


“A police officer sees someone searching under a streetlight and asks what's been lost. 'My keys.' The officer helps search for a few minutes then to the question, 'Are you sure they're here?' receives the reply, 'no, I lost them in the park.' The officer asks, 'why are you searching here, then?' The person responds, 'this is where the light is'.”

Streetlight effect


“The commonest fallacy among women is that simply having children makes them a mother – which is as absurd as believing that having a piano makes one a musician.”

Sydney J. Harris


“The minute you choose to do what you really want to do, it's a different kind of life. ”

R. Buckminster Fuller


“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

R. Buckminster Fuller


“The rate at which a person can mature is directly proportional to the embarrassment they can tolerate.”

Douglas Engelbart


“Beauty arises out of human inspiration.”

Richard Dawkins


“A ‘startup’ is a company that is confused about 1. What its product is. 2. Who its customers are. 3. How to make money.”

Dave McClure


“When you’re in a hole, stop digging.”

Steven Levy


“In any dispute, the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake.”

Sayre's Law


“To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization, and at present very few people have reached this level.”

Bertrand Russell


“It’s hard to do a really good job on anything you don’t think about in the shower.”

Paul Graham


“Leaps of innovation require a bravery that borders on absurdity.”

Astro Teller


“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.”

Groucho Marx


“A true artist is not one who is inspired, but one who inspires others.”

Salvador Dalí


“If one challenges a statement and another cannot prove it, it does not necessarily follow that the statement is false.”

Ron Brackin


“Mooers's Law tells us that information will be used in direct proportion to how easy it is to obtain.”

Roger K. Summit


“A human doesn't begin to attain wisdom until they recognize that they are no longer indispensable.”

Richard E. Byrd


“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

Oscar Wilde


“It is well known that a vital ingredient of success is not knowing that what you're attempting can't be done.”

Terry Pratchett


“We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.”

Amara's Law


“Utopia means elsewhere.”

John Malkovich


“I would give my life for a man who is looking for the truth. But I would gladly kill a man who thinks that he has found the truth.”

Luis Buñuel


“If you optimize everything, you will always be unhappy”

Donald Knuth


“In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.”

Margaret Atwood (Bluebeard's Egg)


“I quote others only in order the better to express myself.”

Michel de Montaigne


“Don’t hire for the sake of hiring. Hire because there is no other way to do what you want to do.”

Sam Altman


“It is far, far easier to make a correct program fast than to make a fast program correct”

Herb Sutter


“Hacking involves a different way of looking at problems that no one's thought of.”

Walter O'Brien


“If you’re not a risk taker, you should get the hell out of business.”

Ray Kroc


“You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts.”

Kahlil Gibran


“Con•ser•va•tive (n.) – A statesman enamored of existing evils, as opposed to a Liberal, who wants to replace them with new ones.”

Ambrose Bierce


“Life is not a problem to be solved, but an experience to be had.”

Alan Watts


“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing themself.”

Leo Tolstoy


“If you love what you do and are willing to do what it takes, it's within your reach.”

Steve Wozniak


“Being strong-willed is not enough, however. You also have to be hard on yourself. Someone who was strong-willed but self-indulgent would not be called determined. Determination implies your willfulness is balanced by discipline.”

Paul Graham


“The centre stage is given to an agent of a nonhuman kind: we can think of audit as an actant to which all kind of powers are attributed.”

Marilyn Strathern


“I want to be cremated, and I want my ashes blown in Uri Geller's eyes.”

James Randi


“I am a passenger on the spaceship Earth.”

R. Buckminster Fuller


“People in any organization are always attached to the obsolete - the things that should have worked but did not, the things that once were productive and no longer are.”

Peter F. Drucker


“Anyone who can appease a person's conscience can take their freedom away from them.”

Fyodor Dostoevsky


“A hacker to me is someone creative who does wonderful things.”

Tim Berners-Lee


“If you put a key under the mat for the cops, a burglar can find it, too.”

Tim Cook


“But the upside of painful knowledge is so much greater than the downside of blissful ignorance.”

Sheryl Sandberg


“If you set your goals ridiculously high and it’s a failure, you will fail above everyone else’s success.”

James Cameron


“Acceptance is the spiritual hammock.”

Tim Berners-Lee


“Generally speaking, I think it is fair to say that I am a friend to the creatures of the Earth when I am not busy eating them or wearing them.”

John Hodgman


“The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.”

Niels Bohr


“All books should be trilogies; I mean, I think we all agree on that.”

John Hodgman


“All grown-ups were once children... but only few of them remember it.”

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry


“Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.”

Honore de Balzac


“Potential has a shelf life.”

Margaret Atwood (Cat's Eye)


“One's ability to perform a normally automatic or unconscious activity is impaired when disrupted by becoming conscious of it or reflecting on it.”

Humphrey's Law


“We must believe in free will — we have no choice.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer


“We are limited only by our imagination and our will to act.”

Ron Garan


“The function of science fiction is not always to predict the future, but sometimes to prevent it.”

Frank Herbert


“An invention that is quickly accepted will turn out to be a rather trivial alteration of something that has already existed.”

Edwin Land


“The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.”

George Orwell


“People who don't take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year. People who do take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year.”

Peter F. Drucker


“Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.”

Murphy's Law


“The invention is by its very nature disruptive. If you want to be understood at all times, then don't do anything new.”

Jeff Bezos


“An administrator in a bureaucratic world is someone who can feel big by merging their non-entity in an abstraction. A real person in touch with real things inspires terror in them.”

Marshall McLuhan


“When we drink coffee, ideas march in like the army”

Honore de Balzac


“if you can imagine someone surpassing you, you should do it yourself.”

Paul Graham


“A leader is best when people barely know they exists, when their work is done, their aim fulfilled, the people will say: we did it ourselves.”

Lao Tzu


“At the core of Silicon Valley is a passion for ‘yes.'”

Steven Levy


“SMOP (n.) — Something quite possible, but requiring unavailable resources to achieve. 'Why isn't that function available in the program?' − 'It's just a Simple Matter Of Programming'”

IBM Jargon Dictionary


“Fortunes are built during the down market and collected in the up market.”

Jason Calacanis


“It is almost impossible to bear the torch of truth through a crowd without singeing somebody’s beard.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg


“To be interesting, one has to provoke.”

Salvador Dalí


“Programs are meant to be read by humans and only incidentally for computers to execute.”

Donald Knuth


“Do you want to have an easy life? Then always stay with the herd and lose yourself in the herd.”

Friedrich Nietzsche


“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.”

Thomas Pynchon


“If things were simple, word would have gotten around.”

Jacques Derrida


“Don't let the bastards grind you down.”

Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid's Tale)


“Most inventors and engineers I've met are like me. They're shy and they live in their heads. The very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone.”

Steve Wozniak


“Over•ton Win•dow (n.) — The range of policies that a politician can recommend without appearing too extreme to gain or keep public office given the climate of public opinion at that time.”

Joseph P Overton


“You really want a company full of missionaries, not mercenaries.”

Sam Altman


“The best startups generally come from somebody needing to scratch an itch.”

Michael Arrington


“Never fire a laser at a mirror.”

Larry Niven (Niven's Laws)


“Constantly think about how you could be doing things better.”

Elon Musk


“The letter box is always on the other side of the road”

Gamble's Law


“Avoid making irrevocable decisions while tired or hungry.”

Robert A. Heinlein


“I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.”

Ray Bradbury


“Go on, prove me wrong. Destroy the fabric of the universe. See if I care. ”

Terry Pratchett


“The most damaging phrase in the language is: 'It's always been done that way.'”

Grace Hopper


“As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it.”

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry


“Playfully doing something difficult, whether useful or not, that is hacking.”

Richard Stallman


“Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.”

Leo Tolstoy


“Much of the industrialized world has not yet come to terms with the recognition of the fallacy of what I call the strong man syndrome.”

Wole Soyinka


“If you learn only methods, you'll be tied to your methods, but if you learn principles you can devise your own methods.”

Ray Bradbury


“The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.”

Marshall McLuhan


“People often think I’m a faker, but I’m usually honest, in a certain way - in such a way that often nobody believes me!”

Richard P. Feynman


“It’s the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting.”

Paulo Coelho


“Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.”

Will Rogers


“Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles one has overcome while trying to succeed.”

Booker T. Washington


“When you understand things, there's no more magic.”

Tim Berners-Lee


“During the 8 hours a human is awake and alert, they will experience one 'event' per second, which may be either exceptional or unexceptional. In 35 days, they will experience about one million events. Therefore, expect one-in-a-million events at a rate of about once a month. ”

Littlewood's Law


“There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.”

Marshall McLuhan


“The function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange.”

G.K. Chesterton


“People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.”

Søren Kierkegaard


“Enjoy life. This is not a dress rehearsal.”

Friedrich Nietzsche


“As far as the customer is concerned, the interface is the product.”

Jef Raskin


“There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.”

Marshall McLuhan


“We can not solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.”

Albert Einstein


“Most of our ancestors were not perfect ladies and gentlemen. The majority of them weren't even mammals.”

Robert Anton Wilson


“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”

Seneca the Younger


“People exaggerate their confidence in their plans - something we call the planning fallacy... The existence of the plan tends to induce overconfidence.”

Daniel Kahneman


“Many things are improbable, only a few are impossible.”

Elon Musk


“Don't start an argument with somebody who has a microphone when you don't. They'll make you look like chopped liver.”

Harlan Ellison


“Engineering or technology is the making of things that did not previously exist, whereas science is the discovering of things that have long existed.”

David Billington


“Good design is all about making other designers feel like idiots because the idea wasn't theirs.”

Frank Chimero


“Innovation is serendipity, so you don't know what people will make.”

Tim Berners-Lee


“How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.”

Niels Bohr


“A problem adequately stated is a problem well on its way to being solved.”

R. Buckminster Fuller


“Computing is too important to be left to men.”

Karen Spärck Jones


“Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep.”

Albert Camus


“The suddenness of the leap from hardware to software cannot help but produce a period of anarchy and collapse, especially in the developed countries.”

Marshall McLuhan


“There is also no clothing policy at Netflix, but no one comes to work naked.”

Patty McCord


“Your theory is crazy, but it's not crazy enough to be true.”

Niels Bohr


“Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.”

Albert Camus


“I don’t think it’s a good idea to plan to sell a company.”

Elon Musk


“It is never wise to let a piece of electronic equipment know that you are in a hurry.”

Unknown


“A patient can have as many diseases as they damn well please.”

Hickam's Dictum


“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Arthur C. Clarke


“True realism consists in revealing the surprising things which habit keeps covered and prevents us from seeing.”

Jean Cocteau


“When a subject becomes totally obsolete we make it a required course.”

Peter F. Drucker


“However much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing.”

George Orwell


“There is nothing more effectual in showing us the weakness of any habitual fallacy or assumption than to hear it sympathetically through the ears of a skeptic.”

Margaret Oliphant


“If you consider yourself a credible person, when a lie reaches you, that’s where the fallacy should end.”

Carlos Wallace


“The value of an idea lies in the using of it.”

Thomas Edison


“Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window.”

Steve Wozniak


“Enjoy what you can, endure what you must.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


“The token's marginal status [is] as a participant who is permitted entrance, but not full participation…someone who meets all of the formal requirements…but does not possess the ‘auxiliary characteristics.’ Consequently, they are never permitted by ‘insiders’ to become full members and may even be ejected if they stray too far from the special ‘niche’ outlined for them.”

Lynn Zimmer


“Life must be understood backward. But it must be lived forward.”

Søren Kierkegaard


“Engineering stimulates the mind. Kids get bored easily. They have got to get out and get their hands dirty: make things, dismantle things, fix things. When the schools can offer that, you'll have an engineer for life.”

Bruce Dickinson


“Judge a person by their questions rather than their answers.”

Voltaire


“Beauty should be edible, or not at all.”

Salvador Dalí


“No evidence against a firmly-held belief, no matter how good or abundant it may be, will sway the true believer.”

James Randi


“Any program is only as good as it is useful.”

Linus Torvalds


“You can do anything except light a paper match on a marshmallow under water”

Murphy's Law of Positivity


“Measurements will be quoted in the least practical unit; velocity, for example, will be measured in 'furlongs-per-fortnight'.”

Murphy's Law of Units


“We adore chaos because we love to produce order.”

M. C. Escher


“Data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not understanding, understanding is not wisdom.”

Clifford Stoll


“To change is to lose identity; yet to change is to be alive.”

Stewart Brand (How Buildings Learn)


“When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, they are almost certainly right. When they state that something is impossible, they are very probably wrong.”

Arthur C. Clarke


“Data is a precious thing and will last longer than the systems themselves.”

Tim Berners-Lee


“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.”

Mark Twain


“Moonshot thinking starts with picking a big problem: something huge, long existing, or on a global scale.”

Astro Teller


“A 22nd-order all-pass filter is, technically, a filter.”

Anonymous


“I could either watch it happen or be a part of it.”

Elon Musk


“We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.”

R. Buckminster Fuller


“All cats are equal, but some cats are more equal than others.”

streetCat


“Patience is a necessary ingredient of genius.”

Benjamin Disraeli


“It´s better to wait for a productive programmer to become available than it is to wait for the first available programmer to become productive.”

Steve McConnell


“Intelligence is the ability to avoid doing work, yet getting the work done.”

Linus Torvalds


“Strategy isn’t what I say; it’s what my employees do.”

Jensen Huang


“Engineering problems are under-defined, there are many solutions, good, bad and indifferent. The art is to arrive at a good solution. This is a creative activity, involving imagination, intuition and deliberate choice.”

Ove Arup


“I never got a pass mark in math ... Just imagine - mathematicians now use my prints to illustrate their books.”

M. C. Escher


“Do robot citizens have the right to electricity?”

Anonymous


“Sometimes, magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.”

Teller


“The more people who believe something, the more apt it is to be wrong. The person who's right often has to stand alone.”

Søren Kierkegaard


“Trying to predict the future is like trying to drive down a country road at night with no lights while looking out the back window. ”

Peter F. Drucker


“So often people are working hard at the wrong thing. Working on the right thing is probably more important than working hard.”

Caterina Fake


“Relying on the government to protect your privacy is like asking a peeping Tom to install your window blinds.”

John Perry Barlow


“Go to heaven for the climate and hell for the company.”

Benjamin Franklin Wade


“The Sun does not realise how wonderful it is until after a room is made.”

Louis Kahn


“Creativity is essentially a lonely art. An even lonelier struggle. To some a blessing; to others a curse. It is in reality the ability to reach inside yourself and drag forth from your very soul an idea.”

Lou Dorfsman


“Persistence is very important. You should not give up unless you are forced to give up.”

Elon Musk


“Be nice to people on your way up because you'll meet them on your way down.”

Wilson Mizner


“Dare to be naïve.”

R. Buckminster Fuller


“Humans never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.”

Blaise Pascal


“Any good software engineer will tell you that a compiler and an interpreter are interchangeable.”

Tim Berners-Lee


“Don't try to be original; just try to be good.”

Paul Rand


“Every problem has a better solution when you start thinking about it differently than the normal way.”

Steven Levy


“You will always find something in the last place you look.”

Murphy's Law of Lost Items


“Engineers are not mere technicians and should not approve or lend their name to any project that does not promise to be beneficent to humankind and the advancement of civilization.”

John Fowler


“A good engineer thinks in reverse and asks about the stylistic consequences of the components and systems being proposed.”

Helmut Jahn


“Henrik Fisker – He's a designer, so he's good at the styling of the cars, but he thinks it's all about styling, and it's not. The reason we don't have electric cars is not for lack of styling...”

Elon Musk


“You may not be able to alter reality, but you can alter your attitude towards it, and this, paradoxically, alters reality.”

Margaret Atwood


“Function reforms form, perpetually.”

Stewart Brand (How Buildings Learn)


“It's not that we need new ideas, but we need to stop having old ideas.”

Edwin Land


“No one reads; if someone does read, they don’t understand; if they understand, they immediately forget.”

Lem's Law


“Premature optimization is the root of all evil.”

Donald Knuth


“You just have to pay attention to what people need and what has not been done.”

Russell Simmons


“Getting information off the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant.”

Mitch Kapor


“One of the less publicized benefits of the open source movement is that it has made it easier to learn to program.”

Paul Graham


“When you're doing something difficult, you're not always enjoying it.”

Jensen Huang


“Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence (ECREE)”

Sagan Standard


“People hasten to judge in order not to be judged themselves.”

Albert Camus


“You can't expect to wield supreme executive power just 'cause some watery tart threw a sword at you!”

Dennis in Monty Python and the Holy Grail


“A computer shall not waste your time or require you to do more work than is strictly necessary.”

Jef Raskin


“Sometimes, carrying on, just carrying on, is the superhuman achievement.”

Albert Camus


“People who build their own home tend to be very courageous. These people are curious about life. They're thinking about what it means to live in a house, rather than just buying a commodity and making it work.”

Tom Kundig


“Everything is designed. Few things are designed well.”

Brian Reed


“Everyone is looking for the hack, the secret to success without hard work.”

Sam Altman


“Any wire cut to length will be too short.”

Murphy's Law of Wire


“Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.”

Robert A. Heinlein


“You have to systematically create confusion, it sets creativity free. Everything that is contradictory creates life”

Salvador Dalí


“A science only advances with certainty, when the plan of inquiry and the object of our researches have been clearly defined; otherwise a small number of truths are loosely laid hold of, without their connexion being perceived, and numerous errors, without being enabled to detect their fallacy.”

Jean-Baptiste Say


“When you can’t imagine how things are going to change, that doesn’t mean that nothing will change. It means that things will change in ways that are unimaginable.”

Bruce Sterling


“A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.”

Marshall McLuhan


“Engineers like to solve problems. If there are no problems handily available, they will create their own problems.”

Scott Adams


“One could write a history of science in reverse by assembling the solemn pronouncements of highest authority about what could not be done and could never happen. ”

Robert A. Heinlein


“The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.”

William James


“I can go into a lab and fool the rear ends off any group of scientists.”

James Randi


“You know your business model is broken when you're suing your customers.”

Paul Graham


“The key thing about all the world's big problems is that they have to be dealt with collectively. If we don't get collectively smarter, we're doomed.”

Douglas Engelbart


“What really matters is what you do with what you have.”

H.G. Wells


“Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.”

William Shakespeare


“The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.”

Socrates


“We have fought long and hard to escape from medieval superstition. I, for one, do not wish to go back.”

James Randi


“When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.”

R. Buckminster Fuller


“When they think that they know the answers, people are difficult to guide. When they know that they don't know, people can find their own way.”

Lao Tze's Tao te Ching


“We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.”

Richard P. Feynman


“The stated purpose of schools is to educate the kids. But there is no external pressure to do this well.”

Paul Graham


“Always look for the fool in the deal. If you don’t find one, it’s you.”

Mark Cuban


“Scientific knowledge is an enabling power to do either good or bad — but it does not carry instructions on how to use it.”

Richard P. Feynman


“The wise person does not discriminate; they gather all the shreds of light, from wherever they may come.”

Umberto Eco


“The amount of energy needed to refute bullsht on the internet is an order of magnitude larger than that required to produce it.”*

Brandolini's Law


“Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.”

Douglas Adams


“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.”

Aristotle


“It is no accident that Silicon Valley is in America... In other countries, people color inside the lines.”

Paul Graham


“I decry the current tendency to seek patents on algorithms. There are better ways to earn a living than to prevent other people from making use of one's contributions to computer science.”

Donald Knuth


“There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action. ”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


“The scientific theory I like best is that the rings of Saturn are composed entirely of lost airline luggage.”

Mark Russell


“Trust only those who stand to lose as much as you.”

Bralek's Rule for Success


“Without using the new word which you have just learned, try to rephrase what you have just learned in your own language.”

Richard P. Feynman


“Don’t worry about funding if you don’t need it.”

Noah Everett


“The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table.”

Steven Johnson


“We have a cultural notion that if children were not engineered, if we did not manipulate them, they would grow up as beasts in the field. This is the wildest fallacy in the world.”

Joseph Chilton Pearce


“In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to their level of incompetence.”

The Peter Principle


“TeX has found at least one bug in every Pascal compiler it's been run on, I think, and at least two in every C compiler.”

Donald Knuth


“The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them.”

Anton Chekhov


“Backups are for wimps. Real humans upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it.”

Linus Torvalds


“When the enemy is making a false movement we must take good care not to interrupt him.”

Napoleon


“Science is not a boy's game, it's not a girl's game. It's everyone's game. It's about where we are and where we're going.”

Nichelle Nichols


“900 years of time and space and I’ve never met anyone who wasn’t important.”

Doctor Who


“An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on their own terms, not anyone else's.”

J.D. Salinger


“What is thinkable is also possible.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein


“If we understood the enigmas of life there would be no need for art.”

Albert Camus


“A leader must have the courage to act against an expert's advice.”

James Callaghan


“Everything is hard before it is easy.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


“Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.”

Malcolm Forbes


“Whether you think you can, or think you can’t – you’re right.”

Henry Ford


“Nothing ever gets built on schedule or within budget.”

Cheops' Law


“If you can't make it good, make it big. If you can't make it big, make it red.”

Golden Rule of Design


“Science fiction is not about the freedom of imagination. It's about a free imagination pinched and howling in a vise that other people call real life.”

Bruce Sterling (Shaping Things)


“It's only because of their stupidity that they're able to be so sure of themselves.”

Franz Kafka


“If a sign is not necessary, then it is meaningless.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein (on Occam's Razor)


“Ninjas over Tanks.”

Unknown


“Working on the wrong thing and not knowing it feels exactly like working on the right thing, up until the moment you realize it's not.”

Matt Chanoff


“Leave the beaten track behind occasionally and dive into the woods. Every time you do you will be certain to find something you have never seen before.”

Alexander Graham Bell


“In conclusion, there is no conclusion. Things will go on as they always have, getting weirder all the time.”

Robert Anton Wilson


“You get paid in direct proportion to the difficulty of problems you solve.”

Elon Musk


“None so deaf as those that will not hear. None so blind as those that will not see.”

Matthew Henry


“Upon meeting, you're judged by your clothes, upon parting you're judged by your wits.”

Leo Tolstoy


“To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit.”

Stephen Hawking


“An unlimited-length file name is a file. The content of a file is its own best name.”

Jef Raskin


“When presented with competing hypotheses about the same prediction, one should select the solution with the fewest assumptions.”

Occam's Razor (Law of parsimony)


“Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.”

Gautama Buddha


“We owe it to our kids to inform them and train them how to think, not what to think.”

James Randi


“People only do things for other people for three reasons – love, money, or force.”

David Friedman


“Why shoot for the moon? When you try to do something radically hard, you approach the problem differently than when you try to make something incrementally better. ”

Astro Teller


“Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.”

Peter F. Drucker


“Be the change that you wish to see in the world.”

Mahatma Gandhi


“In order to understand what someone is telling you, it is necessary for you to assume the person is being truthful, then imagine what could be true about it.”

Miller's Law


“Procedures for assessment have social consequences, locking up time, personnel and resources, as well as locking into the moralities of public management.”

Marilyn Strathern


“One of the issues of social networking silos is that they have the data and I don't.”

Tim Berners-Lee


“It's a truism in technological development that no silver lining comes without its cloud.”

Bruce Sterling


“Money makes people rich; it is a fallacy to think it makes them better, or even that it makes them worse. People are what they do, and what they leave behind.”

Terry Pratchett


“The longer a period something has survived to exist or be used in the present, the more likely it is to have a longer remaining life expectancy.”

Lindy Effect


“We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.”

Marshall McLuhan


“Remind yourself that all humans assert that wisdom is the greatest good, but that there are few who strenuously seek out that greatest good.”

Pythagoras


“Policies are made by humans and can only be changed by humans.”

Unknown


“Dignity does not come in possessing honors, but in deserving them.”

Aristotle


“Anything that can go wrong, will — and at the worst possible moment.”

Finagle's Corollary to Murphy's Law


“The Enlightened take things Lightly.”

Principia Discordia


“They who know, do not speak. They who speak, do not know.”

Lao Tzu


“It isn’t where you come from; it’s where you’re going that counts.”

Ella Fitzgerald


“Here is the surprising truth: It's often easier to make something 10 times better than it is to make it 10 percent better.”

Astro Teller


“You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant.”

Harlan Ellison


“There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.”

Søren Kierkegaard


“Technology is anything that wasn't around when you were born.”

Alan Kay


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

Rick Osborne


“If you don’t have a sense of wonder it’s like you’re dead inside. But your sense of wonder can be used to trick you. You can have a sense of wonder over a thing that’s basically a conjurer’s trick, or a con job, or a rip-off.”

Bruce Sterling


“It's not worth doing something unless you are doing something that someone, somewere, would much rather you weren't doing.”

Terry Pratchett


“Integrity needs no rules.”

Albert Camus


“The greater the obstacle, the more glory in overcoming it.”

Moliere


“I don’t believe in honors – it bothers me. Honors bother: honors are epaulets; honors are uniforms.”

Richard P. Feynman


“No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer.”

Stigler's Law of Eponymy (originally discovered by Robert K. Merton)


“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”

Winston Churchill


“One person's theology is another's belly laugh.”

Robert A. Heinlein


“It’s easy to say, ‘I’m going to build something that already exists,’ but it’s difficult to clearly and succinctly describe something new.”

Sam Altman


“One always has exaggerated ideas about what one doesn't know.”

Albert Camus


“1,000,000 grains of sand is a heap. A heap minus one grain is still a heap. At what point is the heap no longer a heap?”

Sorites Paradox


“There are few sources of energy so powerful as a procrastinating college student.”

Paul Graham


“Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.”

Alan Watts


“In the part of this universe that we know there is great injustice, and often the good suffer, and often the wicked prosper, and one hardly knows which of those is the more annoying.”

Bertrand Russell


“Doors, not Walls.”

Anonymous, 2015


“I try to make everyone's day a little more surreal.”

Bill Watterson


“Computers are good at following instructions, but not at reading your mind.”

Donald Knuth


“All that counts in life is intention.”

Andrea Bocelli


“Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.”

Kranzberg's Laws of Technology


“The greatest risk of a startup is not that they moved too slowly in dominating the entire marketplace, but rather that they spread their scarce resources too thin and ended up securing few or no customers at all.”

Matthew Mochary


“When I’m old and dying, I plan to look back on my life and say ‘wow, that was an adventure,’ not ‘wow, I sure felt safe.”

Tom Preston-Werner


“Given the choice between two theories, take the one which is funnier.”

Blore's Razor


“I don't do one-on-ones. Almost everything that I say, I say to everybody at the same time. I don't believe there's any information that only 1-2 people should hear about.”

Jensen Huang


“Any software that can be written in JavaScript will eventually be written in JavaScript.”

Atwood's Law


“I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.”

Marcel Duchamp


“Mistakes are the portals of discovery.”

James Joyce


“For every PhD there is an equal and opposite PhD.”

Gibson's Law on Expert Witnesses


“I invented the web just because I needed it really because it was so frustrating that it didn't exist.”

Tim Berners-Lee


“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”

Rumi


“Everyone has a plan 'till they get punched in the mouth.”

Mike Tyson


“People ask me to predict the future, when all I want to do is prevent it. Better yet, build it. Predicting the future is much too easy, anyway. You look at the people around you, the street you stand on, the visible air you breathe, and predict more of the same. To hell with more. I want better.”

Ray Bradbury


“My favorite three words in the English language are: ’I don’t know’, because every time I say them, I learn something new.”

Timothy Leary


“The 2 hardest things you'll have to do when running a company are recruiting and talking people out of leaving.”

Marc Andreessen


“People who are smart get into Mensa. People who are really smart look around and leave.”

James Randi


“If you give a hacker a new toy, the first thing they'll do is take it apart to figure out how it works.”

Jamie Zawinski


“Keep your identity small.”

Paul Graham


“AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there’ll be great companies.”

Sam Altman


“In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity.”

Sun Tzu


“Marketing is what you do when your product is no good.”

Edwin Land


“Chase the vision, not the money, the money will end up following you.”

Tony Hsieh


“Critical thinking is an active and ongoing process. It requires that we all think like Bayesians, updating our knowledge as new information comes in.”

Daniel J. Levitin


“You should take the approach that you’re wrong. Your goal is to be less wrong.”

Elon Musk


“I think we're just going to have to live with the microcosm in the electronic world of the kind of things that we might see in the physical world.”

Robert E. Kahn


“By using Bayes' theorem, we are forced to look at all data and update our hypothesis with new evidence.”

Dan Morris


“To improve our collective ability to solve the world’s problems, we must harness the immense promise and power of technology.”

Douglas Engelbart


“The first rule of cryptocurrency is to never shut up about cryptocurrency.”

Unknown


“Human communications usually fail, except by accident.”

Wiio's Laws


“The first rule of Virtual Reality is to never shut up about Virtual Reality.”

Unknown


“Architecture is not based on concrete and steel, and the elements of the soil. It's based on wonder.”

Daniel Libeskind


“Science is a method to keep yourself from kidding yourself. ”

Edwin Land


“Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.”

Søren Kierkegaard


“Professionally, our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results of research are generations old and, by now, are totally inadequate for their purpose.”

Vannevar Bush


“If you're the village blacksmith and a model T comes along, you better become a mechanic. People's lives are better when they get news online versus having to wait for the morning paper. It's a lot more efficient, a lot more real time, a lot less waste.”

Marc Andreessen


“All humans are entrepreneurs not because they should start companies but because the will to create is encoded in human DNA.”

Reid Hoffman


“thra•shing (n.) — When an OS pages constantly, rapidly exchanging data in memory for data on disk, causing performance to degrade or collapse, ultimately blocking completion of any useful work until the underlying cause is addressed.”

Wikipedia


“Many founders hire just because it seems like a cool thing to do, and people always ask how many employees you have.”

Sam Altman


“Movement is not the same as forward motion.”

Anonymous


“What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”

Hitchens's Razor


“We designed Google to be the kind of place where the kind of people we wanted to work here would work for free.”

Urs Hölzle


“The belief that youth is the happiest time of life is founded on a fallacy. The happiest person is the person who thinks the most interesting thoughts, and we grow happier as we grow older.”

William Lyon Phelps


“The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning while those other subjects merely require scholarship.”

Robert A. Heinlein


“Like the majority of deaf people, I don't like blind people much.”

Luis Buñuel


“To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time.”

Leonard Bernstein


“Every great developer you know got there by solving problems they were unqualified to solve until they actually did it”

Patrick McKenzie


“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.”

Shirky Principle


“All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.”

Galileo Galilei


“All complex organizations, regardless of how democratic they are when started, eventually develop into oligarchies.”

Michels's Iron Law of Oligarchy


“Always listen to experts. They'll tell you what can't be done, and why. Then do it.”

Robert A. Heinlein


“An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail.”

Edwin Land


“Normal people believe that if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Engineers believe that if it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet.”

Scott Adams


“Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster.”

Wirth's Law


“I do not pretend to know where many ignorant humans are sure”

Clarence Darrow


“Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.”

Margaret Atwood (Surfacing)


“The future is better than the past. The world steadily grows better because the human mind, applying itself to the environment, makes it better.”

Robert A. Heinlein


“Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy people trying to find easier ways to do something.”

Robert A. Heinlein


“If one ox could not do the job they did not try to grow a bigger ox, but used two oxen. When we need greater computer power, the answer is not to get a bigger computer, but to build systems of computers and operate them in parallel.”

Grace Hopper


“Information wants to be free.”

Stewart Brand


“The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence; it is to act with yesterday's logic.”

Peter F. Drucker


“Perfect, not Flawless.”

Anonymous, 2016


“It forces you to slow down. We talk a lot about how important it is to slow down your decision-making process, and be more intentional and deliberate. When you are grinding in a short period of time to make a decision, you generally retreat to what’s comfortable.”

Jeremi Duru


“Passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information available.”

Benford's Law of Controversy


“Phones would not be better if they could be cooler looking, if they could weigh less, or if they could have more battery. Phones would be better if we didn't have to carry them around.”

Astro Teller


“There was a time when people felt the internet was another world, but now people realise it's a tool that we use in this world.”

Tim Berners-Lee


“All I can ask from society is that it please stop telling me why I should like sports.”

John Hodgman


“You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.”

Plato


“The relevant question is not simply what shall we do tomorrow, but rather what shall we do today in order to get ready for tomorrow.”

Peter F. Drucker


“The way to build billion dollar companies is to first build something people love. There isn’t really a shortcut there.”

Sam Altman


“The only real progress lies in learning to be wrong all alone.”

Albert Camus


“If you’re trying to choose between two theories and one gives you an excuse for being lazy, the other one is probably right.”

Paul Graham


“I believe in the future, and to be a good investor, you have to believe in the future.”

Sam Altman


“Act only on that maxim which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”

Immanuel Kant


“If something has to be designed and invented, and you have to figure out how to ensure that the value of the thing you create is greater than the cost of the inputs, then that is probably my core skill.”

Elon Musk


“Patience is waiting. Not passively waiting. That is laziness. But to keep going when the going is hard and slow - that is patience. The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.”

Leo Tolstoy


“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”

Bill Gates


“Incentives designed to solve a problem may end up rewarding people for making it worse.”

Cobra Effect (Horst Siebert)


“A man that is a friend to everyone is an enemy to himself.”

Mike Tyson


“If I accept you as you are, I will make you worse; however, if I treat you as though you are what you are capable of becoming, I help you become that.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


“It is better to ask some of the questions than to know all the answers.”

James Thurber


“When you're 18; when you're 22, don't sell your time – go make products.”

Garry Tan


“Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.”

Bill Gates


“One essential object is to choose that arrangement which shall tend to reduce to a minimum the time necessary for completing the calculation.”

Ada Lovelace


“I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.”

Richard Dawkins


“Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.”

Robert A. Heinlein


“In the absence of clearly-defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing daily trivia until ultimately we become enslaved by it.”

Robert A. Heinlein


“Your battles inspired me - not the obvious material battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead.”

James Joyce


“If one knows only what one is told, one does not know enough to be able to arrive at a well-balanced decision.”

Leó Szilárd


“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

Marilyn Strathern (on Goodhart's Law)


“When I hear of Schrödinger's cat, I reach for my gun.”

Stephen Hawking


“I do not see the world at all; I invent it.”

Franz Kafka


“Projects we have completed demonstrate what we know - future projects decide what we will learn.”

Dr. Mohsin Tiwana


“TCP implementations will follow a general principle of robustness: be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.”

Jon Postel


“The ideal engineer is a composite... not a scientist, not a mathematician, not a sociologist or a writer, but uses the knowledge and techniques of any or all of these disciplines in solving engineering problems.”

N.W. Dougherty


“There are plenty of smart people who get nowhere.”

Paul Graham


“Stay self-funded as long as possible.”

Garrett Camp


“One person's “magic” is another person's engineering. “Supernatural” is a null word.”

Robert A. Heinlein


“The computer was born to solve problems that did not exist before.”

Bill Gates


“I started SpaceX with the expectation of failure.”

Elon Musk


“The Web as I envisaged it, we have not seen it yet. The future is still so much bigger than the past.”

Tim Berners-Lee


“There are exponentially diminishing returns of extending a library search.”

Bradford's Law


“In 20 or 30 years, you'll be able to hold in your hand as much computing knowledge as exists now in the whole city, or even the whole world.”

Douglas Engelbart


“You can't learn the truth about a person's intentions by asking them.”

Marcel Proust


“...fact takes no heed of human hopes.”

H.G. Wells


“Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


“There is no greater misfortune in the world than the loss of reason.”

Mikhail Bulgakov


“The cleverest of all, in my opinion, is the person who calls themself a fool at least once a month.”

Fyodor Dostoevsky


“Your title makes you a manager. Your people will decide if you're a leader, and it's up to you to live up to that.”

Bill Campbell


“Lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason, than reality, since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to hear.”

Hannah Arendt


“Long ago I had a professor who told me, 'Embrace the contradictions.' I think that is what is most interesting about people like [Steve] Jobs.”

Alex Gibney


“Art has the lovely habit of ruining all artistic theories.”

Marcel Duchamp


“Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”

Franz Kafka


“It is error only, and not truth, that shrinks from inquiry.”

Thomas Paine


“The moment-of-conception fallacy implies that fertilization is a simple process with never a doubt as to whether it has or has not happened.”

George C. Williams


“A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind.”

John Maynard Keynes


“Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.”

Friedrich Nietzsche


“It is better to debate a question without deciding it than to decide it without debate.”

Joseph Joubert


“A teacher affects eternity; they can never tell where their influence stops.”

Henry Adams


“I think it's in my basement... let me go upstairs and check.”

M. C. Escher


“Everyone carries a piece of the puzzle. Nobody comes into your life by mere coincidence. Trust your instincts. Do the unexpected. Find the others.”

Timothy Leary


“No matter how hard you try, you cannot push a string.”

Unknown


“The poet, the artist, the sleuth, whoever sharpens our perception tends to be antisocial; rarely 'well adjusted', they cannot go along with currents and trends. ”

Marshall McLuhan


“Mass transportation is doomed to failure in North America because a person's car is the only place to be alone and think. ”

Marshall McLuhan


“Time's glory is to command contending kings, To unmask falsehood, and bring truth to light.”

William Shakespeare


“Thinking does not lead to truth; truth is the beginning of thought.”

Hannah Arendt


“The path to success in a fast-moving, highly competitive, technology-driven business world is to form high-performing teams and give them the resources and freedom to do great things.”

Bill Campbell


“The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by humans of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.”

Louis Brandeis


“Random numbers should not be generated with a method chosen at random.”

Donald Knuth


“Imagine a world in which time seems to vanish and space becomes completely malleable. Where the gap between need or desire and fulfillment collapses to zero.”

Stewart Brand (The Clock of the Long Now)


“The Ivory Tower (n.) — a state of privileged seclusion or separation from the facts and practicalities of the real world.”

Oxford English Dictionary


“Attitude is a paintbrush. It colors everything!”

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry


“Don't be afraid of new arenas.”

Elon Musk


“We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.”

Stephen Hawking


“All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.”

Mark Twain


“What you think is the point is not the point at all but only the beginning of the sharpness.”

Flann O'Brien


“Pessimists sound smart. Optimists make money.”

Nat Friedman


“I rebel; therefore I exist.”

Albert Camus


“Theory and practice sometimes clash. And when that happens, theory loses. Every single time.”

Linus Torvalds


“Beauty perishes in life, but is immortal in art.”

Leonardo da Vinci


“Vision without execution is daydreaming.”

Bill Gates