Engineering Quotes
Our list of Engineering-related quotes, for inspiration and reflection.
Updated: 2022-10-04
This list of quotations has been compiled through the continuous efforts of members of the lab to draw attention to the 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 the projection screen above the door in the EDS; now you can enjoy them from wherever you are on earth.
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: 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 sources available.
"Integrity needs no rules."
"Your mind will give back to you exactly what you put into it."
"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?"
"If you learn only methods, you'll be tied to your methods, but if you learn principles you can devise your own methods."
"Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world."
"All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure."
"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."
"In what moment or at what percentage does the ship stop being the same ship and become something else?"
"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'"
"My favorite three words in the English language are: ’I don’t know’, because every time I say them, I learn something new."
"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."
"The digital revolution is far more significant than the invention of writing or even of printing."
"Under Bayes' theorem, no theory is perfect. Rather, it is a work in progress, always subject to further refinement and testing."
"To change is to lose identity; yet to change is to be alive."
"The more unusual or interesting the data, the more likely they are to have been the result of an error."
"Almost every dot-com idea from 1999 that failed will succeed."
"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."
"The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion."
"Engineers like to solve problems. If there are no problems handily available, they will create their own problems."
"If a sign is not necessary, then it is meaningless."
"The probability of being observed is in direct proportion to the stupidity of ones actions."
"There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly."
"The first rule of cryptocurrency is to never shut up about cryptocurrency."
— Unknown
"A good engineer thinks in reverse and asks about the stylistic consequences of the components and systems being proposed."
"At a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking."
"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."
"Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do."
"In any dispute, the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake."
"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."
"Human communications usually fail, except by accident."
"You want to do things you’re passionate about but also are useful to other people."
"No matter how hard you try, you cannot push a string."
— Unknown
"I've never been a good estimator of how long things are going to take."
"Start with what is right rather than what is acceptable."
"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."
"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."
"Design for Disassembly."
"If you put a key under the mat for the cops, a burglar can find it, too."
— Tim Cook
"A certain amount of opposition is a great help. Kites rise against, not with, the wind."
"That is not only not right; it is not even wrong."
"Always listen to experts. They'll tell you what can't be done, and why. Then do it."
"Courage is the commitment to begin without any guarantee of success."
"The real test of character is how you treat someone who has no possibility of doing you any good."
"Programs are meant to be read by humans and only incidentally for computers to execute."
"The best way to get rich on the Internet is to talk about how to get rich on the Internet."
— Unknown
"Improvement means deterioration. (a stated improvement often actually hides a deterioration)"
"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."
"Life is like a piano. What you get out of it depends on how you play it."
"In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity."
— Sun Tzu
"Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed. "
"Wherever smart people work, doors are unlocked."
"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."
"It’s the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting."
"New capabilities emerge just by virtue of having smart people with access to state-of-the-art technology."
"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."
"You should take the approach that you’re wrong. Your goal is to be less wrong."
"Computers are good at following instructions, but not at reading your mind."
"I don’t think it’s a good idea to plan to sell a company."
"For the most ambitious young people, the corporate ladder is obsolete."
"Nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion."
"Do you want to have an easy life? Then always stay with the herd and lose yourself in the herd."
"If you can’t feed a team with two pizzas, it’s too large."
"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."
"Humans beings always do the most intelligent thing ...after they’ve tried every stupid alternative and none of them have worked."
"I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something."
"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."
"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."
— Unknown
"Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth."
"wit•zel•sucht (n. German) — Excessive and abnormal joviality with morbid tendency to pun, make poor jokes, and tell pointless stories."
"The best startups generally come from somebody needing to scratch an itch."
"I’ve actually not read any books on time management."
"Complex, statistically improbable things are by their nature more difficult to explain than simple, statistically probable things."
"Upon meeting, you're judged by your clothes, upon parting you're judged by your wits."
"Trust only those who stand to lose as much as you."
"Always go too far, because that's where you'll find the truth"
"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."
"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."
"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."
"A meeting is an event at which the minutes are kept and the hours are lost."
— Unknown
"It's OK to have your eggs in one basket as long as you control what happens to that basket."
"Acceptance is the spiritual hammock."
"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."
"Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without."
"You need to understand things in order to invent beyond them."
"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 easy, conversational tone of good writing comes only on the eighth rewrite."
"The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer."
"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 designed Google to be the kind of place where the kind of people we wanted to work here would work for free."
"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."
"Do what's good for humans, modeled on how humans already do things; ignore what's convenient for computers."
"The sun comes up just about as often as it goes down, in the long run, but this doesn't make its motion random."
"I think that the anti-Microsoft sentiment is simply due to their having been so successful selling a lot of crap."
"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."
"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'."
"Go to heaven for the climate and hell for the company."
"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."
"Losing your way on a journey is unfortunate. But, losing your reason for the journey is a fate more cruel."
"Everything looks like a failure in the middle."
"I think it is possible for ordinary people to choose to be extraordinary."
"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit."
"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."
"Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule."
"It isn’t where you come from; it’s where you’re going that counts."
"Don't handicap your children by making their lives easy."
"Never be limited by other people’s limited imaginations."
"The greater the obstacle, the more glory in overcoming it."
— Moliere
"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."
"Adding more humans to an already late software project makes it even later."
"Unless specified in design documents, nails, superglue, and duct tape are not engineering materials."
"Any idiot can build a bridge that stands, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands."
— Unknown
"Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage."
"Fall in love with some activity, and do it!"
"My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together."
"Relying on the government to protect your privacy is like asking a peeping Tom to install your window blinds."
"Physics is a good framework for thinking. ... Boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there."
"When things begin accelerating wildly out of control, sometimes patience is the only answer. Press pause."
"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."
"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."
"The supreme irony of life is that hardly anyone gets out of it alive."
"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."
"At the moment of commitment the entire universe conspires to assist you."
"The remaining work increases as the deadline approaches."
— Unknown
"900 years of time and space and I’ve never met anyone who wasn’t important."
"If people did not sometimes do silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done."
"You can do anything except light a paper match on a marshmallow under water"
"Risk more than others think is safe. Dream more than others think is practical."
"I don't think there's much distinction between surveillance and media in general. Better media means better surveillance."
"Many things are improbable, only a few are impossible."
"I'm smart enough to know that I'm dumb."
"The internet brought many laudable things, but prosperity, stability, accountability and honest politics were not four of them."
"If we understood the enigmas of life there would be no need for art."
"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."
"Data is a precious thing and will last longer than the systems themselves."
"A hacker is someone who enjoys playful cleverness, not necessarily with computers."
"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."
"Over•view Eff•ect (n.) — A cognitive shift in awareness reported by some astronauts during spaceflight, often while viewing the Earth from outer space."
"Do I need a blockchain?"
— No
"I don't need an alarm clock. My ideas wake me."
"Getting information off the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant."
"A hacker does for love what others would not do for money."
"What really matters is what you do with what you have."
"Don't let schooling interfere with your education."
"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."
"History is much more the product of chaos than of conspiracy."
"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."
"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."
"The function of science fiction is not always to predict the future, but sometimes to prevent it."
"Gutenberg made everybody a reader. Xerox makes everybody a publisher."
"Computing is too important to be left to men."
"I think it would be great to be born on Earth and die on Mars. Just hopefully not at the point of impact."
"Every utopia faces the same problem: What do you do with the people who don't fit in?"
"As an architect, you design for the present, with an awareness of the past for a future which is essentially unknown."
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
"Utopia means elsewhere."
"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."
"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."
"These days, the problem isn't how to innovate; it's how to get society to adopt the good ideas that already exist."
"All cats are equal, but some cats are more equal than others."
— streetCat
"The question is not 'To be or not to be,' it is what we should be until we are not."
"Enjoy what you can, endure what you must."
"When you take away verisimilitude, you do not automatically find the veridical but, perhaps, the implausible."
"If robots are granted citizenship, under what conditions is it permissible for any entity other than themselves to execute an 'upgrade'?"
"Projects we have completed demonstrate what we know - future projects decide what we will learn."
"Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies."
"Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric."
"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."
"You will burn and you will burn out; you will be healed and come back again."
"It's not worth doing something unless you are doing something that someone, somewere, would much rather you weren't doing."
"One of the less publicized benefits of the open source movement is that it has made it easier to learn to program."
"No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of elders. They do not grow wise. They grow careful."
"In my experience, if you have to keep the lavatory door shut by extending your left leg, it’s modern architecture."
"Architecture is the art of how to waste space."
"A hacker to me is someone creative who does wonderful things."
"We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims."
"I have not failed, but found 1,000 ways to not make a light bulb."
"Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it."
"Why is there no Flat Mars Society!?"
"No one wants to learn by mistakes, but we cannot learn enough from successes to go beyond the state of the art."
"Any architectural work that does not express serenity is an error."
"I don't necessarily agree with everything I say."
"Geniuses are like thunderstorms: they go against the wind, terrify people, clear the air."
"We all see only that which we are trained to see."
"I invented the web just because I needed it really because it was so frustrating that it didn't exist."
"The legibility of a copy is inversely proportional to its importance."
"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."
"Hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done."
"Moonshots live in that place between audacious projects and pure science fiction."
"Democracy is not the law of the majority but the protection of the minority."
"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."
"Some people, when confronted with a problem, think 'I know, I'll use regular expressions.' Now they have two problems."
"We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run."
"If we are to make reality endurable, we must all nourish a fantasy or two."
"I have approximate answers, and possible beliefs, and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I’m not absolutely sure of anything."
"...fact takes no heed of human hopes."
"No evidence against a firmly-held belief, no matter how good or abundant it may be, will sway the true believer."
"Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is."
"Nationalism is an infantile disease, the measles of humankind."
"Whether you think you can, or think you can’t – you’re right."
"The Universe is under no obligation to make sense to you."
"Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep."
"You just have to pay attention to what people need and what has not been done."
"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."
"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."
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it."
"When you understand things, there's no more magic."
"One has to watch out for engineers - they begin with the sewing machine and end up with the atomic bomb."
"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."
"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."
"Anticipate the difficult by managing the easy."
— Lao Tzu
"The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man."
"Any program is only as good as it is useful."
"Flying down a tunnel of 1s and 0s is not how hacking is really done."
"We learn by rearranging what we know."
"Good, to evil, seems evil"
"Human beings, thanks to culture and genetics, are inclined to be pessimistic, fearful, skeptical and believers in conspiracy theories."
"A problem adequately stated is a problem well on its way to being solved."
"The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them."
"When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor."
"We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be."
"People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use."
"It’s hard to do a really good job on anything you don’t think about in the shower."
"Curiosity is the essence of our existence."
"I don’t create companies for the sake of creating companies, but to get things done."
"Passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information available."
"When we build, let us think that we build forever."
"You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them."
"By denying scientific principles, one may maintain any paradox."
"What we usually consider as impossible are simply engineering problems. there’s no law of physics preventing them."
"Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them."
"Utopias rest on the fallacy that perfection is a legitimate goal of human existence."
"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."
"By using Bayes' theorem, we are forced to look at all data and update our hypothesis with new evidence."
"Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear."
"If a grasshopper tries to fight a lawnmower, one may admire its courage but not its judgement."
"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."
"Clothes make the person. Naked people have little or no influence on society."
"This isn't my first Rodeo."
— Person at their Second Rodeo
"Enjoy life. This is not a dress rehearsal."
"People who are smart get into Mensa. People who are really smart look around and leave."
"To create, one must first question everything."
"Hey, I’m a good software engineer, but I’m not exactly known for my fashion sense."
"A good leader takes a little more than their share of the blame, a little less than their share of the credit."
"Great deeds are usually wrought at great risks."
"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."
"Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself."
— Rumi
"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."
"Go on, prove me wrong. Destroy the fabric of the universe. See if I care. "
"The engineer’s first problem in any design situation is to discover what the problem really is."
— Unknown
"Everything goes wrong all at once."
— Quantum Interpretation of Murphy's Law
"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."
"There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew."
"If you give a hacker a new toy, the first thing he'll do is take it apart to figure out how it works."
"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."
"But the upside of painful knowledge is so much greater than the downside of blissful ignorance."
"E.U.O.M.U.A.I.A.S.I.T.C. (Excessive use of made-up acronyms is a significant impediment to communication)"
"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."
"What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence."
"It is often easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission."
"You cannot use butterfly language to communicate with caterpillars"
"If we all worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true is really true, there would be little hope of advance."
"After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say 'I want to see the manager.'"
"Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world."
"The invention is by its very nature disruptive. If you want to be understood at all times, then don't do anything new."
"To say that someone who invents a piece of knowledge or technology is responsible for all future uses is ridiculous."
"I started SpaceX with the expectation of failure."
"It is never wise to let a piece of electronic equipment know that you are in a hurry."
— Unknown
"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."
"Write your values in pen, your tactics and strategies in pencil."
"You can't learn the truth about a man's intentions by asking him."
"It's only because of their stupidity that they're able to be so sure of themselves."
"Mistakes are the portals of discovery."
"If we were all on trial for our thoughts, we would all be hanged."
"People understand me so poorly that they don't even understand my complaint about them not understanding me."
"If you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written."
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
"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."
"If software's the only thing in your bag of tools, I'm not going to give you great odds."
"I don't believe a mistake-free learning environment exists."
"We are limited only by our imagination and our will to act."
"The rate at which a person can mature is directly proportional to the embarrassment they can tolerate."
"People exaggerate their confidence in their plans - something we call the planning fallacy... The existence of the plan tends to induce overconfidence."
"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."
"Here is the surprising truth: It's often easier to make something 10 times better than it is to make it 10 percent better."
"If you're going to eat a creature alive, you have to expect some screaming."
"The value of an idea lies in the using of it."
"Price is what you pay. Value is what you get."
"Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food."
"Be the change that you wish to see in the world."
"Any post correcting an error in another post will contain at least one error itself."
"There is no permanent place in this universe for evil."
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right."
"Ninjas over Tanks."
— Unknown
"花より団子 — Dumplings over Flowers."
"First rule of engineering; beware prototypes. Along with, avoid anything made by an engineer who doesn't have all their own fingers"
"If you love what you do and are willing to do what it takes, it's within your reach."
"It's only because of their stupidity that they're able to be so sure of themselves."
"The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing."
— Socrates
"At the core of Silicon Valley is a passion for ‘yes.'"
"Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom."
"Real education should educate us out of self into something far finer into a selflessness which links us with all humanity."
"I'll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there's evidence of any thinking going on inside it."
"Strive for perfection in everything you do. Take the best that exists and make it better. When it does not exist, design it."
"Most pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it."
"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."
"What is the difference between someone who is convinced and one who is deceived? None, if he is well deceived."
"Pyr•rhic Vic•to•ry (n.) — A victory that inflicts such a devastating toll on the victor that it is tantamount to defeat."
"Mass transportation is doomed to failure in North America because a person's car is the only place to be alone and think. "
"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty."
"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."
"Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning."
"You can't think seriously about thinking without thinking about thinking about something."
"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."
"Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step."
— Lao Tzu
"Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions."
"Any software that can be written in JavaScript will eventually be written in JavaScript."
"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."
"Design is where science and art break even."
"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."
"Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough."
"Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral."
"You should be innovating so fast that you're invalidating your prior patents."
"What you think is the point is not the point at all but only the beginning of the sharpness."
"One must never miss an opportunity of quoting things by others which are always more interesting than those one thinks up oneself."
"Perfect, not Flawless."
"I define UNIX as 30 definitions of regular expressions living under one roof."
"The cleverest of all, in my opinion, is the person who calls themself a fool at least once a month."
"When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be."
— Lao Tzu
"The main reason nerds are unpopular is that they have other things to think about."
"If things were simple, word would have gotten around."
"When you struggle with a problem, that's when you understand it."
"A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding."
"I don't know why people hire architects and then tell them what to do."
"There is no fool like an educated fool."
"Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it."
"Once a new technology rolls over you, if you're not part of the steamroller, you're part of the road."
"The tough thing is figuring out what questions to ask, but […] once you do that, the rest is really easy."
"When we drink coffee, ideas march in like the army"
"No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer."
— Stigler's Law of Eponymy (originally discovered by Robert K. Merton)
"I did write some code in Java once ...the island in Indonesia."
"Stupidity has a knack of getting its way."
"Most of our ancestors were not perfect ladies and gentlemen. The majority of them weren't even mammals."
"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."
"Manage things. Lead people."
"Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about. Be kind. Always."
"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."
"No loophole goes unexpoited."
— Unknown
"The designer of a new kind of system must participate fully in the implementation."
"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire."
"Hacking involves a different way of looking at problems that no one's thought of."
"If you’re trying to choose between two theories and one gives you an excuse for being lazy, the other one is probably right."
"Ideas are easy. Implementation is hard."
"Beware the fury of a patient human."
"A 22nd-order all-pass filter is, technically, a filter."
— Anonymous
"Happiness consists in getting enough sleep. Just that, nothing more."
"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."
"Don’t take too much advice... Just build things and find out if they work."
"Hell, there are no rules here; We're trying to accomplish something."
"To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time."
"Diaper backward spells repaid. Think about it."
"Fortunes are built during the down market and collected in the up market."
"Good design is all about making other designers feel like idiots because the idea wasn't theirs."
"Get big quietly, so you don’t tip off potential competitors."
"Free time and proximity to smart, motivated people. University students nearly always take these two super-powers for granted and, looking back, wonder how they could vanish so quickly after graduation."
"When a broken appliance is demonstrated for the repair technician, it will work perfectly."
"To convince someone of the truth, it is not enough to state it, but rather one must find the path from error to truth."
"Life is a commingling of the sacred and the profane, good and evil. To try and separate them is fallacy."
"A person with a watch knows what time it is. A person with two watches is never sure."
"I could either watch it happen or be a part of it."
"Don't be afraid of new arenas."
"Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire."
"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."
"Theory and practice sometimes clash. And when that happens, theory loses. Every single time."
"That’s the real trouble with the world. Too many people grow up."
"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."
"If you are in a spaceship that is traveling at the speed of light, and you turn on the headlights, does anything happen?"
"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."
"What is thinkable is also possible."
"Space is an inspirational concept that allows you to dream big."
"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."
"The ruins of the unsustainable are the 21st century’s frontier."
"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."
"I think the most important thing we can teach our kids for their long-term health and happiness is how to cook."
"The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing."
"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."
"You know your business model is broken when you're suing your customers."
"Moonshot thinking starts with picking a big problem: something huge, long existing, or on a global scale."
"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."
"Knowing Murphy's Law doesn't help."
"I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it."
"The victory always has a lot of parents but the defeat is always an orphan."
"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."
"The main dangers in this life are the people who want to change everything — or nothing."
"Hope is passion for what is possible."
"To provide meaningful architecture is not to parody history, but to articulate it."
"You want to be extra rigorous about making the best possible thing you can. Find everything that's wrong with it and fix it."
"All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning."
"Wisdom.... comes not from age, but from education and learning."
"Doors, not Walls."
"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."
"You simply cannot invent any conspiracy theory so ridiculous and obviously satirical that some people somewhere don't already believe it."
"The intrinsic rate of human performance is exponential."
"Everything has a natural explanation. The moon is not a god, but a great rock, and the sun a hot rock. "
"The future is better than the past. The world steadily grows better because the human mind, applying itself to the environment, makes it better."
"Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre."
"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."
"Everybody has a different Internet."
"The only real progress lies in learning to be wrong all alone."
"For every PhD there is an equal and opposite PhD."
"Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it."
— Alan Kay
"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."
"A designer is an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist."
"if you can imagine someone surpassing you, you should do it yourself."
"We, in the modern world, expect that tomorrow will be better than today."
"Where there is no hope, we must invent it."
"Measurements will be quoted in the least practical unit; velocity, for example, will be measured in 'furlongs-per-fortnight'."
"Reinventing beats inventing nearly every time."
"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."
"The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning while those other subjects merely require scholarship."
"There is no greater misfortune in the world than the loss of reason."
"Life must be understood backward. But it must be lived forward."
"In conclusion, there is no conclusion. Things will go on as they always have, getting weirder all the time."
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
"The minute you choose to do what you really want to do, it's a different kind of life. "
"When presented with competing hypotheses about the same prediction, one should select the solution with the fewest assumptions."
"Leadership is about recognizing that there’s a greatness in everyone, and your job is to create an environment where that greatness can emerge."
"Sometimes you just have to jump out the window and grow wings on the way down."
"Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone."
"The pursuit of balance can create imbalance because sometimes something is true."
"The more people who believe something, the more apt it is to be wrong. The person who's right often has to stand alone."
"In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt."
"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."
"You can’t argue with facts. You’re not entitled to your own facts."
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge."
"The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it."
"Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence (ECREE)"
"All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth."
"Talk is cheap. Show me the code."
"No one reads; if someone does read, they don’t understand; if they understand, they immediately forget."
"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."
"Great minds always tend to see virtue in misfortune."
"The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible."
"No statement should be believed because it is made by an authority."
"I am a passenger on the spaceship Earth."
"The most common form of despair is not being who you are."
"Judge a person by their questions rather than their answers."
— Voltaire
"There are exponentially diminishing returns of extending a library search."
"Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes."
"We absolutely must leave room for doubt or there is no progress and no learning."
"Of course I'm crazy, but that doesn't mean I'm wrong."
"We can't blame the technology when we make mistakes."
"The memory management on the PowerPC can be used to frighten small children."
"The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance."
"The computer was born to solve problems that did not exist before."
"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."
"These young people naturally grow up with ideas different from ours, for they are born for times when we shall no longer be here"
"Trees sprout up just about everywhere in computer science."
"We have fought long and hard to escape from medieval superstition. I, for one, do not wish to go back."
"You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant."
"However much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing."
"When I walk into the Engineering Design Studio, I'm instantly inspired and want to know what's going on here."
"Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others."
"Mooers's Law tells us that information will be used in direct proportion to how easy it is to obtain."
"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."
"PI•DOO•MA (n.) — U.S. Department of Energy class 5 Cost Estimate, 50% error margins. (Pulled It Directly Out Of My Ass)"
"A common fallacy: to imagine a measure will be easy because we have private motives for desiring it."
"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."
"There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action. "
"We owe it to our kids to inform them and train them how to think, not what to think."
"A ship in port is safe, but that is not what ships are for. Sail out to sea and do new things."
"So often people are working hard at the wrong thing. Working on the right thing is probably more important than working hard."
"The letter box is always on the other side of the road"
"Architecture is not based on concrete and steel, and the elements of the soil. It's based on wonder."
"Scientific knowledge is an enabling power to do either good or bad — but it does not carry instructions on how to use it."
"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."
"When you want to know how things really work, study them when they're coming apart."
"Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy people trying to find easier ways to do something."
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
"Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards."
"Sometimes, carrying on, just carrying on, is the superhuman achievement."
"We need diversity of thought in the world to face the new challenges."
"Never chase the next hot thing. Stop trying to chase the wave. You will never catch it."
"The first rule of [insert buzzword] is to never shut up about [insert buzzword]."
— Unknown
"The first rule of blockchain is to never shut up about blockchain."
— Unknown
"If I only did what I can do, I wouldn’t do anything."
"Everything has been figured out, except how to live."
"Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it."
"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."
"A lot of hacking is playing with other people, you know, getting them to do strange things."
"You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts."
"Premature optimization is the root of all evil."
"One of the issues of social networking silos is that they have the data and I don't."
"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."
"It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law."
"To argue with a fool is like lighting candles for the blind."
"Do not waste your time looking for an obstacle - maybe there is none."
"A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools."
"If you optimize everything, you will always be unhappy."
"Vision without execution is daydreaming."
"Don’t delude yourself into thinking something’s working when it’s not, or you’re gonna get fixated on a bad solution."
"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it."
"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."
"Judge a model not by its explanatory power but by its predictive power."
"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."
"Do robot citizens have the right to electricity?"
"I’m sure the universe is full of intelligent life. It’s just been too intelligent to come here."
"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."
"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."
"Leap, and the net will appear."
"Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible."
"Never fire a laser at a mirror."
"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. "
"Don't look for the meanings; look for the use."
"I want to be cremated, and I want my ashes blown in Uri Geller's eyes."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"There is a distinct difference between having an open mind and having a hole in your head from which your brain leaks out."
"Space isn't remote at all. It's only an hour's drive away if your car could go straight upwards."
"Intelligence is the ability to avoid doing work, yet getting the work done."
"We are free to change the world and start something new in it."
"When engineers and quantity surveyors discuss aesthetics and architects study what cranes do we are on the right road."
— Ove Arup
"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."
"Work expands to fill the time available for completion."
"Don’t worry about funding if you don’t need it."
"How could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads?"
"Tomorrow composts today."
"Science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic."
"An object should be judged by whether it has a form consistent with its use."
"Always remember, however, that there’s usually a simpler and better way to do something than the first way that pops into your head."
"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 him not to have it."
"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."
"What is a rebel? A person who says no."
"Constantly think about how you could be doing things better."
"Every problem has a better solution when you start thinking about it differently than the normal way."
"Potential has a shelf life."
"All that counts in life is intention."
"Small opportunities are often the beginning of great enterprises."
"A patient can have as many diseases as they damn well please."
"Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."
"As an online debate increases in length, it becomes inevitable that someone will eventually compare someone or something to Adolf Hitler or the Nazis."
"The need to be right is the sign of a vulgar mind."
"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."
"It is no accident that Silicon Valley is in America... In other countries, people color inside the lines."
"I made choices, and then, having made them, I had fewer choices."
"We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it."
"I retired from modelling a long time ago. It’s time I retired from tech, too."
"Your battles inspired me - not the obvious material battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead."
"Systems are organic, living creations: if people stop working on them and improving them, they die."
"I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do."
"Any good software engineer will tell you that a compiler and an interpreter are interchangeable."
"Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better."
"Function reforms form, perpetually."
"Keep your identity small."
"Why look for conspiracy when stupidity can explain so much."
"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."
"Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."
"An attempt to hide, remove, or censor information will have the opposite and unintended consequence of further publicizing that information."
"It is much more rewarding to do more with less."
"We live in our fantasies and endure our realities."
"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."
"It is not the brains that matter most, but that which guides them — the character, the heart, generous qualities, progressive ideas."
"The fool doth think themself wise, but the wise indivual knows themself to be a fool."
"In the old days, you would chastise people for reinventing the wheel. Now we beg, 'Oh, please, please reinvent the wheel.'"
— Alan Kay
"I think that's the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself."
"One accurate measurement is worth a thousand expert opinions."
"An invention that is quickly accepted will turn out to be a rather trivial alteration of something that has already existed."
"I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand."
"The best things in life are beyond money; their price is agony and sweat and devotion."
"One recognizes one's course by discovering the paths that stray from it."
"Paper is always strongest at the perforation."
"Only feeble minds are paralyzed by facts."
"Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do."
"Playfully doing something difficult, whether useful or not, that is hacking."
"High expectations are the key to everything."
"Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear."
"Everything not forbidden is compulsory."
"If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?"
"We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror."
"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."
"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."
"Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal."
"The most knowledgeable person in one domain may be the most ignorant in another."
"Offer a financial reward for each exterminated poisonous snake, and eventually, enterprising individuals will begin breeding snakes."
"The Web as I envisaged it, we have not seen it yet. The future is still so much bigger than the past."
"Technology is anything that wasn't around when you were born."
— Alan Kay
"I don't spend my time pontificating about high-concept things; I spend my time solving engineering and manufacturing problems."
"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."
"The time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum [of money] involved."
"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."
"The recipe for great work is: very exacting taste, plus the ability to gratify it."
"You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do."
"All operating systems sucks, but Linux just sucks less."
"All complex organizations, regardless of how democratic they are when started, eventually develop into oligarchies."
"The imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of humans."
"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes."
"I do not see the world at all; I invent it."
"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. "
"The Linux philosophy is ‘Laugh in the face of danger’. Oops. Wrong One. ‘Do it yourself’."
"There are few sources of energy so powerful as a procrastinating college student."
"All humans are entrepreneurs not because they should start companies but because the will to create is encoded in human DNA."
"We can influence the future but not see it."
"The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program."
"Information wants you to give me a dollar."
"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."
"There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew."
"When you’re in a hole, stop digging."
"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."
"To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself."
"I rebel; therefore I exist."
"Random numbers should not be generated with a method chosen at random."
"One of the advantages of moving quickly is if you do something wrong you can change it."
"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."
"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."
"We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress."
"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."
"The reason that university politics is so vicious is because stakes are so small."
"Persistence is very important. You should not give up unless you are forced to give up."
"What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult."
"Take big bites. Anything worth doing is worth overdoing. (Lazarus Long)"
"It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt."
"All books should be trilogies; I mean, I think we all agree on that."
"A critic is a person who creates nothing and thereby feels qualified to judge the work of creative people."
"Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results."
"If you set your goals ridiculously high and it’s a failure, you will fail above everyone else’s success."
"I don’t believe in honors – it bothers me. Honors bother: honors are epaulets; honors are uniforms."
"If you buy a ticket to hell, it isn't fair to blame hell."
"The amount of energy needed to refute bullsht on the internet is an order of magnitude larger than that required to produce it."*
"Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts."
"A person who chases two rabbits at once will catch none."
"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."
"The greatest educational dogma is also its greatest fallacy: the belief that what must be learned can necessarily be taught."
"I have a hunch that the unknown sequences of DNA will decode into copyright notices and patent protections."
"Everything considered, a determined soul will always manage."
"One person's theology is another's belly laugh."
"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."
"It is easy to sit up and take notice, What is difficult is getting up and taking action."
"Anyone who can appease a man's conscience can take his freedom away from him."
"Good design is obvious. Great design is transparent."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Movement is not the same as forward motion."
"Stay self-funded as long as possible."
"This is the precept by which I have lived: Prepare for the worst; expect the best; and take what comes."
"There is the opportunity to do more and better if you're smaller and more nimble."
"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."
"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But in practice, there is."
"You're only as young as the last time you changed your mind."
"Teaching is the last refuge of feeble minds with a classical education."
"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
"I've never seen a job being done by a five-hundred-person engineering team that couldn’t be done better by fifty people."
"...an optimistic mind-set finds dozens of possible solutions for every problem that the pessimist regards as incurable."
"Incentives designed to solve a problem may end up rewarding people for making it worse."
"The past may not hurt you, but it won't challenge you, either."
"Only the madman is absolutely sure."
"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."
"You don’t learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing and falling over."
"Innovation is serendipity, so you don't know what people will make."
"A ‘startup’ is a company that is confused about 1. What its product is. 2. Who its customers are. 3. How to make money."
"Beauty perishes in life, but is immortal in art."
"Quality is never an accident. It is always the result of intelligent effort."
"Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can."
"One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary humans. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary human."
"There are plenty of smart people who get nowhere."
"You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist."
"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
"One person's “magic” is another person's engineering. “Supernatural” is a null word."
"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."
"It is important to doubt and that the doubt is not a fearful thing, but a thing of great value."
"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."
"Superstition is the religion of feeble minds."
"There’s a tremendous bias against taking risks. Everyone is trying to optimize their ass-covering."
"The highest forms of understanding we can achieve are laughter and human compassion."
"Life is not a problem to be solved, but an experience to be had."
"The stated purpose of schools is to educate the kids. But there is no external pressure to do this well."
"It’s kind of fun to do the impossible."
"七転び八起き — Fall down seven times, get up eight."
"Anything that can go wrong, will — and at the worst possible moment."
"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."
"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."
"There is also no clothing policy at Netflix, but no one comes to work naked."
"Everyone who believes in telekinesis, raise my hand."
"Anything that can go wrong will go wrong."
"There is nothing more awful, insulting, and depressing than banality."
"Any person blaming tools for shoddy work is either unskilled at using them or has chosen them unwisely, or likely, both."
"I can go into a lab and fool the rear ends off any group of scientists."
"The New Age? Its just the old age stuck in a microwave oven for fifteen seconds."
"An extraordinary amount of arrogance is present in any claim of having been the first in inventing something."
"Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity."
— Seneca
"Don't let the bastards grind you down."
"Those who believe without reason cannot be convinced by reason."
"Don’t explain your philosophy. Embody it."
"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."
"Most people can learn a lot more than they think they can. They sell themselves short without trying."
"Be careful who you choose as your enemy because that's who you become most like."
"A doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines."
"Conspiracy theories are an irresistible labor-saving device in the face of complexity."
"Dare to be naïve."
"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."
"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
"Anything you dream is fiction, and anything you accomplish is science, the whole history of mankind is nothing but science fiction."
"Obsolescence never meant the end of anything, it's just the beginning."
"...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..."
"I’ve learned that by doing things, things get done."
"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."
"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."
"None so deaf as those that will not hear. None so blind as those that will not see."
"The structure of any system designed by an organization is isomorphic to the structure of the organization."
"No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else."
"One always has exaggerated ideas about what one doesn't know."
"Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations."
"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."
"To recognize that nature has neither a preference for our species nor a bias against it takes only a little courage."
"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
"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!"
"A person who is quietly confident makes the best leader."
"You may not be able to alter reality, but you can alter your attitude towards it, and this, paradoxically, alters reality."
"Butterflies are self propelled flowers."
"I have discovered in life that there are ways of getting almost anywhere you want to go, if you really want to go."
"You will always find something in the last place you look."
"The speed of software halves every 18 months."
"All I can ask from society is that it please stop telling me why I should like sports."
"Information wants to be free."
"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool."
"The scientific theory I like best is that the rings of Saturn are composed entirely of lost airline luggage."
"I know of no better life purpose than to perish in attempting the great and the impossible."
"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."
"The minority is always stronger than the majority, because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion."
"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."
"The best way of keeping a secret is to pretend there isn't one."
"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."
"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
"You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation."
— Plato
"猿も木から落ちる — Even monkeys fall from trees."
"The enjoyment of one's tools is an essential ingredient of successful work."
"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."
"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."
"ze•bra (n.) — a surprising, often exotic, medical diagnosis when a more commonplace explanation is more likely."
"Excusing bad programming is a shooting offence, no matter what the circumstances."
"The 2 hardest things you'll have to do when running a company are recruiting and talking people out of leaving."
"Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself."
"A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze."
"Life may be miraculous in its unlikelihood in the universe, but it would be a fallacy to suggest that its rareness makes it inextinguishable."
"In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to their level of incompetence."
"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"
"Nothing ever gets built on schedule or within budget."
"Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window."
"Be nice to people on your way up because you'll meet them on your way down."
"They were building a Ferrari for every launch, when it was possible that a Honda Accord might do the trick."
"I can't shake the feeling that all these conspiracy theorists are in on it."
"The most damaging phrase in the language is: 'It's always been done that way.'"
"No, you can’t force other people to change. You can, however, change just about everything else. And usually, that’s enough."
"Au•to•di•dac•ti•cis•m (n.) — The art of self-education without the guidance of masters or institutions."
"In the long-term, the universe rewards resilience over rigidity."
"The first rule of Virtual Reality is to never shut up about Virtual Reality."
— Unknown
"I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned."
"Don't become a well rounded person. Well rounded people are smooth and dull. Become a thoroughly spiky person."
"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."
"Running a startup is like being punched in the face repeatedly, but working for a large company is like being waterboarded."
"People hasten to judge in order not to be judged themselves."
"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."
"Linux is only free if your time has no value."
"Temp(°C) = 5 + N(chirps per 8s). The relationship between air temperature and the rate at which crickets chirp."
"People don't change. They just slowly reveal who they really are."
— Anonymous
"Everything is hard before it is easy."
"If you consider yourself a credible person, when a lie reaches you, that’s where the fallacy should end."
"Critical thinking is an active and ongoing process. It requires that we all think like Bayesians, updating our knowledge as new information comes in."
"No amount of anxiety makes any difference to anything that is going to happen."
"Leaps of innovation require a bravery that borders on absurdity."
"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."
"An algorithm must be seen to be believed."
"I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world."
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."
"Why try to pursue what is completed?"
"Conspiracy theories are the refuge of the disempowered."
"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."
"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"
"In the absence of clearly-defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing daily trivia until ultimately we become enslaved by it."
"Very often the opinion of the clients must be disregarded in their own interest."
"I think you should always be seeking negative feedback."
"It's a fallacy to believe that age in itself brings wisdom, but one thing it infallibly brings is experience."
"Chase the vision, not the money, the money will end up following you."
"Leadership is nature's way of removing morons from the productive flow."
— Dogbert
"Give them the vision of Oz, show them the direction, convince them you can create the yellow brick road; the rest is civil engineering."
"Divide and rule, a sound motto. Unite and lead, a better one."
"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."
"I am in a very peculiar business: I travel all over the world telling people what they should already know."
"Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one."
"When we can't think for ourselves, we can always quote."
"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."
"Whatever hits the fan will not be evenly distributed."
"I don’t think an economic slump will hurt good ideas."
"One's ability to perform a normally automatic or unconscious activity is impaired when disrupted by becoming conscious of it or reflecting on it."
"Nothing in this world is harder than speaking the truth, nothing easier than flattery."
"The cost of developing a new drug roughly doubles every nine years."
"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."
"The suddenness of the leap from hardware to software cannot help but produce a period of anarchy and collapse, especially in the developed countries."
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."
"We should attempt to bring nature, houses, and human beings together in a higher unity."
"A design isn't finished until someone is using it."
"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."
"If one challenges a statement and another cannot prove it, it does not necessarily follow that the statement is false."
"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."
"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."
"You get paid in direct proportion to the difficulty of problems you solve."
"Avoid making irrevocable decisions while tired or hungry."
"We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?"
"You shouldn't do things differently just because they're different. They need to be... better."
"Creating fake facts does require a measure of haphazard research, insofar as they need to not just be possible, but also interesting."
"The bulk of discussion on programming language design centers on syntax, as opposed to semantics."
"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."
"You can easily judge the character of a person by how they treat those who can do nothing for him."
"Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness."
"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."
"Paths are made by walking"
"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. "
"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. "
"One essential object is to choose that arrangement which shall tend to reduce to a minimum the time necessary for completing the calculation."
"Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster."
"If you’re not a risk taker, you should get the hell out of business."
— Ray Kroc
"pro•noi•a (n.) — the suspicion that the Universe is conspiring on your behalf. (antonym: paranoia)"
"The most innovative designers consciously reject the standard option box and cultivate an appetite for thinking wrong."
"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"
"A stopped clock is correct twice a day, but a sundial can be used to stab someone, even at nighttime."
"Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable."
"Take responsibility for making your own life beautiful."
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit."
"The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning."
"Beauty arises out of human inspiration."
"It's not so much staying alive, it's staying human that's important. What counts is that we don't betray each other."
"They who know, do not speak. They who speak, do not know."
— Lao Tzu
"Engineering or technology is the making of things that did not previously exist, whereas science is the discovering of things that have long existed."
"Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves."
"Any wire cut to length will be too short."
"If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading."
— Lao Tzu
"When smashing monuments, save the pedestals. They always come in handy."
"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."
"A shatterproof object will always fall on the only surface hard enough to crack or break it."
— Murphy's Law of Selective Gravitation
"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."
"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."
"Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present."
"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."
"It's a truism in technological development that no silver lining comes without its cloud."
"Technology... is a queer thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other."
"Until you do what you believe in, you don't know whether you believe it or not."
"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."
"The first step is to establish that something is possible; then probability will occur."
"Everything is designed. Few things are designed well."
"Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced."
"Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution."
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought."
"Always look for the fool in the deal. If you don’t find one, it’s you."
"America is the spirit of human exploration distilled."
"Data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not understanding, understanding is not wisdom."
"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."
"Work on that which creates the world you want to live in"
"Somehow even a popular fallacy has an aspect of truth when it suits one's own case."
"The Sun does not realise how wonderful it is until after a room is made."
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