My Favorite Quotes

If a thing be ordained to another as to its end, its last end cannot consist in the preservation of its being. Hence a captain does not intend as a last end, the preservation of the ship entrusted to him, since a ship is ordained to something else as its end, viz. to navigation.(Often quoted as: If the highest aim of a captain was the preserve his ship, he would keep it in port forever.)

• St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica (1265–1274)

[…] the source of everything respectable in man either as an intellectual or as a moral being, namely, that his errors are corrigible. He is capable of rectifying his mistakes, by discussion and experience. Not by experience alone. There must be discussion, to show how experience is to be interpreted.

• John Stuart Mills, On Liberty, 1859

When the facts change, I change my mind.

• John Maynard Keynes

Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.

• Mel Conway, How Do Committees Invent?, 1968

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.

• James Baldwin

In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.

• Sometimes attributed to Albert Einstein, but more likely to be Benjamin Brewster

Only mediocre people are always at their best.

• Somerset Maugham

Knuth has shown us here how to program intelligibly, but not wisely. I buy the discipline. I do not buy the result. He has fashioned a sort of industrial-strength Fabergé egg—intricate, wonderfully worked, refined beyond all ordinary desires, a museum piece from the start.

• McIlroy writing about an overwrought solution Donald Knuth implemented.

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

• Henry David Thoreau

Everyone can be taught to sculpt: Michelangelo would have had to be taught how not to. So it is with the great programmers

• Alan Perlis

Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.

• Donald Knuth

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

• Arthur C. Clarke

I apologize for such a long letter - I didn’t have time to write a short one.

• Mark Twain

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

• Antoine de Saint-Exupéry