"Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo."
    - H. G. Wells (1866-1946)

"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever."
    - Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821)

"Victory goes to the player who makes the next-to-last mistake."
    - Chessmaster Savielly Grigorievitch Tartakower (1887-1956)

"Don't be so humble - you are not that great."
    - Golda Meir (1898-1978) to a visiting diplomat

"His ignorance is encyclopedic"
    - Abba Eban (1915-2002)

"If a man does his best, what else is there?"
    - General George S. Patton (1885-1945)

"I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better."
    - A. J. Liebling (1904-1963)

"People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought which they avoid."
    - Soren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813-1855)

"Give me chastity and continence, but not yet."
    - Saint Augustine (354-430)

"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted."
    - Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
    - Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

"A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on."
    - Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

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

"The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work."
    - Emile Zola (1840-1902)

"This book fills a much-needed gap."
    - Moses Hadas (1900-1966) in a review

"The full use of your powers along lines of excellence."
    - definition of "happiness" by John F. Kennedy (1917-1963)

"I'm living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be living apart."
    - e e cummings (1894-1962)

"Give me a museum and I'll fill it."
    - Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)

"Assassins!"
    - Arturo Toscanini (1867-1957) to his orchestra

"I'll moider da bum."
    - Heavyweight boxer Tony Galento, when asked what he thought of William Shakespeare

"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But in practice, there is."
    - Yogi Berra

"I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have."
    - Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

"Each problem that I solved became a rule which served afterwards to solve other problems."
    - Rene Descartes (1596-1650), "Discours de la Methode"

"In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."
    - Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968)

"Whether you think that you can, or that you can't, you are usually right."
    - Henry Ford (1863-1947)

"Do, or do not. There is no 'try'."
    - Yoda ('The Empire Strikes Back')

"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it."
    - Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

"Don't stay in bed, unless you can make money in bed."
    - George Burns (1896-1996)

"I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves."
    - Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)

"The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense."
    - Edsgar Dijkstra (1930-2002)

"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

"A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems."
    - Paul Erdos (1913-1996)

"Problems worthy of attack prove their worth by fighting back."
    - Paul Erdos (1913-1996)

"Try to learn something about everything and everything about something."
    - Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895)

"Dancing is silent poetry."
    - Simonides (556-468bc)

"The only difference between me and a madman is that I'm not mad."
    - Salvador Dali (1904-1989)

"If you can't get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you'd best teach it to dance."
    - George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

"But at my back I always hear Time's winged chariot hurrying near."
    - Andrew Marvell (1621-1678)

"Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws."
    - Plato (427-347 B.C.)

"The power of accurate observation is frequently called cynicism by those who don't have it."
    - George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

"Whenever I climb I am followed by a dog called 'Ego'."
    - Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

"Everybody pities the weak; jealousy you have to earn."
    - Arnold Schwarzenegger (1947-)

"Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain."
    - Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805)

"We have art to save ourselves from the truth."
    - Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

"Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake."
    - Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821)

"I think 'Hail to the Chief' has a nice ring to it."
    - John F. Kennedy (1917-1963) when asked what is his favorite song

"Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe."
    - H. G. Wells (1866-1946)

"Talent does what it can; genius does what it must."
    - Edward George Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873)

"The difference between 'involvement' and 'commitment' is like an eggs-and-ham breakfast: the chicken was 'involved' - the pig was 'committed'."
    - unknown

"Women might be able to fake orgasms. But men can fake a whole relationship."
    - Sharon Stone

"If you are going through hell, keep going."
    - Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

"He who has a 'why' to live, can bear with almost any 'how'."
    - Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

"Many wealthy people are little more than janitors of their possessions."
    - Frank Lloyd Wright (1868-1959)

"I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's start with typewriters."
    - Frank Lloyd Wright (1868-1959)

"Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go."
    - Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh."
    - Voltaire (1694-1778)

"He is one of those people who would be enormously improved by death."
    - H. H. Munro (Saki) (1870-1916)

"I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter."
    - Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

"I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them."
    - Ian L. Fleming (1908-1964)

"If you can count your money, you don't have a billion dollars."
    - J. Paul Getty (1892-1976)

"Facts are the enemy of truth."
    - Don Quixote - "Man of La Mancha"

"When you do the common things in life in an uncommon way, you will command the attention of the world."
    - George Washington Carver (1864-1943)

"How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself."
    - Anais Nin (1903-1977)

"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."
    - Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931)

"I begin by taking. I shall find scholars later to demonstrate my perfect right."
    - Frederick (II) the Great

"Maybe this world is another planet's Hell."
    - Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)

"Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact."
    - George Eliot (1819-1880)

"Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth."
    - Sherlock Holmes (by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1859-1930)

"Black holes are where God divided by zero."
    - Steven Wright

"I've had a wonderful time, but this wasn't it."
    - Groucho Marx (1895-1977)

"It's kind of fun to do the impossible."
    - Walt Disney (1901-1966)

"We didn't lose the game; we just ran out of time."
    - Vince Lombardi

"The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears this is true."
    - James Branch Cabell

"A friendship founded on business is better than a business founded on friendship."
    - John D. Rockefeller (1874-1960)

"All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusion is called a philosopher."
    - Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)

"You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it."
    - Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936)

"An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered; an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered."
    - Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936)

"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth."
    - Umberto Eco

"Be nice to people on your way up because you meet them on your way down."
    - Jimmy Durante

"The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good."
    - Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)

"A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both."
    - Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969), Inaugural Address, January 20, 1953

"The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them."
    - Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

"Basically, I no longer work for anything but the sensation I have while working."
    - Albert Giacometti (sculptor)

"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 (1788-1860)

"Many a man's reputation would not know his character if they met on the street."
    - Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915)

"There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life."
    - Frank Zappa

"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
    - Antoine de Saint Exupery

"Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome."
    - Isaac Asimov

"If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe."
    - Carl Sagan

"It is much more comfortable to be mad and know it, than to be sane and have one's doubts."
    - G. B. Burgin

"Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action."
    - Auric Goldfinger, in "Goldfinger" by Ian L. Fleming (1908-1964)

"To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance"
    - Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

"Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens."
    - Jimi Hendrix

"A clever man commits no minor blunders."
    - Goethe (1749-1832)

"Argue for your limitations, and sure enough they're yours."
    - Richard Bach

"A witty saying proves nothing."
    - Voltaire (1694-1778)

"Sleep is an excellent way of listening to an opera."
    - James Stephens (1882-1950)

"The nice thing about being a celebrity is that if you bore people they think it's their fault."
    - Henry Kissinger (1923-)

"Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance."
    - Will Durant

"I have often regretted my speech, never my silence."
    - Xenocrates (396-314 B.C.)

"It was the experience of mystery -- even if mixed with fear -- that engendered religion."
    - Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

"If everything seems under control, you're just not going fast enough."
    - Mario Andretti

"I do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment to be called an agnostic. I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure -- that is all that agnosticism means."
    - Clarence Darrow, Scopes trial, 1925.

"Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal."
    - Henry Ford (1863-1947)

"I'll sleep when I'm dead."
    - Warren Zevon (1947-2003)

"There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread."
    - Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)

"When you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you."
    - Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

"The instinct of nearly all societies is to lock up anybody who is truly free. First, society begins by trying to beat you up. If this fails, they try to poison you. If this fails too, they finish by loading honors on your head."
    - Jean Cocteau (1889-1963)

"Everyone is a genius at least once a year; a real genius has his original ideas closer together."
    - Georg Lichtenberg (1742-1799)

"Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it"
    - Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

"While we are postponing, life speeds by."
    - Seneca (3BC - 65AD)

"Where are we going, and why am I in this handbasket?"
    - Bumper Sticker

"God, please save me from your followers!"
    - Bumper Sticker

"Fill what's empty, empty what's full, and scratch where it itches."
    - the Duchess of Windsor, when asked what is the secret of a long and happy life

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
    - Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)

"Luck is the residue of design."
    - Branch Rickey - former owner of the Brooklyn Dodger Baseball Team

"Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die."
    - Mel Brooks

"Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so."
    - Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)

"Wit is educated insolence."
    - Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)

"My advice to you is get married: if you find a good wife you'll be happy; if not, you'll become a philosopher."
    - Socrates (470-399 B.C.)

"Egotist: a person more interested in himself than in me."
    - Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)

"A narcissist is someone better looking than you are."
    - Gore Vidal

"Wise men make proverbs, but fools repeat them."
    - Samuel Palmer (1805-80)

"It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity."
    - Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

"The secret of success is to know something nobody else knows."
    - Aristotle Onassis (1906-1975)

"Sometimes when reading Goethe I have the paralyzing suspicion that he is trying to be funny."
    - Guy Davenport

"When you have to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite."
    - Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

"Any man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has not heart; and any man who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has no brains."
    - Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

"The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth."
    - Niels Bohr (1885-1962)

"We all agree that your theory is crazy, but is it crazy enough?"
    - Niels Bohr (1885-1962)

"When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong."
    - Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983)

"In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite."
    - Paul Dirac (1902-1984)

"I would have made a good Pope."
    - Richard M. Nixon (1913-1994)

"In any contest between power and patience, bet on patience."
    - W.B. Prescott

"Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin."
    - John von Neumann (1903-1957)

"The mistakes are all waiting to be made."
    - chessmaster Savielly Grigorievitch Tartakower (1887-1956) on the game's opening position

"It is unbecoming for young men to utter maxims."
    - Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)

"Grove giveth and Gates taketh away."
    - Bob Metcalfe (inventor of Ethernet) on the trend of hardware speedups not being able to keep up with software demands

"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."
    - Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

"One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important."
    - Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)

"A little inaccuracy sometimes saves a ton of explanation."
    - H. H. Munro (Saki) (1870-1916)

"There are two ways of constructing a software design; one way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult."
    - C. A. R. Hoare

"Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler."
    - Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

"What do you take me for, an idiot?"
    - General Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970), when a journalist asked him if he was happy

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

"Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do."
    - Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)

"A doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines."
    - Frank Lloyd Wright (1868-1959)

"It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid."
    - George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

"If you haven't got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me."
    - Alice Roosevelt Longworth (1884-1980)

"A man can't be too careful in the choice of his enemies."
    - Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

"Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names."
    - John F. Kennedy (1917-1963)

"Logic is in the eye of the logician."
    - Gloria Steinem

"No one can earn a million dollars honestly."
    - William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925)

"Everything has been figured out, except how to live."
    - Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)

"Well-timed silence hath more eloquence than speech."
    - Martin Fraquhar Tupper

"Thank you for sending me a copy of your book - I'll waste no time reading it."
    - Moses Hadas (1900-1966)

"From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it."
    - Groucho Marx (1895-1977)

"It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating."
    - Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

"When ideas fail, words come in very handy."
    - Goethe (1749-1832)

"In the end, everything is a gag."
    - Charlie Chaplin (1889-1977)

"The nice thing about egotists is that they don't talk about other people."
    - Lucille S. Harper

"You got to be careful if you don't know where you're going, because you might not get there."
    - Yogi Berra

"I love Mickey Mouse more than any woman I have ever known."
    - Walt Disney (1901-1966)

"He who hesitates is a damned fool."
    - Mae West (1892-1980)

"Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theater."
    - Gail Godwin

"University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small."
    - Henry Kissinger (1923-)

"The graveyards are full of indispensable men."
    - Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970)

"You can pretend to be serious; you can't pretend to be witty."
    - Sacha Guitry (1885-1957)

"Behind every great fortune there is a crime."
    - Honore de Balzac (1799-1850)

"If women didn't exist, all the money in the world would have no meaning."
    - Aristotle Onassis (1906-1975)

"I am not young enough to know everything."
    - Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

"Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same."
    - Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

"The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his."
    - General George Patton (1885-1945)

"Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis."
    - Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

"There is no sincerer love than the love of food."
    - George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

"I don't even butter my bread; I consider that cooking."
    - Katherine Cebrian

"I have an existential map; it has 'you are here' written all over it."
    - Steven Wright

"Mr. Wagner has beautiful moments but bad quarters of an hour."
    - Gioacchino Rossini (1792-1868)

"Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure."
    - Oliver Herford (1863-1935)

"I have read your book and much like it."
    - Moses Hadas (1900-1966)

"The covers of this book are too far apart."
    - Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)

"Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them."
    - Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964)

"Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end."
    - Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)

"Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung."
    - Voltaire (1694-1778)

"When choosing between two evils, I always like to try the one I've never tried before."
    - Mae West (1892-1980)

"I don't know anything about music. In my line you don't have to."
    - Elvis Presley (1935-1977)

"No Sane man will dance."
    - Cicero (106-43 B.C.)

"Hell is a half-filled auditorium."
    - Robert Frost (1874-1963)

"Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you."
    - Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961)

"Vote early and vote often."
    - Al Capone (1899-1947)

"If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?"
    - Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

"Few things are harder to put up with than a good example."
    - Mark Twain (1835-1910)

"Hell is other people."
    - Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)

"I am become death, shatterer of worlds."
    - Robert J. Oppenheimer (1904-1967) (citing from the Bhagavad Gita, after witnessing the world's first nuclear explosion)

"Happiness is good health and a bad memory."
    - Ingrid Bergman (1917-1982)

"Friends may come and go, but enemies accumulate."
    - Thomas Jones

"You can get more with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone."
    - Al Capone (1899-1947)

"The gods too are fond of a joke."
    - Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)

"Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes."
    - Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

"The difference between pornography and erotica is lighting."
    - Gloria Leonard

"It is time I stepped aside for a less experienced and less able man."
    - Professor Scott Elledge on his retirement from Cornell

"Every day I get up and look through the Forbes list of the richest people in America. If I'm not there, I go to work."
    - Robert Orben

"The cynics are right nine times out of ten."
    - Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956)

"There are some experiences in life which should not be demanded twice from any man, and one of them is listening to the Brahms Requiem."
    - George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

"And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him."
    - Revelations 6:8

    "Attention to health is life's greatest hindrance."
        - Plato (427-347 B.C.)

    "Plato was a bore."
        - Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

    "Nietzsche was stupid and abnormal."
        - Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)

    "I'm not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy."
        - Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)

    "Hemingway was a jerk."
        - Harold Robbins 

"Men are not disturbed by things, but the view they take of things."
    - Epictetus (55-135 A.D.)

"What about things like bullets?"
    - Herb Kimmel, Behavioralist, Professor of Psychology, upon hearing the above quote (1981)

    "How can I lose to such an idiot?"
        - A shout from chessmaster Aaron Nimzovich (1886-1935)

    "Not only is there no God, but try finding a plumber on Sunday."
        - Woody Allen (1935-)

    "I don't feel good."
        - The last words of Luther Burbank (1849-1926)

    "Nothing is wrong with California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn't cure."
        - Ross MacDonald (1915-1983)

    "Men have become the tools of their tools."
        - Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

    "I have never let my schooling interfere with my education."
        - Mark Twain (1835-1910)

    "It is now possible for a flight attendant to get a pilot pregnant."
        - Richard J. Ferris, president of United Airlines

    "I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television."
        - Gore Vidal

    "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying."
        - Woody Allen (1935-)

    "Men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all the other alternatives."
        - Abba Eban (1915-2002)

    "A consensus means that everyone agrees to say collectively what no one believes individually."
        - Abba Eban (1915-2002)

    "To sit alone with my conscience will be judgment enough for me."
        - Charles William Stubbs

    "Sanity is a madness put to good uses."
        - George Santayana (1863-1952)

    "Imitation is the sincerest form of television."
        - Fred Allen (1894-1956)

    "Always do right- this will gratify some and astonish the rest."
        - Mark Twain (1835-1910)

    "In America, anybody can be president. That's one of the risks you take."
        - Adlai Stevenson (1900-1965)

    "Copy from one, it's plagiarism; copy from two, it's research."
        - Wilson Mizner (1876-1933)

    "Why don't you write books people can read?"
        - Nora Joyce to her husband James (1882-1941)

    "Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers."
        - T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)

    "Criticism is prejudice made plausible."
        - Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956)

    "It is better to be quotable than to be honest."
        - Tom Stoppard

    "Being on the tightrope is living; everything else is waiting."
        - Karl Wallenda

    "Opportunities multiply as they are seized."
        - Sun Tzu

    "A scholar who cherishes the love of comfort is not fit to be deemed a scholar."
        - Lao-Tzu (570?-490? BC)

    " The best way to predict the future is to invent it."
        - Alan Kay

    "Never mistake motion for action."
        - Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)

    "I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours."
        - Sir Stephen Henry Roberts (1901-1971)

    "Hell is paved with good samaritans."
        - William M. Holden

    "The longer I live the more I see that I am never wrong about anything, and that all the pains that I have so humbly taken to verify my notions have only wasted my time."
        - George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

    "Silence is argument carried out by other means."
        - Ernesto"Che"Guevara (1928-1967)

    "Well done is better than well said."
        - Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

    "The average person thinks he isn't."
        - Father Larry Lorenzoni

    "Heav'n hath no rage like love to hatred turn'd, Nor Hell a fury, like a woman scorn'd."
        - William Congreve (1670-1729)

    "A husband is what is left of the lover after the nerve has been extracted."
        - Helen Rowland (1876-1950)

    "Learning is what most adults will do for a living in the 21st century."
        - Lewis Perelman

    "Dogma is the sacrifice of wisdom to consistency."
        - Lewis Perelman

    "Sometimes it is not enough to our best; we must do what is required."
        - Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

    "The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready."
        - Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

    "There is a country in Europe where multiple-choice tests are illegal."
        - Sigfried Hulzer

    "Ask her to wait a moment - I am almost done."
        - Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855), while working, when informed that his wife is dying

    "A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty."
        - Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

    "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
        - Thomas Watson (1874-1956), Chairman of IBM, 1943

    "I think it would be a good idea."
        - Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948), when asked what he thought of Western civilization

    "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."
        - Edmund Burke (1729-1797)

    "I'm not a member of any organized political party, I'm a Democrat!"
        - Will Rogers (1879-1935)

    "If stupidity got us into this mess, then why can't it get us out?" "
        - Will Rogers (1879-1935)

    "The backbone of surprise is fusing speed with secrecy."
        - Von Clausewitz (1780-1831)

    "Democracy does not guarantee equality of conditions - it only guarantees equality of opportunity."
        - Irving Kristol

    "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."
        - Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977

    "The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better than a 'C', the idea must be feasible."
        - A Yale University management professor in response to student Fred Smith's paper proposing reliable overnight delivery service (Smith went on to found Federal Express Corp.)

    "Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?"
        - H. M. Warner (1881-1958), founder of Warner Brothers, in 1927

    "We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out."
        - Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles, 1962

    "Everything that can be invented has been invented."
        - Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899

    "Denial ain't just a river in Egypt."
        - Mark Twain (1835-1910)

    "A pint of sweat saves a gallon of blood."
        - General George S. Patton (1885-1945)

    "After I'm dead I'd rather have people ask why I have no monument than why I have one."
        - Cato the Elder (234-149 BC, AKA Marcus Porcius Cato)

    "He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I know."
        - Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

    "Don't let it end like this. Tell them I said something."
        - last words of Pancho Villa (1877-1923)

    "The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins."
        - Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841-1935)

    "The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense."
        - Tom Clancy

    "It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog."
        - Mark Twain (1835-1910)

    "It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both."
        - Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527), "The Prince"

    "Whatever is begun in anger ends in shame."
        - Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

    "The President has kept all of the promises he intended to keep."
        - Clinton aide George Stephanopolous speaking on Larry King Live

    "We're going to turn this team around 360 degrees."
        - Jason Kidd, upon his drafting to the Dallas Mavericks

    "Half this game is ninety percent mental."
        - Yogi Berra

    "There is only one nature - the division into science and engineering is a human imposition, not a natural one. Indeed, the division is a human failure; it reflects our limited capacity to comprehend the whole."
        - Bill Wulf

    "There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher."
        - Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964)

    "He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire."
        - Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

    "I criticize by creation - not by finding fault."
        - Cicero (106-43 B.C.)

    "Love is friendship set on fire."
        - Jeremy Taylor

    "God gave men both a penis and a brain, but unfortunately not enough blood supply to run both at the same time."
        - Robin Williams, commenting on the Clinton/Lewinsky affair

    "My occupation now, I suppose, is jail inmate."
        - Unibomber Theodore Kaczynski, when asked in court what his current profession was

    "Woman was God's second mistake."
        - Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

    "This isn't right, this isn't even wrong."
        - Wolfgang Pauli (1900-1958), upon reading a young physicist's paper

    "For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing."
        - Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956)

    "Pray, v.: To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy."
        - Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)

    "Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats."
        - Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956)

    "Now, now my good man, this is no time for making enemies."
        - Voltaire (1694-1778) on his deathbed in response to a priest asking that he renounce Satan.

    "Fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth of distance run."
        - Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)

    "He would make a lovely corpse."
        - Charles Dickens (1812-1870)

    "I've just learned about his illness. Let's hope it's nothing trivial."
        - Irvin S. Cobb

    "I worship the quicksand he walks in."
        - Art Buchwald

    "Wagner's music is better than it sounds."
        - Mark Twain (1835-1910)

    "A poem is never finished, only abandoned."
        - Paul Valery (1871-1945)

    "We are not retreating - we are advancing in another Direction."
        - General Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964)

    "If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use? Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?"
        - Seymour Cray (1925-1996), father of supercomputing

    "#3 pencils and quadrille pads."
        - Seymoure Cray (1925-1996) when asked what CAD tools he used to design the Cray I supercomputer; he also recommended using the back side of the pages so that the grid lines were not so dominant.

    "Interesting - I use a Mac to help me design the next Cray."
        - Seymoure Cray (1925-1996) when he was told that Apple Inc. had recently bought a Cray supercomputer to help them design the next Mac.

    "Your Highness, I have no need of this hypothesis."
        - Pierre Laplace (1749-1827), to Napoleon on why his works on celestial mechanics make no mention of God.

    "I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need."
        - Francois-Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), when asked how he managed to make his remarkable statues

    "The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them."
        - Mark Twain (1835-1910)

    "The truth is more important than the facts."
        - Frank Lloyd Wright (1868-1959)

    "Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing."
        - Wernher Von Braun (1912-1977)

    "There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it."
        - Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

    "There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle."
        - Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

If you lie to the compiler, it will get its revenge.

    Henry Spencer

Trying to outsmart a compiler defeats much of the purpose of using one.

    Kernighan & Plauger, The Elements of Programming Style.

It's hard enough to find an error in your code when you're looking for it; it's even harder when you've assumed your code is error-free.

    Steve McConnell Code Complete

If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilisation.

    Gerald Weinberg

Programming can be fun, so can cryptography; however they should not be combined.

    Kreitzberg and Shneiderman

Testing by itself does not improve software quality. Test results are an indicator of quality, but in and of themselves, they don't improve it. Trying to improve software quality by increasing the amount of testing is like trying to lose weight by weighing yourself more often. What you eat before you step onto the scale determines how much you will weigh, and the software development techniques you use determine how many errors testing will find. If you want to lose weight, don't buy a new scale; change your diet. If you want to improve your software, don't test more; develop better.

    Steve McConnell Code Complete

Once a new technology starts rolling, if you're not part of the steamroller, you're part of the road.

    Stewart Brand

The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.

    Flannery O'Connor

Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs. 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

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

    Donald Knuth

Computers are good at following instructions, but not at reading your mind.

    Donald Knuth

... the designer of a new system must not only be the implementor and the first large-scale user; the designer should also write the first user manual. ... If I had not participated fully in all these activities, literally hundreds of improvements would never have been made, because I would never have thought of them or perceived why they were important.

    Donald Knuth

Any inaccuracies in this index may be explained by the fact that it has been sorted with the help of a computer.

    Donald Knuth Sorting and Searching

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 process of preparing programs for a digital computer is especially attractive, not only because it can be economically and scientifically rewarding, but also because it can be an aesthetic experience much like composing poetry or music.

    Donald Knuth

You're bound to be unhappy if you optimize everything.

    Donald Knuth

These machines have no common sense; they have not yet learned to "think," and they do exactly as they are told, no more and no less. This fact is the hardest concept to grasp when one first tries to use a computer.

    Donald Knuth

We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.

    Donald Knuth

Good code is its own best documentation. As you're about to add a comment, ask yourself, 'How can I improve the code so that this comment isn't needed?' Improve the code and then document it to make it even clearer.

    Steve McConnell Code Complete

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.

    Bertrand Russell

A charlatan makes obscure what is clear; a thinker makes clear what is obscure.

    Hugh Kingsmill

Unformed people delight in the gaudy and in novelty. Cooked people delight in the ordinary.

    Erik Naggum

An organisation that treats its programmers as morons will soon have programmers that are willing and able to act like morons only.

    Bjarne Stroustrup

Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.

    Bill Gates

The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time.

    Tom Cargill

Before software can be reusable it first has to be usable.

    Ralph Johnson

Programmers are in a race with the Universe to create bigger and better idiot-proof programs, while the Universe is trying to create bigger and better idiots. So far the Universe is winning.

    Rich Cook

Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.

    Albert Einstein

Just because the standard provides a cliff in front of you, you are not necessarily required to jump off it.

    Norman Diamond

But in our enthusiasm, we could not resist a radical overhaul of the system, in which all of its major weaknesses have been exposed, analyzed, and replaced with new weaknesses.

    Bruce Leverett, Register Allocation in Optimizing Compilers

The best performance improvement is the transition from the nonworking state to the working state

    John Ousterhout

As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs.

    Maurice Wilkes discovers debugging, 1949

Real computer scientists despise the idea of actual hardware. Hardware has limitations, software doesn't. It's a real shame that Turing machines are so poor at I/O.

    Anon

There are only two industries that refer to their customers as "users".

    Edward Tufte

Debugging a Direct3D application can be challenging.

    Microsoft's Direct3D Immediate Mode overview.

If you want a girlfriend, avoid working in the computer games industry like the plague. If you work seven days a week, 15 hours a day for almost two years, with barely enough time for a pint, you have no time whatsoever for relationships. Plus computer-games makers are regarded as being about as hip and cool as abattoir workers.

    Toby Gard, creator of Lara Croft.

There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third works.

    Alan J. Perlis

To many managers, getting rid of the arrogant, undisciplined, over-paid, technology-obsessed, improperly-dressed etc. programmers would appear to be a significant added benefit.

    Bjarne Stroustrup The C++ Programming Language 3e, section 24.2.4

I did say something along the lines of "C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do, it blows your whole leg off."

    Bjarne Stroustrup

I have always wished that my computer would be as easy to use as my telephone. My wish has come true. I no longer know how to use my telephone.

    Bjarne Stroustrup

Naturally we feel that mentally ill people are not what we are looking for when we hire programmers - although there is no empirical data to support or contradict that view...... Is it appropriate to give tests for mental illness to anyone applying for any kind of job?

    Weinberg The Psychology of Computer Programming

The most important single aspect of software development is to be clear about what you are trying to build.

    Bjarne Stroustrup 

If you think your management doesn't know what it's doing or that your organisation turns out low-quality software crap that embarrasses you, then leave.

    Edward Yourdon Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer

Most of you are familiar with the virtues of a programmer. There are three, of course: laziness, impatience, and hubris.

    Larry Wall

It has been said that the great scientific disciplines are examples of giants standing on the shoulders of other giants. It has also been said that the software industry is an example of midgets standing on the toes of other midgets.

    Alan Cooper About Face

The road to wisdom?
Well its plain and simple to express:
Err and err and err again,
but less and less and less.

    Piet Hein

There are perhaps 5% of the population that simply *can't* think.
There are another 5% who *can*, and *do*.
The remaining 90% *can* think, but *don't*.

    R. A. Heinlein

Lord, give us the wisdom to utter words that are gentle and tender, for tomorrow we may have to eat them.

    Rep. Morris Udall

Do not worry about your difficulties in mathematics, I assure you that mine are greater.

    Einstein

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.

    Pablo Picasso

Theory is when you know something, but it doesn't work. Practice is when something works, but you don't know why.
Programmers combine theory and practice: Nothing works and they don't know why.

I really hate this damned machine
I wish that they would sell it.
It never does quite what I want
But only what I tell it.

    A Programmer's Lament

UNIX is simple. It just takes a genius to understand its simplicity.

    Dennis Ritchie

When someone says, "I want a programming language in which I need only say what I want done," give him a lollipop.

    Alan Perlis

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

    H L Mencken

One of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that, lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C programs.

    Robert Firth

Haste is of the devil. Slowness is of God.

    H L Mencken

If the code and the comments disagree, then both are probably wrong.

    attributed to Norm Schryer

Good programmers use their brains, but good guidelines save us having to think out every case.

    Francis Glassborow

...well over half of the time you spend working on a project (on the order of 70 percent) is spent thinking, and no tool, no matter how advanced, can think for you. Consequently, even if a tool did everything except the thinking for you -- if it wrote 100 percent of the code, wrote 100 percent of the documentation, did 100 percent of the testing, burned the CD-ROMs, put them in boxes, and mailed them to your customers -- the best you could hope for would be a 30 percent improvement in productivity. In order to do better than that, you have to change the way you think.

    Fred Brook [paraphrased] as quoted from Allen Holub's http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-07-1999/jw-07-toolbox.html

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

    Hanlon's razor

Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

And the users exclaimed with a laugh and a taunt: "It's just what we asked for but not what we want."

Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them.

    Laurence J. Peter

# The Six Phases of a Project: Enthusiasm
# Disillusionment
# Panic
# Search for the Guilty
# Punishment of the Innocent
# Praise for non-participants

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

    George Santayana

Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.

    George Santayana

For a sucessful technology, honesty must take precedence over public relations for nature cannot be fooled.

    Richard Feynman

The inside of a computer is as dumb as hell but it goes like mad!

    Richard Feynman

The act of focusing our mightiest intellectual resources on the elusive goal of goto-less programs has helped us get our minds off all those really tough and possibly unresolvable problems and issues with which today's professional programmer would otherwise have to grapple.

    John Brown

A most important, but also most elusive, aspect of any tool is its influence on the habits of those who train themselves in its use. If the tool is a programming language this influence is, whether we like it or not, an influence on our thinking habits.

    Edsger Dijkstra

To iterate is human, to recurse divine.

    L. Peter Deutsch

Increasingly, people seem to misinterpret complexity as sophistication, which is baffling---the incomprehensible should cause suspicion rather than admiration. Possibly this trend results from a mistaken belief that using a somewhat mysterious device confers an aura of power on the user.

    Niklaus Wirth

There's no sense being exact about something if you don't even know what you're talking about.

    John von Neumann

Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random numbers is, of course, in a state of sin.

    John von Neumann

There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.

    C.A.R. Hoare

... the cost of adding a feature isn't just the time it takes to code it. The cost also includes the addition of an obstacle to future expansion. ... The trick is to pick the features that don't fight each other.

    John Carmack

You can't have great software without a great team, and most software teams behave like dysfunctional families.

    Jim McCarthy

Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there.

    Will Rogers

That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.

    Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle Oath of Fealty

Trying to get into the details seems to be a religious issue -- nearly everybody is convinced that every style but their own is ugly and unreadable. Leave out the "but their own" and they're probably right...

    Jerry Coffin on indentation

When you start off by telling those who disagree with you that they are not merely in error but in sin, how much of a dialogue do you expect ?"

    Thomas Sowell

Einstein argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer.

    Fred Brooks, Jr.

Incompetents invariably make trouble for people other than themselves.

    Larry McMurtry

A notation is important for what it leaves out.

    Joseph Stoy

As we said in the preface to the first edition, C "wears well as one's experience with it grows." With a decade more experience, we still feel that way.

    Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie

A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems.

    Alfréd Rényi

Ugly programs are like ugly suspension bridges: they're much more liable to collapse than pretty ones, because the way humans (especially engineer-humans) perceive beauty is intimately related to our ability to process and understand complexity. A language that makes it hard to write elegant code makes it hard to write good code.

    Eric S. Raymond

PHP is a minor evil perpetrated and created by incompetent amateurs, whereas Perl is a great and insidious evil, perpetrated by skilled but perverted professionals.

    Jon Ribbens

Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability

    Edsger W.Dijkstra

I've finally learned what "upward compatible" means. It means we get to keep all our old mistakes.

    Dennie van Tassel

Exceptions relieve the programmer of tedious writing boilerplate code -- without removing the semantics of said code -- and they allow the programmer to arrange the code so that error handling code is more separate from the main program logic.

    Herb Sutter

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

    Upton Sinclair

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

    Jamie Zawinski

The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.

    Robert Conquest's Second Law of Politics

Power is the ability to control things, moral authority is the ability to change things

    Jim Wallis

There is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new...

    Niccolo Macchiavelli, The Prince

The open secrets of good design practice include the importance of knowing what to keep whole, what to combine, what to separate, and what to throw away.

    Kevlin Henny

Rules of Optimization:
Rule 1: Don't do it.
Rule 2 (for experts only): Don't do it yet.

    M.A. Jackson

More computing sins are committed in the name of efficiency (without necessarily achieving it) than for any other single reason - including blind stupidity.

    W.A. Wulf

The best is the enemy of the good.

    Voltaire

There's a fine line between being on the leading edge and being in the lunatic fringe.

    Frank Armstrong

The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.

    William Arthur Ward

Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.

    Fred Brooks

Plan to throw one away, you will anyhow.

    Fred Brooks

If you plan to throw one away, you will throw away two.

    Craig Zerouni

Learning is not compulsory. Neither is survival.

    W. Edwards Deming

C++ tries to guard against Murphy, not Machiavelli.

    Damian Conway

I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.

    Dwight Eisenhower

We are tied down to a language which makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style.

    Tom Stoppard

They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.

    Andy Warhol

We only acknowledge small faults in order to make it appear that we are free from great ones.

    La Rochefoucauld

Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.

    Alan Kay

We all agree on the necessity of compromise. We just can't agree on when it's necessary to compromise.

    Larry Wall

Perl is another example of filling a tiny, short-term need, and then being a real problem in the longer term.

    Alan Kay

The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his own skull; therefore he approaches the programming task in full humility, and among other things he avoids clever tricks like the plague.

    Edsger Dijkstra

It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to Basic; as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.

    Edsger Dijkstra

We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth.... For my part, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst; and to provide for it.

    Patrick Henry

A non-virtual function says, you have to do this and you must do it this way. A virtual function says you have to do this, but you don't have to do it this way. That's their fundamental difference.

    Scott Meyers

Comparing to another activity is useful if it helps you formulate questions, it's dangerous when you use it to justify answers.

    Martin Fowler

Correctness is clearly the prime quality. If a system does not do what it is supposed to do, then everything else about it matters little.

    Bertrand Meyer

An API that isn't comprehensible isn't usable.

    James Gosling

Style distinguishes excellence from accomplishment.

    James Coplien

You know you've achieved perfection in design, not when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing more to take away.

    Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Wind, Sand and Stars

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

    Hofstadter's Law

The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.

    Hans Hoffmann

Simplicity carried to the extreme becomes elegance.

    Jon Franklin

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

    Leonardo da Vinci

Moving parts in rubbing contact require lubrication to avoid excessive wear. Honorifics and formal politeness provide the lubrication where people rub together. Often the very young, the untraveled, the naive, the unsophisticated deplore these formalities as "empty," "meaningless," or "dishonest," and scorn to use them. No matter how "pure" their motives, they thereby throw sand into machinery that does not work too well at best.

    Robert A. Heinlein

It.s so easy to become mesmerized by the immediacy of a result that you don.t question its validity.

    Naomi Karten

Every program has (at least) two purposes: the one for which it was written, and another for which it wasn't.

    Alan J. Perlis

Elegance is not optional

    Richard O'Keefe

The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry.

    Henry Petroski

Technology is dominated by two types of people: Those who understand what they do not manage. Those who manage what they do not understand.

    Putt's Law

Copy and paste is a design error

    David Parnas

There is not now, nor has there ever been, nor will there ever be, any programming language in which it is the least bit difficult to write bad code.

    Flon's Law

When one is postulating correlations or causations extant in reality, one should always remember that the human brain is mainly a pattern recognition engine. And it is such a persistent pattern recognition engine that it often perceives patterns where none exist.

    Jeff Walther

Any code of your own that you haven't looked at for six or more months might as well have been written by someone else.

    Eagleson's law

If you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning.

    Catherine Aird

Alas, to wear the mantle of Galileo it is not enough that you be persecuted by an unkind establishment, you must also be right.

    Bob Park

Any fool can use a computer. Many do.

    Ted Nelson

Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.

    H. L. Mencken

You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing -- that's what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.

    Richard Feynman

Incorrect documentation is often worse than no documentation.

    Bertrand Meyer

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

    Brian W. Kernighan

If the lessons of history teach us anything it is that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.

The primary duty of an exception handler is to get the error out of the lap of the programmer and into the surprised face of the user. Provided you keep this cardinal rule in mind, you can't go far wrong.

    Verity Stob

If you want a product with certain characteristics, you must ensure that the team has those characteristics before the product's development.

    Jim and Michele McCarthy - Software for your Head

Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations. (For example, if you have four groups working on a compiler, you.ll get a 4-pass compiler)

    Conway.s Law

It's not at all important to get it right the first time. It's vitally important to get it right the last time.

    Andrew Hunt and David Thomas

There are 10 kinds of people in this world....Those who understand binary and those who don't.

The perfect project plan is possible if one first documents a list of all the unknowns.

    Bill Langley

Without stress nothing would move.

    Bill Langley

Complexity kills. It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build and test, it introduces security challenges and it causes end-user and administrator frustration.

    Ray Ozzie

Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.

    Albert Einstein

First, solve the problem. Then, write the code.

    John Johnson

Software obeys the law of gaseous expansion - it continues to grow until memory is completely filled.

    Larry Gleason

Without requirements or design programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.

    Louis Srygley