In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

— Douglas Adams

Whenever something is automated, you lose some control over it. Sometimes that loss of control improves your life because exerting control is work, and sometimes it worsens your life because it reduces your autonomy.

— Robin Berjon

It is simply unavoidable — inevitable — that the ideology, views and political agenda of a billionaire funder will end up contaminating and dominating any project for which they are the exclusive or primary funder… No matter how benevolent and well-intentioned they may be, the power and control they will inevitably wield, even if they try not to, will be limitless.

— Glenn Greenwald

Early on, my behavior led to a set of rules much more strict than my parents ever imposed. It was miserable. But over time, it gets better. Much better. You start to impose your own rules, and you start to find a balance between your desires and the needs of others.

— Brian Koberlein

If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.

— Benjamin Franklin

Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive. Because what the world needs is People who have come alive.

— Howard Thurman

You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.

— Steve Jobs

A corporate executive … has direct responsibility to conduct business in accordance with[shareholder] desires …[i.e.] to make as much money as possible while conforming to their basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom.

— Milton Friedman

When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion.

— Dale Carnegie

Life is divided into three periods, past, present and future. Of these, the present is short, the future is doubtful, the past is certain.

— Seneca the younger

There are two possible outcomes: if the result confirms the hypothesis, then you’ve made a measurement. If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you’ve made a discovery

— Enrico Fermi

Most great scientists know many important problems. They have something between 10 and 20 important problems for which they are looking for an attack. And when they see a new idea come up, one hears them say "Well that bears on this problem." They drop all the other things and get after it... Now of course lots of times it doesn't work out, but you don't have to hit many of them to do some great science. It's kind of easy. One of the chief tricks is to live a long time!

— Richard Hamming

Our character is basically a composite of our habits. Because they are consistent, often unconcious patterns, they constantly, daily, express our character.

— Stephen Covey

After all, to any rational mind, the greater part of the history of ideas is a history of freaks.

— E. P. Thompson

I have never done anything 'useful'. No discovery of mine has made, or is likely to make, directly or indirectly, for good or ill, the least difference to the amenity of the world. I have helped to train other mathematicians, but mathematicians of the same kind as myself, and their work has been, so far at any rate as I have helped them to it, as useless as my own. Judged by all practical standards, the value of my mathematical life is nil; and outside mathematics it is trivial anyhow.

— G. H. Hardy

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds.

— Teddy Roosevelt

The part of life we really live is small. For all the rest of existence is not life, but merely time.

— Seneca the younger

The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.

— Ernest Hemingway

I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance

— Socrates

Learning to play a video game is part of the game. It is a significant part of the pleasure of the game. If a game is any good, you will never stop learning how to play it.

— Raph Koster

Systems should be build to do useful things for real people

— Prof. Roger Needham

Because hypertext is potentially unconstrained you are a little daunted. Do not be. You can write a document as simply as you like. In many ways, the simpler the better.

— Tim Berners-Lee

Software engineering is what happens to programming when you add time and other programmers.

— Russ Cox

Third place is a term used to open our minds to the communities and spaces where we feel a lightness for life and where our voices matter.

— Lia Schifitto

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

— C.S. Lewis

The highest type of ruler is one of whose existence the people are barely aware…. The Sage is self-effacing and scanty of words. When his task is accomplished and things have been completed, all the people say, 'We ourselves have achieved it!

— Lao-Tzu

It is very singular how little men seem to realize that they are not caught in the grip of a mechanism from which there is no escape, but that the treadmill is one upon which they remain merely because they have not noticed that it fails to take them up to a higher level.

— Bertrand Russell

All models are wrong, but some are useful.

— George E. P. Box

The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together: our virtues would be proud, if our faults whippt them not: and our crimes would despair, if they were not cherisht by our virtues.

— William Shakespeare

The beginning of wisdom is the ability to call things by their right names.

— Confucius