Quotes

• Attitude
• Communication & Creativity
• Design
• Funny
• Games
• Groups & Leadership
• Life
• PhD
• Politics
• Research & Science
• Taoism
• Teaching & Learning
• Technology & Culture

Attitude

• Life is a mirror: if you frown at it, it frowns back; if you smile, it returns the greeting.
  
  -Anonymous
• You laugh at me because I'm different. I laugh at you because you're all the same.
  
  -Anonymous
• Work like you don't need the money, love like you've never been hurt, and dance like no one is watching.
  
  -Anonymous
• If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.
  
  -Antoine de St. Exupery
• No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
  
  -Eleanor Roosevelt
• The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
  
  -George Bernard Shaw
• It's amazing how much you can accomplish when you don't care who gets the credit.
  
  -Gertrude Elion
• The legs feed the wolf.
  
  -Kurt Russell in Miracle
• Imperfection in beauty; madness is genius. And it's better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.
  
  -Marilyn Monroe
• Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.
  
  -Mark Twain
• There is nothing so easy but that it becomes difficult when you do it reluctantly.
  
  -Terence
• I'm a great believer in luck and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.
  
  -Thomas Jefferson
• Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.
  
  -Voltaire

Communication & Creativity

• Drama is life with the dull bits left out.
  
  -Alfred Hitchcock
• If there is any kind of magic in this world it must be in the attempt of understanding someone, sharing something. I know: it's almost impossible to succeed. But... who cares, really? The answer must be in the attempt.
  
  -Celine in Before Sunrise
• If the eye cannot see it, The hand cannot make it, If the tongs will not hold it, The hammer cannot hit it, If you cannot remember it, Forget it.
  
  -Francis Whitaker
• Rigor is not a substitute for imagination.
  
  -Gary Klein
• I don't need luck. I've got imagination.
  
  -Jim Kelley, Junk Brothers
• Don't confuse the quality of an idea with the ability to express it.
  
  -Kym Buchanan
• Chance favors only the prepared mind.
  
  -Louis Pasteur
• Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.
  
  -Peter Ustinov
• For there are only two worlds--your world, which is the real world, and other worlds, the fantasy. Worlds like this are worlds of the human imagination: their reality, or lack of reality, is not important. What is important is that they are there. These worlds provide an alternative. Provide an escape. Provide a threat. Provide a dream, and power, provide refuge, and pain. They give your world meaning. They do not exist; and thus they are all that matters.
  
  -Titania in The Books of Magic
• Freedom from judgment is the essence of creativity.
  
  -Unknown
• There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.
  
  -W. Somerset Maugham

Design

• The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
  
  -Alan Kay
• The system is the solution.
  
  -AT Systems
• All models are wrong. Some models are useful.
  
  -Deming
• The best explanation is as simple as possible, but no simpler.
  
  -Einstein
• There is scarcely anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse, and sell a little more cheaply. The person who buys on price alone is this man's lawful prey.
  
  -John Ruskin
• Tools, of course, can be the subtlest of traps.
  
  -Neil Gaiman (Sandman: The Wake, p. 141)
• They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.
  
  -Sir Francis Bacon
• Perfection is attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away.
  
  -St. Exupery
• It is a poor carpenter who blames his tools.
  
  -Unknown
• Seek simplicity... and then distrust it!
  
  -Whitehead

Funny

• Whatever women must do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult.
  
  -Charlotte Whitton
• America believes in education: the average professor earns more money in a year than a professional athlete earns in a whole week.
  
  -Evan Esar
• I wanna hang a map of the world in my house. Then I'm gonna put pins into all the locations that I've traveled to. But first, I'm gonna have to travel to the top two corners of the map so it won't fall down.
  
  -Mitch Hedberg
• We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.
  
  -Robert Wilensky
• I used to think I was indecisive, but now I'm just not sure.
  
  -Unknown
• No sense being pessimistic, it probably wouldn't work anyway.
  
  -Unknown
• The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four persons is suffering from some sort of mental illness. Think of your three best friends. If they're OK, then it's you.
  
  -Unknown

Games

• The game designer's principal goal is to create entertaining gameplay. The purpose of the interface is to make that entertainment accessible.
  
  -Bruce Shelly, Ensemble Studio
• ...[M]anaging a cyberspace world is not like managing the world inside a single-user application or even a conventional online service. Instead, it is more like governing an actual nation. Cyberspace architects will benefit from study of the principles of sociology and economics as much as from the principles of computer science.
  
  -Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer
• As a game designer you are an absolute god. One kind of god says, "O.K., now this leaf will fall a little bit here, and then this wind will blow a bit over there." The other kind of god says, "Here are the laws of physics. Go for it."
  
  -Chris Crawford
• Any system that must regulate its discourse by social pressure and convention rather than by clearly defined regulations is more than a game--both more real and more perilous.
  
  -Espen Aarseth

Groups & Leadership

• The wrong job betrays you.
  
  -Willamette Week
• People will rise or sink to your expectations.
  
  -Anonymous
• I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.
  
  -Bill Cosby
• You can build a throne with bayonets, but you can't sit on it for long.
  
  -Boris Yeltsin
• If you don't know where you are going, you're likely to end up somewhere else. (Peter's Principle states that employees within a hierarchical organization will advance to their highest level of competence, be promoted to a level at which they are incompetent, and then stay in that position.)
  
  -Lawrence J. Peter
• Some men see things as they are and say, Why? I dream of things that never were and say, Why not?
  
  -Robert Kennedy
• It takes time to persuade men to do even what is for their own good.
  
  -Thomas Jefferson
• When your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
  
  -Unknown
• If we had no faults ourselves, we would not take so much pleasure in noticing those of others.
  
  -Unknown

Life

• We have developed speed but we have shut ourselves in: machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical, our cleverness hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little: More than machinery we need humanity; More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness.
  
  -Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator
• Candy doesn't have to have a point. That's why it's candy.
  
  -Charlie in Charlie & The Chocolate Factory (2005)
• The smallest good deed is better than the grandest good intention.
  
  -Duguet
• You need an intuitive sense for answering the question that needs to be answered, not just the question that's being asked. This same intuitive sense should also tell you where to invest your energies. When you have so many balls in the air, the trick is to drop the ones that are rubber and not the ones that are glass.
  
  -George Chin
• The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the relevation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
  
  -H.P. Lovecraft
• The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.
  
  -Henry David Thoreau
• You are not truly alive until you have found something that you are willing to die for.
  
  -MLK, Jr.
• The important thing in the Olympic Games is not winning but taking part. Just as in life, the aim is not to conquer but to struggle well.
  
  -Pierre De Coubertin
• Be patient with everyone, but above all with yourself.
  
  -St. Francis de Sales
• You are not the car you drive.
  
  -Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) in Fight Club
• To the world you may be one person, but to one person you may be the world.
  
  -Unknown
• To go... from a small here, to a greater. That is to be living. But to go from the great to the small? ...that is death.
  
  -Wobbly in The Books of Magic: Reckonings

PhD

• Daniel Jackson: Why would someone with two PhD's become a teamster? Samantha Carter: I don't know. More money, I guess.
  
  -Stargate: SG1
• Dang it, Jim. I'm an astronomer, not a doctor! I mean, I am a doctor, but I'm not that kind of doctor. I have a doctorate, it's not the same thing. You can't help people with a doctorate. You just sit there and you're useless!
  
  -Doctor Doppler in Treasure Planet (2002)
• The average PhD thesis is nothing but a transference of bones from one graveyard to another.
  
  -J. Frank Dobie

Politics

• Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
  
  -Dwight Eisenhower
• The people I distrust most are those who want to improve our lives but have only one course of action.
  
  -Frank Herbert
• Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world: indeed; it's the only thing that ever has.
  
  -Margaret Mead
• There is a demand in these days for men who can make wrong appear right.
  
  -Terence
• Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have... the course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases.
  
  -Thomas Jefferson

Research & Science

• The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.
  
  -Friedrich Nietzsche
• If you had demanded that the NIH solve the problem of polio not through independent, investigator-driven discovery research but by means of a centrally directed program, the odds are very strong that you would get the very best iron lungs in the world--portable iron lungs, transistorized iron lungs--but you wouldn't get the vaccine that eradicated polio.
  
  -Samuel Broder, Director of the National Cancer Institute

Taoism

• The river tells no lies, though standing on the shore, the dishonest man still hears them.
  
  -Stargate: SG1
• The universe is vast and we are so small. There is really only one thing we can ever truly control: whether we are good or evil.
  
  -Stargate: SG1
• My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.
  
  -Albert Einstein
• We don’t see things as they are. We see them as we are.
  
  -Anais Nin
• Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.
  
  -Arthur Schopenhauer
• Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
  
  -Hebrews 11.1
• Chop your own wood, and it will warm you twice.
  
  -Henry Ford
• The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.
  
  -Joseph Conrad
• Your reason and your passion are the rudder and the sails of your seafaring soul. If either your sails or your rudder be broken, you can but toss and drift, or else be held at a standstill in mid-seas. For reason, ruling alone, is a force confining; and passion, unattended, is a flame that burns to its own destruction.
  
  -Khalil Gibran
• Moderation in all things.
  
  -Terence in Andria

Teaching & Learning

• When someone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and see nothing.
  
  -Adrienne Rich
• Smooth seas do not make skillful sailors.
  
  -African Proverb
• We think in generalities, but we live in detail.
  
  -Alfred North Whitehead
• You can't simply eliminate a behavior. You must replace it.
  
  -Allen Neuringer
• Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.
  
  -Barry LePatner
• An understanding heart is everything in a teacher, and cannot be esteemed highly enough. One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feeling. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.
  
  -Carl Jung
• Most of us prefer to walk backward into the future, a posture that may be uncomfortable but which at least allows us to keep on looking at familiar things as long as we can.
  
  -Charles Handy
• Learning is not a spectator sport.
  
  -D. Blocher
• If the human mind was simple enough to understand, we'd be too simple to understand it.
  
  -Emerson Pugh
• Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theater.
  
  -Gail Godwin
• Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.
  
  -Gandhi
• Philosophy is the history of philosophy.
  
  -Hegel
• A teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn is hammering on a cold iron.
  
  -Horace Mann
• It may well be easier to remember a list if one sings it (or dances to it). However, these uses of the
  
  -Howard Gardner
• To teach is to learn twice.
  
  -Joseph Joubert
• If philosophy begins in wonder, pedagogy typically begins in frustration.
  
  -Lee Shulman
• People teach what they most need to learn.
  
  -M.J. Ryan
• The things we know best are the things we haven't been taught.
  
  -Marquis de Vauvenargues
• Those of us who are in this world to educate, to care for, young children have a special calling: a calling that has very little to do with the collection of expensive possessions but has a lot to do with the worth inside of heads and hearts. In fact, that's our domain: the heads and hearts of the next generation, the thoughts and feelings of the future.
  
  -Mr.' Fred Rogers
• The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.
  
  -Plutarch
• Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.
  
  -Thomas H. Huxley
• It's easier to build a child than repair an adult.
  
  -Unknown

Technology & Culture

• Culture and technology exist in a dynamic reciprocal relationship. Culture comprehends technology through the means of narratives or myths, and those narratives influence the future shape and purposes of technology. The culture-technology circuit is at the heart of cultural evolution.
  
  -Brenda Laurel in Utopian Entrepreneur (p. 102)
• When artists and philosophers talk only amongst themselves, they ignore the potential of popular culture to become a variety of dialogues with and between everyday people. Its discourse may be productive of desire and pleasure, but popular culture is also a language in which people discuss politics, religion, ethics, and action.
  
  -Brenda Laurel in Utopian Entrepreneur (p. 11)
• Some will say The New Circus is not a real circus.
  
  -Brian Clements
• In a world that daily disconnects further from truth, more and more people accept the virtual in place of the real, and all things virtual are also malleable.
  
  -Dean Koontz (The Good Guy, p. 147)
• Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.
  
  -Edsger Dijkstra
• Nothing could be more absurd than an experiment in which computers are placed in a classroom where nothing else is changed.
  
  -Seymour Papert

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