Quotations

Below are some quotes I enjoy, credited where possible.

"Fiery, the Angels fell; Deep Thunder rolled around their shores; Burning with the fires of orc." - Misquotation of Rutger Hauer in Bladerunner. True quote is "Fiery the angels rose, and as they rose deep thunder roll'd. Around their shores: indignant burning with the fires of Orc." from William Blake

"Now hatred is by far the longest pleasure; men love in haste but they detest at leisure." - Lord Byron

"There's nothing I like less than bad arguments for a view I hold dear." - Daniel Dennett

"Only the mediocre, are always at their best." - Jean Giraudoux

"It's possible I understand better what's going on, or it's equally possible that I just think I do." - Russ Cox

"The Great Man... is colder, harder, less hesitating, and without respect and without the fear of "opinion"; he lacks the virtues that accompany respect and "respectability", and altogether everything that is the "virtue of the herd". If he cannot lead, he goes alone. ... He knows he is incommunicable: he finds it tasteless to be familiar. ... When not speaking to himself, he wears a mask. There is a solitude within him that is inaccessible to praise or blame." - Friedrich Nietzsche

"Dying is easy, Comedy is hard." - Edmund Gwenn

"Tis strange,- but true; for truth is always strange; Stranger than fiction: if it could be told, How much would novels gain by the exchange! How differently the world would men behold!" - Lord Byron

"It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail." - Gore Vidal.

Sometimes that quote is "It is not enough that we should succeed, but our friends must fail as well." -Francois de La Rochefoucauld

"Reject your sense of injury, and the injury itself disappears." - Marcus Aurelius

"A witty saying proves nothing" - Voltaire

"When you're young, you look at television and think, There's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That's a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It's the truth." - Steve Jobs

"It's possible for good people in badly designed systems to perpetrate acts of great evil completely unthinkingly." - Ben Goldacre

"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool." - Richard Feynman

"Mathematics has no symbols for confused ideas." - George Stigler

"The fact is that the average man’s love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth. He is not actually happy when free; he is uncomfortable, a bit alarmed, and intolerably lonely. Liberty is not a thing for the great masses of men." - H.L. Mencken

"There are only two people who can tell you the truth about yourself - an enemy who has lost his temper and a friend who loves you dearly." - Antisthenes

"True friends stab you in the front." - Oscar Wilde

"Loyalty to a person and whatever they say or do, that’s the opposite of real loyalty, which is loyalty based on inquiry, and telling someone what you really think and feel–your best estimation of the truth instead of what they want to hear." - Paul O'Neil

"One of the painful signs of years of dumbed-down education is how many people are unable to make a coherent argument. They can vent their emotions, question other people's motives, make bold assertions, repeat slogans– anything except reason." - Thomas Sowell

"The so-called 'middle class' achieve their priveleged access to consumption and security through education, in which they are obliged to invest a substantial part of their income, acquiring as their property a degree which represents the sorry fact that 'the candidate can tolerate boredom and knows how to follow the rules.'" - Stanley Aronowitz

"The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics." - Thomas Sowell

"One of the surest tests [of the superiority or inferiority of a poet] is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest." - T.S. Eliot

"Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time." - Jean Cocteau

"Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows." - Jim Jarmusch

"I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin." - Aldous Huxley

"Enlightenment is its own reward, its own punishment. You begin to see much more. And so much more sees you." - Lord Byron

"If Gimp is built by engineers for engineers, then Brutalism is built by architects for architects." - Leandrei

"Think about how difficult it is to change yourself, and you will realize how insignificant are your chances to change others" - Voltaire

"I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best." - Oscar Wilde

"Because of the nature of Moore's law, anything that an extremely clever graphics programmer can do at one point can be replicated by a merely competent programmer some number of years later." - John Carmack

"Rocket science has been mythologized all out of proportion to its true difficulty." - John Carmack

"Focus is a matter of deciding what things you're not going to do." - John Carmack

"Focused, hard work is the real key to success. Keep your eyes on the goal, and just keep taking the next step towards completing it. If you aren't sure which way to do something, do it both ways and see which works better." - John Carmack

"An interesting question: is it easier to motivate a learned individual that never does anything, or educate an ignorant individual that actually produces things?" - John Carmack

"If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you." - Oscar Wilde

"I don’t want to go to heaven. None of my friends are there." - Oscar Wilde

"Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all." - Oscar Wilde

"Seems can have seams" - Unknown

"Suffer the pains, not the chains" - Unknown