Favorite Quotes

We seem to have a compulsion these days to bury time capsules in order to give those people living in the next century or so some idea of what we are like. I have prepared one of my own. I have placed some rather large samples of dynamite, gunpowder, and nitroglycerin. My time capsule is set to go off in the year 3000. It will show them what we are really like.

Cooking is like love. It should be entered into with abandon or not at all.

I am patient with stupidity but not with those who are proud of it.

Hargo Day was established to also recognize the human capacity for appreciation, wonder, and awe that can be achieved when small plastic things are arranged in a certain order near and around a cat

I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work, I want to achieve it through not dying.

Code comes and goes. It gets refactored and deleted. Lessons taught to other developers live on. They survive longer than any feature or project.

The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.

Everybody has their own private Mount Everest they were put on this earth to climb. You may never reach the summit; for that you will be forgiven. But if you don’t make at least one serious attempt to get above the snow-line, years later you will find yourself lying on your deathbed, and all you will feel is emptiness.

I really didn’t foresee the Internet. But then, neither did the computer industry. Not that that tells us very much, of course – the computer industry didn’t even foresee that the century was going to end.

Yes, risk-taking is inherently failure-prone. Otherwise, it would be called sure-thing taking.

Research is what I’m doing when I don’t know what I’m doing.

Everything depends. Nothing is always. Everything is sometimes.

I am thinking, well, America has finally got to us.

It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.

“God’s plan” is often a front for men’s plans and a cover for inadequacy, ignorance, and evil.

Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy.

Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come.

I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him.

If you can eliminate all the other choices, the remaining choice, no matter how improbable, is the answer.

Science is like sex: sometimes something useful came out, but that’s not the reason we’re doing it.

Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are a good person is a little like expecting the bull not to attack you because you are a vegetarian.

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

When we die, we may be set to write an essay on our life story. Fifty years behind a desk will be summed up in a few paragraphs while a few days in the wilds will expand into the story.

2 is not equal to 3, not even for large values of 2.

Well the hours are good, but now you come to mention it, most of the actual minutes are pretty lousy.

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.

Code is inherently incorrect. It’s always in a state of undiscovered failure.

Each place has its own advantages – heaven for the climate, and hell for the society.

You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube.

Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight.

Invisible Pink Unicorns are beings of great spiritual power. We know this because they are capable of being invisible and pink at the same time. Like all religions, the Faith of the Invisible Pink Unicorns is based upon both logic and faith. We have faith that they are pink; we logically know that they are invisible because we can’t see them.

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.

My country is the world, and my religion is to do good.

There is something to be learned from a rainstorm.
When meeting with a sudden shower, you try
not to get wet and run quickly along the road.
By doing such things as passing under the eaves
of houses, you still get wet. When you are
resolved from the beginning, you will not be
perplexed, though you will still get the same
soaking. This understanding extends to all things.

How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.

We had a holy cow here a year-and-a-half ago. You don’t get two that close together.

An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.

When authorities warn you of the sinfulness of sex, there is an important lesson to be learned. Do not have sex with the authorities.

Alone and at the mercy of the elements, every sailor’s creed must include a founded belief in their seamanship, their boat’s capabilities, and the innate goodness of others who share a love of life on the water.

There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

A thing moderately good is not so good as it ought to be. Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is always a vice.

He hoped and prayed that there wasn’t an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn’t an afterlife.