Themes 6

  • There are no rules here — we’re trying to accomplish something.
    – Thomas Edison
  • “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” – Wayne Gretzky
  • A soft answer turneth away wrath … – Proverbs 15:1
  • “Life is difficult.  This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths.” – M. Scott Peck (1936 – 2005) in The Road Less Traveled (1978)
  • “Life is hard; it’s harder if you’re stupid.” – John Wayne
  • If a theory cannot produce a testable prediction, then it isn’t science; it’s philosophy. – unknown
  • “… if a technology is commercially viable, then government support is not needed; and if a technology is not commercially viable, no amount of government support will make it so.” – Thomas H. Lee, Ben C. Ball, Jr., and Richard D. Tabors, Energy Aftermath (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1990), pp. 167
  • Every honest researcher I know admits he’s just a professional amateur.  He’s doing whatever he’s doing for the first time.  That makes him an amateur.  He has sense enough to know that he’s going to have a lot of trouble, so that makes him a professional. – Charles Kettering (1876-1958)
  • Brooks’s Law – Programmer time is not fungible; adding developers to a late software project makes it later because the complexity and communication costs of a project rise with
    the square of the number of developers, while work done only rises linearly.
    – Fred Brooks (1975), The Mythical Man-Month
  • “To have doubted one’s own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841 – 1935)
  • “Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent.” – Eleanor Roosevelt
  • Words that soak into your ears are whispered … not yelled. – unknown
  • Prejudice is being down on something you’re not up on. – unknown
  • If something cannot go on forever, it will stop. – Herbert Stein
  • Every man has a right to his opinion, but no man has a right to be wrong in his facts.
    – Bernard Baruch
  • “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.”
    – attributed to Everett Dirksen (1896-1969) US Senator from Illinois
  • “Put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert and in five years there’d be a sand shortage.” – Milton Friedman
  • “A man convinced against his will … is of the same opinion still.” – L.C. Annis (1864-1940)
  • Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy; its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery. – Winston Churchill
  • “Liberalism is a religion. It affords the feeling of spiritual rectitude at little or no cost. Central to this religion is the assertion that evil does not exist, all conflict being attributed to lack of understanding between the opposed. … this does not accord with the experience of anyone.” – David Mamet
  • Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder. – Arnold Toynbee
  • No organization can possibly survive if it needs geniuses or supermen to manage it.  It must be organized in such a way as to be able to get along under a leadership composed of average human beings. – Peter Drucker
  • “No people in history have ever survived who thought they could protect their freedom by making themselves inoffensive to their enemies.” – Dean Acheson (US Secretary of state, January 21, 1949 – January 20, 1953)
  • “Do not blame Caesar, blame the people of Rome who have so enthusiastically acclaimed and adored him and rejoiced in their loss of freedom and danced in his path and gave him triumphal processions. – Blame the people who hail him when he speaks in the Forum of the ‘new, wonderful good society’ which shall now be Rome’s, interpreted to mean ‘more money, more ease, more security, more living fatly at the expense of the industrious.’ ” – Roman statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.)
  • “Absence is to love as wind is to fire: it extinguishes the little flame, it fans the big.” – Umberto Eco
  • “When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that justifies it.” – Frédéric Bastiat
  • “… (people) go mad in herds, while they recover their senses slowly, and one by one.” – Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841)
  • We could say that Congress spends money like drunken sailors, but that would be unfair to drunken sailors.  It would be unfair, because the sailors are spending their own money. – Ronald Reagan
  • “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.”
    – Pastor Martin Niemöller (1892-1984), 1945.
  • Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil. – Thomas Mann (1875 – 1955)
  • “In the past quarter century, we exposed biases against other races and called it racism, and we exposed biases against women and called it sexism.  Biases against men we call humor.” – Warren Farrell