Quotes

Test What You Fly, Fly What You Test

Then bad things happen in rapid succession!

Just because a project succeeds in its goals doesn’t mean its not a fucking disaster

The computing scientist’s main challenge is not to get confused by the complexities of his own making.

The surest sign of intelligent life in the universe is that none of it has ever attempted to contact us

It looks like it’s held together with duct tape, chewing gum, and good hopes

The solution to pollution is dilution.

There is no problem that can’t be solved with a suitable application of explosives

Never attribute to malice, what you can attribute to stupidity

I plugged these two resistive heaters into this thin copper filament, and now I have three resistive heaters!

88.72% of all statistics are made up on the spot.

Remember the past, fear the future

People who brag about their IQ are losers.

There’s never time to do it right, but there’s always time to do it twice

What goes up, must come down

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

There is nothing as permanent as a temporary solution

Wherever you go, there you are

Code can be so complex that there are no obvious bugs or so simple that there are obviously no bugs

The more you find out about the world, the more opportunities there are to laugh at it.

The human brain is the most complex structure in the whole entire universe

Perfection. Where everyone fails.

If you expect nothing you can be happy for everything.

A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent

Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a world with finite resources is either a madman or an economist.

In terms of sheer coolness, few things beat rocketry.

The future’s already here. It’s just not evenly distributed.

Follow the process not the plan

“Perfect” is the enemy of “Good Enough”

Frustration is the crucible of invention

Floccinaucinihilipilification
the action or habit of estimating something as worthless.

The secret to being tidy is making cleanliness easier than laziness.

Every plane lands eventually. The tricky part is being able to walk away afterwards.
Bonus points if the plane can be re-used.

We are in trouble as a species if people refuse to believe things they can’t do themselves.

Let us know if you feel a shortness of breath, a persistent dry cough or your heart stopping, because that’s not part of the test – that’s asbestos.

You can set anything on fire if you really believe in yourself

Is there a patron saint of ballistics yet?

Failure is always an option.

When in doubt, C4.

Research is what I’m doing when I have no idea what I’m doing.

The Only Difference Between Screwing Around and Science Is Writing It Down

Hopefully, the 27th time’s the charm

Over-Engineering is the mark of inferior design

Well there’s your problem.

Guns can kill. Knives can kill. Even children, launched at great speed, can kill.

Learning from mistakes is easy if you make a lot of them

Its very easy to get a rock to sit still

if you think its expensive to hire a professional to do a job- wait till you hire an amateur

Don’t show me the pen, show me what you wrote with it.

We are not professionals. We are determined idiots.

If its stupid and it works its not stupid

Duct tape fixes everything

If it blows up and you get data out of it, then it’s not a failure. Then it’s science.

Im not a terrorist, Im a scientist!

Never is a person more vulnerable, when they think they are safe

Sometimes, you can’t always get what you want. Where would you put it?

If you have to ask, you can’t afford it

The secret to going cheap is don’t be greedy

The difference between theory and practice is often greater in practice than theory

Bomb producer: an expert of explosives or a bad boiler designer

The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you

Don’t let fire play with you

Keep it simple, stupid

Think about how stupid the average person is, then realize that half of them are stupider than that.

There is no point in using the word ‘impossible’ to describe something that has clearly happened.

Krushnic Effect. A very dramatic phenomenon where your rocket makes a tremendous amount of noise and smoke but doesn’t go anywhere

The cool thing with programming is that it does exactly what you tell it to do, the problem with programming is that it does EXACTLY…what you tell it to do

Solving IT problems is like going down a 4×4 path with a Toyota Prius
You’ll get there but its going to be a bumpy ride

They say any landing you can walk away from is a good one.

It’s a very sobering feeling to be up in space and realize that one’s safety factor was determined by the lowest bidder on a government contract.

Be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it.

The Believer is happy, the Doubter is wise

Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.

The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is its inefficiency.

A war doesnt determine who is right, only who is left.

Mankind invented the atomic bomb, but no mouse would ever construct a mousetrap

These people are making up random quotes I didn’t make

No amount of evidence will ever persuade an idiot.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic

Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.

The nuclear arms race is like two sworn enemies standing waist deep in gasoline, one with three matches, the other with five.

Censorship is telling a man he cannot have a steak, just because babies cannot chew them.

[Science] works! Planes fly. Cars drive. Computers compute. If you base medicine on science, you cure people. If you base the design of planes on science, they fly. If you base the design of rockets on science, they reach the moon. It works… bitches.

It seems that the only thing that we aren’t running out of is problems

Science doesn’t care about your feelings

It’s hard to win an argument against someone who’s smart, it’s impossible to win an argument against someone who’s stupid.

Never argue with an idiot. They will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.

Dogs have owners, cats have staff.

Don’t ever do something you can’t explain to paramedics

Always good to stop and think “How could this experiment have killed me?”. It trains your critical thinking and builds up your paranoia levels at the same time!

The minor detonation resulted in rapidly accelerated fractionated glassware

A place for everything and everything in its place

‘Moving on with my life’ is the less harsh term I use to refer to giving up

Test What You Fly, Fly What You Test

There are time limits in life that we can’t postpone and that’s exactly why we should give ourselves deadlines. It’s a good practice for the big one

When you can’t make a bomb out of something, it’s because you didn’t experiment enough

Any machine can be a smoke machine if you operate it wrong enough

It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes

Professionals are predictable, amateurs are the ones you have to watch out for

Newton’s third Law of Thermodynamics

The risk I took was calculated but man am I bad at math

Time is a illusion, lunchtime doubly so

You only learn from mistakes, which is why I say I did really well on my exams

If you want an accurate one-liner saying, don`t get involved in hydrodynamic

Persnickety
Placing too much emphasis on trivial or minor details; fussy.

The secret to being tidy is making cleanliness easier than laziness.

Well there’s your problem

Tnetennba is a perfectly cromulent word.

This is why you should carry a rope with you at all times

If you think its expensive to hire a professional to do a job- wait till you hire an amateur

Every test gets me further to success

The difference between theory and practice is often greater in practice than theory

If you have to ask, you can’t afford it

I removed protracted terminology and replaced it with, easy words

There is no point in using the word ‘impossible’ to describe something that has clearly happened

The cool thing with programming is that it does exactly what you tell it to do, the problem with programming is that it does EXACTLY…what you tell it to do

I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and I’m not even kidding

If its stupid and it works its not stupid

Duct tape fixes everything

It’s a mechanical problem, so as an electrical engineer I’m over qualified

If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.

Science isn’t about WHY. It’s about WHY NOT.

Science isn’t about WHY. It’s about WHY NOT. Why is so much of our science dangerous? Why not marry safe science if you love it so much. In fact, why not invent a special safety door that won’t hit you on the butt on the way out, because you are fired.

Experience: That thing you acquire just after you needed it.

Wisdom. Triangulated experience acquired after everyone has stopped listening to you anyway.

The way to succeed is to double your failure rate.

The ideal engineer is a composite … He is not a scientist, he is not a mathematician, he is not a sociologist or a writer; but he may use the knowledge and techniques of any or all of these disciplines in solving engineering problems.

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.

This must be Thursday,’ said Arthur to himself, sinking low over his beer. ‘I never could get the hang of Thursdays.

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

Flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.

A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.

I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don’t know the answer

Don’t Panic.

The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.

A learning experience is one of those things that says, ‘You know that thing you just did? Don’t do that.’

The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.

Nothing travels faster than the speed of light, with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.

I’d far rather be happy than right any day.

If there’s anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.

For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen.

You live and learn. At any rate, you live.

Reality is frequently inaccurate.

If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat.

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

He attacked everything in life with a mix of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence, and it was often difficult to tell which was which.

We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.

We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!

There is no point in using the word ‘impossible’ to describe something that has clearly happened.

Wisdom comes from experience. Experience is often a result of lack of wisdom.

In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.

Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.

“And what would humans be without love?”
RARE, said Death.

There is a rumor going around that I have found God. I think this is unlikely because I have enough difficulty finding my keys, and there is empirical evidence that they exist.

It’s still magic even if you know how it’s done.

Science is like magic, but it works.

He’d been wrong, there was a light at the end of the tunnel, and it was a flamethrower.

Always be wary of any helpful item that weighs less than its operating manual.

The optimist says: “The glass is half full.”
The pessimist says: “The glass is half empty.”
The engineer says: “The glass is twice as big as it needs to be.”

The intelligence of that creature known as a crowd is the square root of the number of people in it.

The entire universe has been neatly divided into things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks.

Over the centuries, mankind has tried many ways of combating the forces of evil… prayer, fasting, good works and so on. Up until Doom, no one seemed to have thought about the double-barrel shotgun. Eat leaden death, demon…

Even if it’s not your fault, it’s your responsibility.

Coffee is a way of stealing time that should by rights belong to your older self.

“There’s a door.”
“Where does it go?”
“It stays where it is, I think.”

Only in our dreams are we free. The rest of the time we need wages.

Progress just means bad things happen faster.

Studies have shown that an ant can carry one hundred times its own weight, but there is no known limit to the lifting power of the average tiny eighty-year-old Spanish peasant grandmother.

Everything starts somewhere, though many physicists disagree. But people have always been dimly aware of the problem with the start of things. They wonder how the snowplough driver gets to work, or how the makers of dictionaries look up the spelling of words.

She was also, by the standards of other people, lost. She would not see it like that. She knew where she was, it was just that everywhere else didn’t

Nuclear power is one hell of a way to boil water.

A nuclear power plant is infinitely safer than eating because 300 people choke to death on food every year.

All the waste in a year from a nuclear power plant can be stored under a desk.

Nuclear energy, in terms of an overall safety record, is better than other energy.

Eight years involved with the nuclear industry have taught me that when nothing can possibly go wrong and every avenue has been covered, then is the time to buy a house on the next continent.

Oh, meltdown. It’s one of these annoying buzzwords. We prefer to call it an unrequested fission surplus.

Sleeping next to a woman presents a greater radioactive risk than camping beside a nuclear power station.

The definition of an Elephant, “A mouse built to government specifications.”

Every one of the 247 billion facts on the internet is wrong

Apparently, if you start a sentence with the word “apparently “, it is most likely untrue.

I used to dislike Stockholm Syndrome, but then it took a hold of me and I really grew to love it.

If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the precipitate.

There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.
TANSTAAFL

Failure is unacceptable, yet we seem to be failing

There can be no progress without a goal

Simplicity is a prerequisite for reliability.

Cave Johnson, we’re done here.

I do not think there is any thrill that can go trough the human hearth like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success… such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything.

If there is no reward for taking risk, then no one wants to take risk.

The best time to plant a tree was 30 years ago,
The second best time is now

If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough

Inevitably I was asked “Are you writing a book?”, and I would say that I was.
“What is the title?” was the inevitable next question and I would say: “Excuse Me, Sir, Would You Like To Buy A Kilo Of Isopropyl Bromide?”
“It’s a bit long”, was the inevitable comment, and this is true, but it’s the story of my life.

“Define interesting”
“Oh god oh god we’re all going to die?”

Hardware is hard

Have you ever spent time creating something and then realized it’s the worst thing a human being has ever done

The ‘S’ in flat earth stands for scientific.

The giant smoke cloud means it’s working!

“Preacher, don’t the Bible have some pretty specific things to say about killing?”
“Quite specific. It is however somewhat fuzzier on the subject of kneecaps.”

Get baited scrub

Contrary to popular belief, you can’t miss a shot you didn’t take

It’s held together with either skill or prayer

An overnight success rarely happens overnight

It takes 20 years to become a overnight success

They are right on the bleeding edge, and its bleeding for sure

I would rather entertain and hope that people learned something than educate people and hope they were entertained

Maybe don’t shoot for the moon just yet, you might miss

Its not the fire that kills people, its the smoke
Therefore, this perfectly smokeless ethanol fire can not kill me

I’ve lost enough IQ points to think IQ is real

There’s a Socratic acceptance of the limits of one’s own knowledge, and there’s ignorance. I’m not saying which is which

I could definitely get it to the ground, landing would be a bit of an exaggeration

You fly the plane as low as physically possible and then stop flying

Proof: left as an exercise to the reader

Fun fact! There are more planes in the sea than there are ships in the sky

The definition of an Elephant, “A mouse built to government specifications.”

“They’re playing Pass-the-Parcel”
“Can’t really blame them when it’s ticking.”

Kom dan, kutwurm

You are standing on the shoulders of giants, and refuse to look down

Certainty comes from a lack of alternatives

There’s definitely a lot of words here, they have no substance, but there sure are a lot of them

Whats the difference between a good joke and

a bad joke timing

The level of engineering failure contained in such a small package is almost awe inspiring.

“How many gimmicks should we put in the pistol?”
“All of them, all the gimmicks.”

Reloading? That’s a problem for someone that doesn’t have enough guns on him.

Sanity must have prevailed; that or my perpetually empty billfold.

Do you think god stays in heaven because he, too, lives in fear of what he has created?

You tried your best and you failed miserably, the lesson is never try.

Your weather is perplexing

We must end War, before War ends us.

Humans had always been better at killing than any other living thing.

A troop transport that can’t carry troops, a reconnaissance vehicle that’s too conspicuous to do reconnaissance, and a quasi-tank that has less armor than a snowblower, but has enough ammo to take out half of D.C.

Ludwig Boltzman, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand.
Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933.
Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics. Perhaps it will be wise to approach the subject cautiously

Gentlemen! you can’t fight in here! This is the War Room!

I don’t think it’s quite fair to condemn the whole program because of a single slip up.

If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit

That’s Numberwang!

Numberwang!

Numberwang

The analysis is severely limited by my lack of understanding of what I am doing

Why are you dodging like this? They couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance-

Anything that can be digitized will be digitized; anything that is digitized will be searchable on the Internet.

Now that’s numberwang!

Science is not a collection of facts; it is a process of discorvery

Ideas have consequences

Now, one obvious and frequently noted flaw in this plan is that fusion reactors do not exist

Of course, if you don’t go about it correctly, you might also vaporize the spaceship, blow it to pieces, turn the crew to jelly with 100,000g of acceleration, or kill everyone on board with a lethal dose of gamma rays.
As we say in the engineering business, “These concerns need to be addressed.”

The obvious answer is anti-matter

In this chapter we have discussed interstellar travel using mighty systems such as thermonuclear fusion, antimatter rockets, and laser-pushed light-sails, all with power ratings in the tens to hundreds of terawatts.
It should be obvious to most readers that such systems will be (a) expensive and (b) very dangerous in the hands of minors

People will do anything to survive, even become better.

Life is the creator of nature

Its mass would be about equal to that of Venus, which might be conveniently disassembled to construct it.

It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness

The day may come when humanity no longer has a need for wars.
But we will always have a need for heroes.

See, this is why I’m such a good theoretical physicist. I solve problems that shouldn’t even exist to begin with.

Your side is the one with death and violence, mine is the one with hope, love, and submachine guns!

At least this shotgun won’t deceive me. It’s filled with pellets, not LIES!

Space, it says, is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space.

He’s spending a year dead for tax reasons.

If I were not an atheist, I think I would have to be a Catholic because if it wasn’t the forces of natural selection that designed fish, It must have been an Italian.

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

I don’t want to die now! I’ve still got a headache! I don’t want to go to heaven with a headache, I’d be all cross and wouldn’t enjoy it!

Things aren’t scary. People are scared.

When I first looked back at the Earth, standing on the Moon, I cried.

Anyone who sits on top of the largest hydrogen-oxygen fueled system in the world, knowing they’re going to light the bottom, and doesn’t get a little worried, does not fully understand the situation.

Mars has been flown by, orbited, smacked into, radar examined, and rocketed onto, as well as bounced upon, rolled over, shoveled, drilled into, baked and even blasted. Still to come: Mars being stepped on.

I must admit, maybe I am a piece of history after all.

In the field of technology, simplification is always an enormous advance

Astronauts are inherently insane. And really noble.

Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in a cradle forever.

When forced to summarize the general theory of relativity in one sentence: Time and space and gravitation have no separate existence from matter

Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.

For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

For every one billion particles of antimatter there were one billion and one particles of matter. And when the mutual annihilation was complete, one billionth remained – and that’s our present universe.

To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit.

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

Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.

I’m sure the universe is full of intelligent life. It’s just been too intelligent to come here.

I see Earth! It is so beautiful.

I looked and looked but I didn’t see God.

Curiosity is the essence of our existence.

Gravity hurts.

In the van, we can see the rocket in the distance, lit up and shining, an obelisk. In reality, of course, it’s a 4.5-megaton bomb loaded with explosive fuel, which is why everyone else is driving away from it.

If you ain’t Dutch, you ain’t much

God made the earth, but the Dutch made the Netherlands

Holland, the largest man made structure on earth

I read a book on Anti-Gravity, couldn’t put it down

I took the only thing that communism ever built that worked. And using it to make money like a dirty capitalist.

Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained

What is the only provocation that could bring about the use of nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. What is the priority target for nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. What is the only established defense against nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. How do we prevent the use of nuclear weapons? By threatening the use of nuclear weapons. And we can’t get rid of nuclear weapons, because of nuclear weapons. The intransigence, it seems, is a function of the weapons themselves.

Music is the voice that tells us that the human race is greater than it knows.

They’ve got us surrounded, the poor bastards!

I surrender and volunteer for treason.

The reason that the American Navy does so well in wartime, is that war is chaos, and the Americans practice chaos on a daily basis.

“Sir they have us surrounded!”
“That simplifies the problem”

You may have a major in physics, but I have a minor in research

Underidoderidoderiododeridoo

The living will envy the dead.

If you can remember the 60s you weren’t really there

Only when we stop stopping our lives can we begin to start starting them

The only two certainties in life are death and taxes.

Welcome to the world of high voltage, where everything is a wire and you’re probably going to die

It’s not perfect, but it’s fantastic

You would make a ship sail against the winds and currents by lighting a bonfire under it’s deck? I have no time for such nonsense.

We fire the WHOLE bullet. That’s 65% more bullet per bullet!

It happens to happen

It happened to happen

There are more planes in the ocean than submarines in the sky

Hours and hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.

More Speed, Less Haste.

There is no amount of expertise that will allow you to avoid failing.

The problem with doing it right the first time is that no one appreciates how difficult it was.

An expert is a person who has found out by his own painful experience all the mistakes that one can make in a very narrow field.

The difference between being smart and being wise:
Being smart is learning from your mistakes.
Being wise is learning from the mistakes of others.
My life has given many others the chance to be wise.

Science is suffering.

To understand recursion, one must first understand recursion.

When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all

I don’t really have a solution for that, I’m just complaining in a gentle fashion

People aren’t loyal to you, they are loyal to their need of you. Once their need changes, so does their loyalty

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

Safety may get old but so do those who practice it.

If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?

The purpose of intellect is the transformation of a miracle to something understandable.

You can always trust a dishonest man to be dishonest. Honestly, it’s the honest ones you have to watch out for.

Anyone who thinks that you can have infinite growth in a finite environment is either a madman or an economist.

Too Big to Fail, that’s like saying too fat to diet

If you are the smartest person in the room, you are in the wrong room.

Who’s the more foolish? The fool, or the fool who follows him?

Why is the floor on the floor

If you don’t get hired for an unpaid internship it literally makes no difference. Just show up and start working. What are they gonna do, pay you?

Oh, actually we’re getting tons of funding, but the people who decide how it’s spent spend it hiring more people to figure out how it’s spent.

Its not really a rabbit hole its just a normal sized hole that I fell into and then climbed back out of and thought ‘huh that’s weird.’

42

I use the universally applicable measuring system of “that looks about right.”

Nobody expect the Spanish inquisition!

We have purposely trained him wrong, as a joke.

Its very important this lines up perfectly.
I’m eyeballing it with a straight edge, but I’m eyeballing it carefully.

Why doesn’t anybody ever quote me? What’s up with Sun Tzu?

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it

If it’s broke, don’t fix it
If it ain’t broke, fix it till it breaks then run away

Nice day to be young and made of skin, don’t you think?

Don’t get me wrong

Conflict is the beginning of consciousness

Whatever it is, I’m against it

I am not young enough to know everything.

The most common reaction to learning about the Dunning-Kruger effect is a knee-jerk presumption of individual immunity from it.

The easiest person to fool is yourself.

The Lathe is the King of Tools

The first draft of anything is shit.

Guns are awesome!
Idiots are not.

To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.

The only thing separating a nut from a genius is proper equipment.

That’s probably fine

Even the best product can be ruined by upper management

Never trust a computer you can’t throw out a window.

I try. I fail. I try again. I fail better.

The only source of knowledge is experience.

Science knows no country, because knowledge belongs to humanity, and is the torch which illuminates the world.

Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.

If you don’t design your own life plan, chances are you’ll fall into someone else’s plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much.

Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.

We build too many walls and not enough bridges.

If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.

We learn more by looking for the answer to a question and not finding it than we do from learning the answer itself.

Lack of activity destroys the good condition of every human being.

Zing, the sound wineglasses make

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.

There are, it has been said, two types of people in the world. There are those who, when presented with a glass that is exactly half full, say: this glass is half full. And then there are those who say: this glass is half empty. The world belongs, however, to those who can look at the glass and say: What’s up with this glass? Excuse me? Excuse me? This is my glass? I don’t think so. My glass was full! And it was a bigger glass! Who’s been pinching my beer?

And at the other end of the bar the world is full of the other type of person, who has a broken glass, or a glass that has been carelessly knocked over (usually by one of the people calling for a larger glass) or who had no glass at all, because he was at the back of the crowd and had failed to catch the barman’s eye.

“Patterson, fire a warning shot!”
“Sir, this is an m284 grenade launcher”
“Ah potato potato fire it Patterson”

The best work is teamwork!

There is no better work than a network

The trouble with computers, of course, is that they’re very sophisticated idiots.

“Fire a warning shot Patterson”
“Sir, this is an MK19 belt fed automatic grenade launcher”
“Ah potato potato, just fire it Patterson”

I’m misusing algebra to throw a fit.

God help us. We’re in the hands of engineers… and ferrets?

God help us, were in the hands of engineers!

Before you criticize a man, walk a mile in his shoes.
That way, when you criticize him, you will be a mile away and have his shoes.

I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.

Perhaps one day we will have machines that can cope with approximate task descriptions, but in the meantime, we have to be very prissy about how we tell computers to do things.

I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.

Spend more than twenty four hours awake, and your decision making skills go to pieces

The answer to the age old question: It depends.

“Dad, what is technology?”
“It’s magic Joel, it’s magic.”

Science is like magic, but it works

Trying is the first step toward failure.

Homeboy was about 30 degrees from making a serious fucky-wucky and having to get in The Forever Box

I took ballistics in school! Fascinating subject! Things go up, things go down!

The competent programmer is fully aware of the limited size of his own skull. He therefore approaches his task with full humility, and avoids clever tricks like the plague

Saying that guns kill people is like saying spoons make people fat

The only difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.

The crusade against fireworks is strange in a country where 40,000 die annually in car crashes and over a million are seriously injured.
It’s probably the usual envy of people having too much fun.

Anyone who never made a mistake never tried anything new.

Unlike you people, I have no illusion as to my usefulness in an actual apocalypse. The most I can hope for is to die in a pose that confuses future archeologists.

Nothing says ‘I come in peace’ like a good incendiary device

I woke up one morning to find that the entire city had been covered in a three-foot layer of man-eating jam.

I could think of no better place to secretly murder someone than inside a fridge. Well, actually there were probably several better ones, but none came to mind at the time.

This was how I would die. Strangled by an attractive, seminaked woman inside a fridge with a giant tarantula in the middle of a sea of carnivorous jam. As I blacked out, all I could think of was a fortune teller I’d spoken to a few years ago, and how full of shit she’d turned out to be.

It could have been a thief or a murderer. I considered crying out. A thief would run away, but a murderer would murder me. On the other hand, the murderer would probably murder me if I didn’t too. That was his whole thing.

Once the rockets are up who cares where they come down, that’s not my department says Werner Von Braun.

Recalcitrant!

A university’s engineering faculty is invited by an airplane manufacturer to be passengers on the test flight of their latest, fastest experimental aircraft.
The professors are all excited as they board the plane and get ready for the trip.
Once on board the company’s representative says, “Great to see you all here. We invited you all to commemorate your great work, you should know that this airplane was fully designed, engineered, and made by your successful students!”
There is a mad scramble for the doors as the professors panic to be let off the plane. The representative notices one professor sitting calmly. “Why are you not panicking like the others?”
“Because,” the professor answers, “I taught and knew those kids for four years of schooling. I am confident that I know their abilities. I have complete faith that this shit will not even start.”

The best work is teamwork

The best work is a network

They can’t defeat you if you don’t know what you’re doing

Simplicity is the purest form of sophistication

A computer is like air conditioning – it becomes useless when you open Windows.

They asked me if I had a degree in theoretical physics, I said I had a theoretical degree in physics, they said welcome aboard.

Don’t tell people your plans. Show them your results.

Chekhov’s concealed pistol!

1 in 3 numbers can be divided by 3

“Rocket scientists just don’t like to die” is a bold statement, most just tread the line of “maybe we die, maybe we make something cool, only one way to find out”

There is nothing impossible to him who will try

In terms of sheer coolness, few things beat rocketry.

Remember: Progress before safety!

If only international politics was as easy as rocket science

War is sweet to those who have no experience of it. But the experienced man trembles exceedingly in his heart at its approach.

Rest in peace AN-225 “Mirya”

Older men declare war but it is the youth that must fight and die

A coward dies many times before his death but a valiant only dies once.

Sometimes things need to look horribly horribly wrong before you get them right

Don’t just miss your shots, miss them with purpose

Whoever said the pen is mightier than the sword obviously never encountered automatic weapons.

The pen is mightier than the sword… unless of course you happen to be in a sword fight.

The 75mm main gun is firing, the 37mm secondary gun is firing, but it’s traversed round the wrong way. The Browning is jammed. I am saying, ‘Driver advance’ on the A set, but the driver – who can’t hear me – is reversing.
And as I look over the top of the turret, and see 12 enemy tanks, just 50 yards away, someone hands me a cheese sandwich.

“they want to surrender?”
“No they want us to surrender.”
“Nuts.”

If it ain’t broke, we’ll fix it ’til it is.

If it wasn’t for the bloody Yanks, we could have kept this war going for another 10-20 years.

They’ve got us surrounded, the poor bastards!

Why are you dodging like this? They couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance.

“Private, I haven’t seen you during yesterdays stealth training!”
“Thank you, sir!”

You are supposed to think outside the box, not step over boundaries

He who starts to play shall also endure it.

There is no such thing as an unsolvable problem

We are ignoring the passing of time.

A star walks into a black hole but doesn’t seen phased.
The black hole then turns to the star and says, “I don’t think you understand the gravity of this situation.”

We don’t like him necessarily because he’s a likable character, we find him endearing because he’s right.

Legacy code is the code that is too scary to update and too profitable to delete

I keep six honest serving-men (They taught me all I knew); Their names are What and Why and When And How and Where and Who.

For the junior developers, a book is a sequential document database implemented in hardware.
They don’t have WiFi but the battery life on them is phenomenal.

If you ever code something that “feels like a hack but it works,” just remember that a CPU is literally a rock that we tricked into thinking

The 11 in C++11 refers to the number of legs that have now been nailed onto the dog whilst attempting to build a better octopus.

All art is quite useless.

The function of art is to hold a mirror up to nature.

Clouds are not spheres,
mountains are not cones,
coastlines are not circles,
and bark is not smooth,
nor does lightning travel in a straight line.

We invented computers, which means taking lightning and sticking it into a rock until it learns to think.

Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis

A rapid expansion in volume associated with an extremely vigorous outward release of energy, usually with the generation of high temperatures and release of high-pressure gases.

Contact light

It was only a little bit impossible, which is not the same as completely impossible

It has been said that the great scientific disciplines are examples of giants standing on the shoulders of other giants. It has also been said that the software industry is an example of midgets standing on the toes of other midgets.

If everyone is thinking alike, someone isn’t thinking.

I once told my flight instructor after a preflight inspection… “That plane is leaking oil”
He said, “good… if it’s not leaking oil, its out of oil.”

Its not a oil leak, its a progressive oil change.

Slow release evaporative humidifiers, otherwise known as buckets of water

How inappropriate to call this planet “Earth,” when it is clearly “Ocean.”

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Science demands patience.

Magic’s just science that we don’t understand yet.

Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.

I’m sure the universe is full of intelligent life. It’s just been too intelligent to come here.

Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.

All the waste in a year from a nuclear power plant can be stored under a desk.

In reality, Chernobyl proves why nuclear is the safest way to make electricity. In the worst nuclear power accidents, relatively small amounts of particulate matter escape, harming only a handful of people.

Don’t stay in bed, unless you can make money in bed.

All things are difficult before they are easy.

Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.

The reward for work well done is the opportunity to do more.

Quality is everyone’s responsibility.

Nothing will work unless you do.

“Relatively safe” is etched on many tombstones.

When you want to insert a nail into a piece of wood, don’t do anything fancy or glamorous. Just take the damn hammer and hit the son of a bitch until it’s in.

Someone already did the due diligence for me, I assume

The enemy of art is the absence of limitations

Being a rocket scientist isn’t all that smart when you could work in finance.

When you launch in a rocket, you’re not really flying that rocket.
You’re just sort of hanging on.

Rocket science is tough, and rockets have a way of failing.

Insisting on perfect safety is for people who don’t have the balls to live in the real world.

Do you realize what we accomplished today? Today the spaceship was born.

Rocket science has been mythologized all out of proportion to its true difficulty.

It all looked so easy when you did it on paper —
where valves never froze, gyros never drifted,
and rocket motors did not blow up in your face.

There’s the whole myth about rocket science.
It’s really not that hard. It’s not brain surgery.

As I hurtled through space, one thought kept crossing my mind – every part of this rocket was supplied by the lowest bidder.

The space station is the most unique laboratory we’ve ever built. The reason we have it is to research materials, people, medical matters, pharmaceuticals – the possibilities are nearly endless.

Quite often, while I’m getting up in the morning, I think my warranty is running out on these body parts because it’s not working quite the way it used to.

In orbit, you’re keyed up and aware of everything going on, every little noise, anything that may have special meaning because of where you are.

I fully expected that, by the end of the century, we would have achieved substantially more than we actually did.

I believe every human has a finite number of heartbeats. I don’t intend to waste any of mine.

That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.

You’ve got to expect things are going to go wrong. And we always need to prepare ourselves for handling the unexpected.

Shoot for the stars, but if you happen to miss, shoot for the moon again.

Pilots take no special joy in walking. Pilots like flying.

I am, and ever will be, a white-socks, pocket-protector, nerdy engineer, born under the second law of thermodynamics, steeped in steam tables, in love with free-body diagrams, transformed by Laplace and propelled by compressible flow.

In much of society, research means to investigate something that you do not know or understand.

Well, I think that we tried very hard not to be overconfident, because when you get overconfident, that’s when something snaps up and bites you.

The regret on our side is, they used to say years ago, we are reading about you in science class. Now they say, we are reading about you in history class.

I thought the attractions of being an astronaut were actually, not so much the Moon, but flying in a completely new medium.

The one thing I regret was that my work required an enormous amount of my time, and a lot of travel.

We would like to give special thanks to all those Americans who built the spacecraft, who did the construction, design, the tests, and put their hearts and all their abilities into those crafts. To those people tonight, we give a special thank you, and to all the other people that are listening and watching tonight, God bless you. Good night from Apollo 11.

When I orbited the Earth in a spaceship, I saw for the first time how beautiful our planet is. Mankind, let us preserve and increase this beauty, and not destroy it!

Looking at the Earth from afar, you realize that it is too small for conflict and just large enough for cooperation. Nothing will stop us.

The road to the stars is steep and dangerous. But we are not afraid…

When they saw me in my space suit and the parachute dragging alongside as I walked, they started to back away in fear. I told them, don’t be afraid. I am a Soviet like you, who has descended from space, and I must find a telephone to call Moscow!

Our technique is very reliable, and I, as well as my comrades, scientists, engineers, and technicians, did not doubt for a minute its successful completion.

I am watching the Earth. The visibility is good. I feel well and cheerful. The machine is functioning normally.

Gravity hurts.

We are limited only by our imagination and our will to act.

The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn’t have a space program.

In this single galaxy of ours, there are eighty-seven thousand million suns.

Pythagoras, the inventor of the triangle

I am still alive!

When I meet God, I am going to ask him two questions: Why relativity? And why turbulence? I really believe he will have an answer for the first.

This dying is boring.

I choose to live forever, or die trying to.

Just because you’re not paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.

Never hit a man with glasses. Hit him with a baseball bat.

Living on Earth is expensive, but it does include a free trip around the sun.

Stone’s Law: One man’s “simple” is another man’s “huh?”

640K ought to be enough for anybody.

This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.

Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons.

I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.

But what … is it good for?

Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?

Louis Pasteur’s theory of germs is ridiculous fiction

The abdomen, the chest, and the brain will forever be shut from the intrusion of the wise and humane surgeon

When I die, I hope to go to Heaven, whatever the Hell that is.

To be, or what?

All my life I wanted to be someone; I guess I should of been more specific

I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up

A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman’s birthday but never remembers her age.

Gods are fragile things; they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense

Reflection is for mirrors

“Don’t judge a book by its cover” is a great analogy when applied to everything *except books*

You are entitled to my opinion

Tetris: A Inventory Management Survival Horror Game.

“What do you see?”
“Everything! That is my curse”

My hatred of mineralogists is purely theatrical

Everything is a low hanging fruit if you’re tall enough

Engineering is just simplified physics

Physics is just simplified engineering

Using Arduino, hardware engineers can pretend like they know how software works, and software engineers can pretend like they know how anything works

You named your killer robot ‘Gus’?

Old isn’t always gold. Sometimes new is what’s to do.

“They called Issac Newton crazy when he discovered apples”

“The Nerds in high school are the ones who become cool as adults”

Safety rules are written in blood, as in, people die to change or update safety regulations

Complexity is beautiful.

If you set your goals low, you can hit a lot of ’em.

There are virtually infinite possible ways to shuffle a deck of cards, yet solitaire still becomes a bit samey after a few games

When you find solutions for math it called “pure math”
When math find solutions for you it called “applied math”

We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.

I didn’t ‘slip’, there was just a minor shoelace malfunction…

The best way to communicate from one human being to another is through story.

At one point, I thought life was about acquiring things. But as I get older, life is totally about losing everything

Make something foolproof, and nature will make a better fool.

We have some questions about your internet purchases

What you do in this world is a matter of no consequence. The question is what can you make people believe you have done.

“It’s quite exciting,” said Sherlock Holmes, with a yawn.

No man burdens his mind with small matters unless he has some very good reason for doing so.

His Ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge.

It is a mistake to confound strangeness with mystery.

So many books, so little time.

Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.

A room without books is like a body without a soul.

Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter, and those who matter don’t mind.

You know you’re in love when you can’t fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.

You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.

In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.

If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.

A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you.

To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.

Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.

Without music, life would be a mistake.

I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying.

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.

Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results.

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

It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.

I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.

Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.

Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.

There is nothing better than a friend, unless it is a friend with chocolate.

Science is epic. Death is certain.

Not every madman is a genius, but every genius has a level of madness.

Love with your hearth, use your head for everything else!

Paranoia is a byproduct of being consistently right, you should aspire to it.

The life of a designer is no parade of victories.
There are innumerably more failures.
But they must not stop us.

Life is a series of small inconveniences, followed by the biggest one of them all

Technically correct is the best kind of correct

Music is the only art that goes through the ears and straight into the heart

You can do whatever you want, the consequences are what fucks you over.

The most dangerous person is always calm

It doesn’t work as expected because you’re expecting too much.

bomb-makers don’t build tests of electrical engineering skill, they build devices that go bang.

bomb-makers don’t build tests of electrical engineering skill, they build devices that go bang.
The simpler the device, the more likely it is to explode.

No plan survives contact with the enemy

Never has so much been owed to so few

This is the nearest thing to doomsday that one could possibly imagine. I am sure that at the end of the world — in the last millisecond of the Earth’s existence — the last human will see what we saw.

The effects could well be called unprecedented, magnificent, beautiful, stupendous and terrifying. No man-made phenomenon of such tremendous power had ever occurred before…Words are inadequate tools for the job of acquainting those not present with the physical, mental and psychological effects. It had to be witnessed to be realized.

They are all out to get you

As engineers, we were going to be in a position to change the world – not just study it.

The scientist discovers a new type of material or energy and the engineer discovers a new use for it.

Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world.

The engineer has been, and is, a maker of history.

Scientists study the world as it is; engineers create the world that has never been.

Strive for perfection in everything you do. Take the best that exists and make it better. When it does not exist, design it.

We are continually faced by great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems.

When you want to know how things really work, study them when they’re coming apart.

When Henry Ford decided to produce his famous V-8 motor, he chose to build an engine with the entire eight cylinders cast in one block, and instructed his engineers to produce a design for the engine. The design was placed on paper, but the engineers agreed, to a man, that it was simply impossible to cast an eight-cylinder engine-block in one piece.

Ford replied,”Produce it anyway.”

Airplanes are not tools for war. They are not for making money. Airplanes are beautiful dreams. Engineers turn dreams into reality.

Engineers like to solve problems. If there are no problems handily available, they will create their own problems.

One man’s “magic” is another man’s engineering. “Supernatural” is a null word.

Anything which is physically possible can always be made financially possible; money is a bugaboo of small minds.

All we know about the new economic world tells us that nations which train engineers will prevail over those which train lawyers. No nation has ever sued its way to greatness.

We tend to hear much more about the splendors returned than the ships that brought them or the shipwrights. It has always been that way. Even those history books enamored of the voyages of Christopher Columbus do not tell much about the builders of the Nina the Pinta and the Santa Maria or about the principle of the caravel. These spacecraft, their designers, builders, navigators and controllers are examples of what science and engineering set free for well-defined peaceful purposes can accomplish. Those scientists and engineers should be role models for an America seeking excellence and international competitiveness. They should be on our stamps.

“The fewer moving parts, the better.”
“Exactly. No truer words were ever spoken in the context of engineering.”

Manufacturing is more than just putting parts together. It’s coming up with ideas, testing principles and perfecting the engineering, as well as final assembly.

Automation is cost cutting by tightening the corners and not cutting them.

It is hardly surprising that the malodorous field of garbology has not attained the popularity of rocket science, oil exploration, or brain surgery.

As in real life, complex engineering designs demand a pragmatic approach.

In engineering, the joints are the most crucial. They have to be both firm and flexible, exactly like the joints in our body.

Engineering or Technology is the making of things that did not previously exist, whereas science is the discovering of things that have long existed.

Engineering problems are under-defined, there are many solutions, good, bad and indifferent. The art is to arrive at a good solution. This is a creative activity, involving imagination, intuition and deliberate choice.

Engineers … are not superhuman. They make mistakes in their assumptions, in their calculations, in their conclusions. That they make mistakes is forgivable; that they catch them is imperative. Thus it is the essence of modern engineering not only to be able to check one’s own work but also to have one’s work checked and to be able to check the work of others.

The history of engineering is really the history of breakages, and of learning from those breakages. I was taught at college ‘the engineer learns most on the scrapheap’

Engineers have more words for screwing up than the Inuit have words for snow.

Incompetence is prevalent in the engineering field.

Software is a great combination between artistry and engineering.

The cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from Science, along with behaviour control, genetic engineering, transplanted heads, computer poetry and the unrestrained growth of plastic flowers.

At its heart, engineering is about using science to find creative, practical solutions. It is a noble profession.

There’s nothing I believe in more strongly than getting young people interested in science and engineering, for a better tomorrow, for all humankind.

The more you find out about the world, the more opportunities there are to laugh at it.

Believe you can and you’re halfway there.

Nobody cares how much you know, until they know how much you care.

Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.

Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.

If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.

All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them.

It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.

Science is about knowing; engineering is about doing.

If you want to work in engineering and to have an impact that’s global, come work in the aerospace sector.

There is nothing in machinery, there is nothing in embankments and railways and iron bridges and engineering devices to oblige them to be ugly. Ugliness is the measure of imperfection.

If we don’t end war, war will end us.

Older men declare war. But it is the youth that must fight and die.

The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.

War does not determine who is right – only who is left.

Advertising is legalized lying.

Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race.

What really matters is what you do with what you have.

Engineering stimulates the mind. Kids get bored easily. They have got to get out and get their hands dirty: make things, dismantle things, fix things. When the schools can offer that, you’ll have an engineer for life.

Life is too short to do the things you don’t love doing.

Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.

Apart from death and taxes, the one thing that’s certain in this life is that I’ll never be a fashion icon.

Well, yeah, sometimes I get a little too creative.

If your only arbiter of anything is money, really you should… go and rob banks.

The lack of money is the root of all evil.

When I was young I thought that money was the most important thing in life; now that I am old I know that it is.

There’s no such thing as a free lunch.

The hardest thing to understand in the world is the income tax.

A bank is a place that will lend you money if you can prove that you don’t need it.

A rich man is nothing but a poor man with money.

Do what you love and the money will follow.

Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver.

My dad always told me, ‘I don’t care what you do. Just aim to be the best at it. Even if it’s the world’s best window cleaner.’

The best way to predict the future is to create it.

I do the very best I know how – the very best I can; and I mean to keep on doing so until the end.

Nobody who ever gave his best regretted it.

The best way to keep one’s word is not to give it.

I am as bad as the worst, but, thank God, I am as good as the best.

Engineering or technology is all about using the power of science to make life better for people, to reduce cost, to improve comfort, to improve productivity, etc.

I look most like myself… when I’m wearing my black, nerdy engineering glasses.

Colleagues are a wonderful thing – but mentors, that’s where the real work gets done.

You can be creative in anything – in math, science, engineering, philosophy – as much as you can in music or in painting or in dance.

Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value. It is a process; it’s not random.

Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it.

The answer is not to standardize education, but to personalize and customize it to the needs of each child and community. There is no alternative. There never was.

Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.

In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.

I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.

Develop a passion for learning. If you do, you will never cease to grow.

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

Education is the best friend. An educated person is respected everywhere. Education beats the beauty and the youth.

Now the problem with standardized tests is that it’s based on the mistake that we can simply scale up the education of children like you would scale up making carburetors. And we can’t, because human beings are very different from motorcars, and they have feelings about what they do and motivations in doing it, or not.

Learning happens in the minds and souls, not in the databases of multiple-choice tests.

Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.

If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?

Research is creating new knowledge.

Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.

He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying.

A wise man can learn more from a foolish question than a fool can learn from a wise answer.

Learning never exhausts the mind.

I am always ready to learn although I do not always like being taught.

Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer.

Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.

Art is never finished, only abandoned.

Our life is made by the death of others.

Don’t go through life, grow through life.

Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.

It is often said that before you die your life passes before your eyes. It is in fact true. It’s called living.

They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it’s not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance.

To know what you know and what you do not know, that is true knowledge.

Opinion is the medium between knowledge and ignorance.

Without knowledge action is useless and knowledge without action is futile.

The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.

I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.

Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.

Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.

It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.

Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.

Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive.

If you could kick the person in the pants responsible for most of your trouble, you wouldn’t sit for a month.

Laziness is nothing more than the habit of resting before you get tired.

A day without sunshine is like, you know, night.

The problem with common sense is that its not all that common

People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.

The harder I work, the luckier I become.

I put my heart and my soul into my work, and have lost my mind in the process.

The reward for work well done is the opportunity to do more.

By working faithfully eight hours a day you may eventually get to be boss and work twelve hours a day.

The beginning is the most important part of the work.

‘Educational’ refers to the process, not the object. Although, come to think of it, some of my teachers could easily have been replaced by a cheeseburger.

If the government ever imposes a tax on books – and I wouldn’t put it past them – I’m in dead trouble.

You can’t die with an unfinished book.

It always seems impossible until it’s done.

I can’t change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination.

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

It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.

Sooner or later we’re all someone’s dog.

Some people die at 25 and aren’t buried until 75.

Good, better, best. Never let it rest. ‘Til your good is better and your better is best.

Taxation is just a sophisticated way of demanding money with menaces.

Sometimes it is better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness.

If you’re going through hell, keep going.

Enjoy life… that’s what we’re here for.

Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.

I have, before now, waited for a pen to perform a macro.

It seems sensible to me that we should look to the medical profession, that over the centuries has helped us to live longer and healthier lives, to help us die peacefully among our loved ones in our own home without a long stay in God’s waiting room.

Evolution was far more thrilling to me than the biblical account. Who would not rather be a rising ape than a falling angel? To my juvenile eyes, Darwin was proved true every day. It doesn’t take much to make us flip back into monkeys again.

Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind.

This isn’t life in the fast lane, it’s life in the oncoming traffic.

It’s not worth doing something unless you were doing something that someone, somewhere, would much rather you weren’t doing.

Go on, prove me wrong. Destroy the fabric of the universe. See if I care.

My experience in Amsterdam is that cyclists ride where the hell they like and aim in a state of rage at all pedestrians while ringing their bell loudly, the concept of avoiding people being foreign to them.

The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head.

Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.

Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.

No legacy is so rich as honesty.

What is normal? Normal was yesterday. If you lose a leg, one day you’re hopping around on one leg, so you know the difference.

Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.

You can’t trample infidels when you’re a tortoise. I mean, all you could do is give them a meaningful look.

It’s not morbid to talk about death. Most people don’t worry about death, they worry about a bad death.

I’m glad a genre writer has got a knighthood, but stunned that it was me.

The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.

I’ve often felt depressed; everyone feels depressed.

Dickens, as you know, never got round to starting his home page.

I am a great fan of science, but I cannot do a quadratic equation.

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.

The human brain is an incredible pattern-matching machine.

Rockets are cool. There’s no getting around that.

Everything is theoretically impossible, until it is done.

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

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.

Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.

The science of today is the technology of tomorrow.

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

Nothing has such power to broaden the mind as the ability to investigate systematically and truly all that comes under thy observation in life.

Nothing I can say or devise, and nothing anybody else can say or devise, is going to be perfect.

Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.

Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value.

You can’t cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water.

Personally, I think the best motto for an educational establishment is: ‘Or Would You Rather Be a Mule?’

I have a living will and I have friends, and I have money and I have hope.

There are things around, and I know where they can be got quite easily, but I quite like waking up to the sunshine.

By the time you’ve reached your sixties, you do know that one day you will die, and knowing that is at least the beginning of wisdom.

The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.

It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.

In the 1950s, the average person saw science as something that solved problems. With the advent of nuclear weapons and pollution, the idealistic aura around scientific research has been replaced by cynicism.

I wore a coat and tie all through high school: my way of being rebellious in the late 1950s.

Back in the 1950s, there was a top-secret program code-named SUNTAN being conducted at a top-secret facility called Skunk Works. Its objective? To develop a liquid-hydrogen-powered spy plane. Because liquid hydrogen is incredibly volatile, early experiments were conducted inside a bomb shelter with eight-foot-thick walls.

You can absolutely drive through an atmospheric bomb test and not be affected.

Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope and confidence.

Change your life today. Don’t gamble on the future, act now, without delay.

Beauty is power; a smile is its sword.

The Internet is literally a network of networks.

Sleep is a waste of time.

You don’t have to know how to build an automobile or a television set or a laptop to know how to use it.

Quality is not an act, it is a habit.

Sometimes thinking too much can destroy your momentum.

We do not remember days, we remember moments.

The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.

You don’t have to be young to learn about technology. You have to feel young.

One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.

People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.

Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.

The Internet is so big, so powerful and pointless that for some people it is a complete substitute for life.

Getting information off the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant.

The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.

It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.

We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid.

Wise men speak because they have something to say; Fools because they have to say something.

Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.

Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.

Life is tough, but it’s tougher if you’re stupid.

However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.

If you’re not first, you’re last.

I never drink water because of the disgusting things that fish do in it.

If you done it, it ain’t bragging.

It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.

If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.

Problems are not the problem; coping is the problem.

A dream doesn’t become reality through magic; it takes sweat, determination and hard work.

If we continue to develop our technology without wisdom or prudence, our servant may prove to be our executioner.

Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.

The computer would do anything you programmed it to do.

In 1973, the only cryptographic technology we could get our hands on was classified.

At some point, you can’t lift this boulder with just your own strength. And if you find that you need to move bigger and bigger boulders up hills, you will need more and more help.

Strength and growth come only through continuous effort and struggle.

That which does not kill us makes us stronger.

There was something amazingly enticing about programming.

What is special about VOIP is that it’s just another thing you can do on the Internet, whereas it is the only thing – or nearly the only thing with the exception of the dial-up modem and fax – that you can do on the public switched telephone network.

We live in a very complex world.

Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.

Believe in yourself! Have faith in your abilities! Without a humble but reasonable confidence in your own powers you cannot be successful or happy.

Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.

Nothing can be done except little by little.

What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?

Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.

If you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.

The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.

Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind.

Lost time is never found again.

You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.

Yesterday’s the past, tomorrow’s the future, but today is a gift. That’s why it’s called the present.

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.

The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.

Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.

Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change.

Time and tide wait for no man.

If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?

Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.

Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

42

Nobody expects the spanish inquisition!

I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I’m awake, you know?

Lot of people are bit by dogs that don’t bite and get shot by guns that aren’t loaded.

Hardware is hard
Software is also hard

You never rise to the occasion: you sink to your level of training.

I’m a wilderness survival expert. I expertly avoid ever needing to survive in the wilderness.

As a former US Marine with a lot of guns people usually think I’m an expert. All I know is I point loud hole at what I want to hit, pull bendy thing slowly and wait for the science magic to do things and it makes me smile.

The truth about a city’s aspirations isn’t found in its vision
It’s found in its budget.

It’s just like a mule. A mule is a docile, patient beast, and he will give you power to pull a plow for decades, but he wants to kill you. He waits for years and years for that rare, opportune moment when he can turn your lights out with a simple kick to the head.

A scientist need not be responsible for the entire world. Social irresponsibility might be a reasonable stance.

Everything went quite well as long as a mechanic from Augsburg and an engineering school professor were permanently on hand.

Will you please issue the following operating instructions to the operator engaged in controlling the Wigner Energy Release. If the highest Uranium or Graphite temperature reaches 300°C, then Mr Fair, Mr Gausden and Mr Robertson are to be informed at once, and the PCE alerted, to be ready to insert plugs and close the chimney base.

If the oceans were filled with liquid sodium, then some crazy scientist would want to build a water-cooled reactor.

Expect to have a fire.

Expect to have a fire.

The most important man in a nuclear submarine? That would be the inconspicuous seaman who goes all around the sub and drips oil in the bearings. You lose one bearing in something like a valve-actuating motor somewhere, and you can lose the whole boat.

HEAT SINK: a small metallic device attached to your CPU that, like the cooling tower at a nuclear-power plant, is the only device standing between safe, reliable system operation and a total core meltdown.

If a man fires at the past from a pistol, the future will fire at him from a cannon.

There we are, learn to live with it

When anxious, uneasy and bad thoughts come, I go to the sea, and the sea drowns them out with its great wide sounds, cleanses me with its noise, and imposes a rhythm upon everything in me that is bewildered and confused.

What’s as big as a house, burns 20 litres of fuel every hour, puts out a shitload of smoke and noise, and cuts an apple into three pieces? A Soviet machine made to cut apples into four pieces!

It is a syntax error to write FORTRAN while not wearing a blue tie.

A monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors, what’s the problem?

If its silly and it works, its still silly

After a tragedy is when all of the offensive jokes show up.

Eye halve a spelling checker
It came with my pea sea.
It plainly marks four my revue
miss steaks eye kin knot sea.

Eye strike a quay and type a word
and weight for it to say
Weather eye yam wrong oar write.
It shows me strait a weigh

The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.

A language that doesn’t affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing

A nuclear bomb always hits ground zero.

Convention is the enemy of interesting

Well, that does it

You’re incapable of that level of incompetence.

When I first came here, this was all swamp. Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built in all the same, just to show them. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up. And that’s what you’re going to get, Lad, the strongest castle in all of England.

99% of the computer problems sit in front of one.

In pursuit of great, we failed to do good

You cannot possibly afford to be this naive

Opposites attract, alikes repel,
Studying electrodynamics is living hell

You buy a hamster to teach your kids about death

If you lower the goals you will always achieve them

There are moments of cromulence

Plausible deniability goes a long way

Science isn’t meant to be easy, it’s meant to be right

Ignorance is the greatest source of risk

The bible was written to make a character more marketable to kids in the ’90s.

They tried to tell me it couldn’t be done
They were right, it can’t be done!

“Legacy code” often differs from its suggested alternative by actually working and scaling.

Yes, of course duct tape works in a near-vacuum. Duct tape works anywhere. Duct tape is magic and should be worshiped.

I guess you could call it a “failure”, but I prefer the term “learning experience”

I started the day with some nothin’ tea. Nothin’ tea is easy to make. First, get some hot water, then add nothin’.

As with most of life’s problems, this one can be solved by a box of pure radiation.

Everything went great right up to the explosion.

I need to ask myself, ‘What would an Apollo astronaut do?’ He’d drink three whiskey sours, drive his Corvette to the launchpad, then fly to the moon in a command module smaller than my Rover. Man those guys were cool.

Things didn’t go exactly as planned, but I’m not dead, so it’s a win.

I tested the brackets by hitting them with rocks. This kind of sophistication is what we interplanetary scientists are known for.

As usual, I’m working with stuff that was deliberately designed not to burn. But no amount of careful design by NASA can get around a determined arsonist with a tank of pure oxygen.

They say no plan survives first contact with implementation. I’d have to agree.

I’m traveling 90 kilometers per day as usual, but I only get 37 kilometers closer to Schiaparelli because Pythagoras is a dick.

On a scale from one to ‘invade Russia in winter,’ how stupid is this plan?

Frankly, I suspect you’re a super-villain. You’re a chemist, you have a German accent, you had a base on Mars…what more can there be?

Astronauts are inherently insane. And really noble.

An ironic death for someone with a leaky space suit: too much oxygen.

They’re not much different from kitchen trash bags, though I’m sure they cost $50,000 because of NASA.

The worst moments in life are heralded by small observations.

It’s a simple idiot-proofing scheme that’s very effective. But no idiot-proofing can overcome a determined idiot.

To them, equipment failure is terrifying. To me, it’s “Tuesday.”

It seemed to work well. The seal looked strong and the resin was rock-hard. I did, however, glue my hand to the helmet.

There aren’t many people who can say they’ve vandalized a three-billion-dollar spacecraft, but I’m one of them.

With no magnetic field, Mars has no defense against harsh solar radiation. If I were exposed to it, I’d get so much cancer, the cancer would have cancer.

A clumsy, awkward success is still a success.

I started with a large rigid sample container (or “plastic box” to people who don’t work at NASA).

We’re as smart as evolution made us. So we’re the minimum intelligence needed to ensure we can dominate our planets.

If you want to play it safe all the time, go join an insurance company.

Hell yeah I’m a botanist! Fear my botany powers!

The planet’s famous red colour is from iron oxide coating everything. So it’s not just a desert. It’s a desert so old it’s literally rusting.

The battery was a lithium thionyl chloride non-rechargeable. I figured that out from some subtle clues: the shape of the connection points, the thickness of the insulation, and the fact that it had “LiSOCl2 NON-RCHRG” written on it.

I am smiling a great smile. The smile of a man who fucked with his car and didn’t break it.

I leaned to Dimitri. “Are all Russians crazy?” “Yes,” he said with a smile. “It is the only way to be Russian and happy at the same time.” “That’s…dark.” “That’s Russian!”

Five a.m. was a largely theoretical concept to me. I knew it existed, but I rarely observed it.

I can’t imagine explaining “sleep” to someone who had never heard of it. Hey, I’m going to fall unconscious and hallucinate for a while. By the way, I spend a third of my time doing this. And if I can’t do it for a while, I go insane and eventually die. No need for concern.

People will trust a reliable criminal more readily than a shady businessman.

I could have finished faster, but I figured caution’s best when setting fire to rocket fuel in an enclosed space.

In other news, It’s seven sols till the harvest, and I still haven’t prepared. For starters, I need to make a hoe. Also, I need to make an outdoor shed for the potatoes. I can’t just pile them up outside. The next major storm would cause The Great Martian Potato Migration.

Blissful unconsciousness became foggy awareness which transitioned into painful reality.

LOG ENTRY: SOL 36 Things are finally going my way. In fact, they’re going great! I have a chance to live after all!
LOG ENTRY: SOL 37 I am fucked, and I’m gonna die!

How did I end up in this situation? I’m the district sales manager of a napkin factor. Why is my daughter in space?

Life is amazingly tenacious. They don’t want to die any more than I do.

My conclusion was “Fuck it.”

I could cut off an arm and eat it, gaining me valuable calories and reducing my overall caloric need.

I used a sophisticated method to remove sections of plastic (hammer), then carefully removed the solid foam insulation (hammer again).

Q. Star Wars or Star Trek? A. Doctor Who.

This all sounds like a great idea with no chance of catastrophic failure. That was sarcasm, by the way.

“Fuck you,” he said to the planet below.

Evolution can be insanely effective when you leave it alone for a few billion years.

Humanity’s first miscommunication with an intelligent alien race. Glad I could be a part of it.

How dare you call me lazy? I’d come up with a scathing retort but, meh, I’m just not motivated.

One thing I have in abundance here are bags. They’re not much different than kitchen trash bags, though I’m sure they cost $50,000 because of NASA.

I knew what I had to do—I just didn’t like it. I’d have to blow the remaining two at the same time.
Please don’t quote that last sentence out of context.

I awoke to the oxygen alarm in my suit. A steady, obnoxious beeping that eventually roused me from a deep and profound desire to just fucking die.

So, in the face of overwhelming odds, I’m left with only one option: I’m going to have to science the shit out of this.

Space is dangerous. It’s what we do here. If you want to play it safe all the time, go join an insurance company.

It’s a terrible thing to have my life depend on my half-assed handiwork.

Damn it, Jim, I’m a botanist, not a chemist!

It’s like sticking your finger in a glass of water to see if it’s hot or cold. You put a tiny part of yourself into the vessel, and when you bring it back out, you’ve gained all the experiences it had.

“Sorry for the delay,” Vogel said. “I was required to make a bomb.”

But I have to save humanity first. Stupid humanity. Getting in the way of my hobbies.

By the way, we also hate it when people . . . call Artemis “the city in space.” We’re not in space; we’re on the moon. I’m mean, technically, we’re in space, but so is London.

God damn it! I yelled to him. Will you stop wining about your problems during my murder!

“I admit it’s fatally dangerous,” Watney said. “But consider this: I’d get to fly around like Iron Man.”

Here’s a woman who had survived the centrifuge, the vomit comet, hard-landing drills and 10k runs. A woman who fixed a simulated MDV computer failure while being spun around upside-down. But she was afraid of a tattoo needle.

My life is now a desperate struggle for survival…with occasional titration.

Godspeed, little taters. My life depends on you.

Presuming I don’t fuck up with the hydrazine, there’s still the matter of burning hydrogen. I’m going to be setting a fire. In the Hab. On purpose. If you asked every engineer at NASA what the worst scenario for the Hab was, they’d all answer “fire.” If you asked them what the result would be, they’d answer “death by fire.

From this, I concluded the following:
1. I’ve been in a dust storm for several sols.
2. Shit.

That’s pretty much a rule in electronics: You never get diodes right on the first try.

The worst moments in life are heralded by small observations. The tiny lump on your side that wasn’t there before. Coming home to your wife and seeing two wineglasses in the sink. Anytime you hear “We interrupt this program…”

I got bounced around a lot, but I’m a well-honed machine in times of crisis. As soon as the rover toppled, I curled into a ball and cowered. That’s the kind of action hero I am.

Half-ration for dinner. All I accomplished today was thinking up a plan that’ll kill me, and that doesn’t take much energy.

You started my training by buying me a beer. For breakfast. Germans are awesome.

“How long will the patch take?” Venkat asked. “Should be pretty much instant,” Jack answered. “Watney entered the hack earlier today, and we confirmed it worked. We updated Pathfinder’s OS without any problems. We sent the rover patch, which Pathfinder rebroadcast. Once Watney executes the patch and reboots the rover, we should get a connection.” “Jesus, what a complicated process,” Venkat said. “Try updating a Linux server sometime,” Jack said.

If my neighborhood were wine, connoisseurs would describe it as “shitty, with overtones of failure and poor life decisions.”

I didn’t want to spend any more time inside the mind of an economist. It was dark and disturbing.

And if you want to make babies, somebody’s got to get fucked.

I’ll need to trick out a rover. Basically it’ll have to be a mobile Hab. I’ll pick Rover 2 as my target. We have a certain bond, after I spent two days in it during the Great Hydrogen Scare of Sol 37.

And like all good plans, it required a crazy Ukrainian guy.

Something very hot and very explodey had happened

Now on to my next task: sitting around with nothing to do for twelve hours. I better get started!

Ever set up a camping tent? From the inside? While wearing a suit of armor? It was a pain in the ass.

It’s all part of the life-cycle of an economy. First it’s lawless capitalism until that starts to impede growth. Next comes regulation, law enforcement, and taxes. After that: public benefits and entitlements. Then, finally, overexpenditure and collapse.

Sometimes, the stuff we all hate ends up being the only way to do things.

I’ll be playing with high-voltage power tomorrow. Can’t imagine anything going wrong with that!

All my brilliant plans foiled by thermodynamics. Damn you, Entropy!

If I make any mistakes, there’ll be nothing left but the “Mark Watney Memorial Crater” where the Hab once stood.

I washed it down with some Martian coffee. That’s my name for “hot water with a caffeine pill dissolved in it.” I ran out of real coffee months ago.

Fun fact: This is exactly how the Apollo 1 crew died. Wish me luck!

I’m pretty much fucked.

I can see it now: me holding a map, scratching my head, trying to figure out how I ended up on Venus.

Software engineers are sneaky bastards when it comes to data management.

Just once I’d like something to go as planned, ya know?

“Well, you’re not alone anymore, buddy,” I say. “Neither of us are.”

That’s the thing about crying yourself to sleep. When you wake up, the problems are still there.

It’s about as hot and loud as a volcano during mating season

The steering wheel. To go left or anti left.

Baseball is 90% mental and the other half is physical.

Remember the 5 D’s of Dodgeball: Dodge, Duck, Dip, Dive and Dodge

I don’t know what the problem is, so lets do some exploratory surgery!

As I was saying, before I rudely interrupted myself.

Why reinvent the wheel when you can just change the tire instead.

Life is like Tetris; if it doesn’t fit, just flip it over

I’ve always been a proponent of the idea that technology doesn’t matter to game design. The example I always like to point out is ‘Tetris,’ one of the greatest games ever made.

When I walk into a room, you’d think I was one of those long, straight Tetris pieces because everyone’s just like, Oh great, you’re here! We’ve been waiting for you to show up.

Java is like a variant of the game of Tetris in which none of the pieces can fill gaps created by the other pieces, so all you can do is pile them up endlessly.

If Tetris has taught me anything, it’s that errors pile up and accomplishments disappear.

Tetris teaches you that when you try to fit in you’ll disappear

All the science is either physics or stamp collecting

There is no quote

It’s easier to be a famous pilot than it is to be a good pilot.

Beautiful things are still beautiful, even if they have mud on them.

Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.

“Tell me Dr. Floyd what has happened to American bravery?”
“It’s alive and well thank you. What happened to Russian common sense?”

DNS is the root of all problems

The resistor is the wrong way around!

If a full load of 12 gauge 00 Buck can’t solve a problem then the problem is unsolvable.

It just works

I believe everything that has been taught to me can be taught to others if they’re willing to learn

Fair. Fair statement, I think.

As the well-known Italian saying goes, “the 9th time better f*cking work”

Sometimes, the best inventions are the ones that have already been invented

The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.

Streets full of water – please advise.

It’s a boy.

Jumping Jehovah James that’s a scimtar he’s got.

The strange hotdog wizard was clearly sick of seeing me succeed

One smile can hide a thousand tears

They’re not abandoned, they’re done.

The engines failed to shut down, sending the probe into lithobraking trajectory.

[…] If they hit 90% full, you should consider your own personal pants to be on actual fire, and react with an appropriate amount of immediacy to remedy that.

“You cant teach people how to make a firearm”
“Its not a firearm, its an explosive!”

I’m not [a] mad [scientist], I’m just disappointed.

“Don’t worry, that happens sometimes”
“Of course it happens sometimes, it just did”

If you are questioning your belief daily, maybe pick another belief

“Magic’s just science that we don’t understand yet.”
— Arthur C. Clarke
“It’s still magic even if you know how it’s done.”
— Terry Pratchett
Therefore, I reason, Science = Magic

The real secret to success is enthusiasm

Work hard in silence. Let success make the noise

Success is the result of small efforts, repeated

Success isn’t overnight. Its when every day you get a little better than the day before.

The best revenge is massive success

The poisonous world flows into my mouth like water into that of a drowning man

There’s nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself.

Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.

Man is the only kind of varmint sets his own trap, baits it, then steps in it.

It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.

The language of friendship is not words but meanings.

Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.

Never look back unless you are planning to go that way.

Things do not change; we change.

Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.

Be not simply good – be good for something.

An early-morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.

The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.

Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.

Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.

Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.

I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.

Our life is frittered away by detail… simplify, simplify.

Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.

You’re only given a little spark of madness. You mustn’t lose it.

I like nonsense; it wakes up the brain cells.

Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.

There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.

It’s not a job if you love what you’re doing

For five seconds, I was God. Then, I was a dead man.

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

One day, somewhere in the future, my work will be quoted!

You should try using smaller words that mean more

How are we going to get to the Moon if we can’t talk between two or three buildings?

If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.

A poor appetite for books eventually leads to intellectual malnutrition.

Well done is better than well said.

Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one.

Scientists will save us all.

There is no courtesy in science.

Physics is the basic science. One can easily argue that all other sciences are specialized aspects of physics.

When gravity calls, something falls.

There is no gravity. The earth sucks.

Ah, gravity: thou art a heartless b*tch.

All science hangs together. It’s one piece. If you want to stop one part, you’ve got to stop it all.

Engineering is merely the slow younger brother of physics.

I don’t care how you get potassium out of kelp; I want to know how kelp gets potassium out of the sea.

Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive.

Don’t judge each day only by the harvest you reap, but also by the seeds you sow.

The point of chemistry is not to be barbaric, the point of chemistry is to *play god*

Don’t ask me for funding

We’ve got an 80-90% yield already and all I’ve done is weigh out one reagent

You can’t treat your life’s work as a part time job

Too much thinking leads to doubts

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

My mind is like a browser: 30 tabs open, 5 tabs are frozen and I have no idea where the music is coming from.

Hahahahahahaha

Learn to spoken

Learn to spelling

An educated guess, but a guess nonetheless

With patience, everything goes faster

I didn’t fall in love, I gently descended!

Before you say anything, I would like to remind you that I’m holding an ax.

So, summing up, we’re wrong about everything.

The fact that I’m upright is a credit to our French press.

Don’t play dumb with me, you’re not smart enough.

I know all about poisons, Watson, I’ve become an expert on them. But over the past few years, I’ve come to understand that there is nothing on this planet so toxic as guilt.

Is it safe? No. Is it effective? I’m not even sure yet.

It’s never too late to be wise.

We aren’t planning on doing anything about it

The only thing I really know is that I know nothing.

Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet has free access to the sum of all human knowledge.

Violence is the mark of the amateur.

Everything works in Theory, I’m thinking about moving there.

Big Iron is nothing compared to Small Soviet Steel

My brain got me in here, it can get me out

You can give a man a hammer, but you can’t determine what he does with it.

I’m strong to the “finich”, ’cause I eats me spinach.

If you always do what you always did, you will always get what you always got.

Hiking is like walking but there is a big hill in the way

Probable death to escape certain death

I also constantly wonder if I have had either too much, or not enough caffeine

Probably the toughest time in anyone’s life is when you have to murder a loved one because they’re the devil.

Friday afternoon, I’m walking home from school and I’m watching some men build a new house.
And the guy hammering on the roof calls me a paranoid little weirdo. In Morse code.

Close enough for government work.

Even when they do something wrong, they don’t do it right.

There’s a seahorse in my Coke!

This is too much carbonated milk

I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.

A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you.

To avoid criticism say nothing, do nothing, be nothing.

God will not look you over for medals, degrees or diplomas but for scars.

Every man is a damn fool for at least five minutes every day; wisdom consists in not exceeding the limit.

He who does not understand your silence will probably not understand your words.

Never explain―your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe you anyway.

The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one.

There is no failure except in no longer trying.

It does not take much strength to do things, but it requires a great deal of strength to decide what to do.

The object of teaching a child is to enable him to get along without a teacher.

The love we give away is the only love we keep.

If men could only know each other, they would neither idolize nor hate.

I believe in the hands that work, in the brains that think, and in the hearts that love…I believe in sunshine, fresh air, friendship, calm sleep, beautiful thoughts.

The world is moving so fast these days that the man who says it can’t be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it.

Self-discipline is the ability to make yourself do what you should do, when you should do it, whether you feel like it or not.

I would rather be able to appreciate things I cannot have than to have things I am not able to appreciate.

The best way to prepare for life is to begin to live.

No man needs a vacation so much as the man who has just had one.

I do not read a book; I hold a conversation with the author.

The final proof of greatness lies in being able to endure criticism without resentment.

Happiness is a habit—cultivate it.

True life lies in laughter, love and work.

Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped.

Know what you want to do, hold the thought firmly, and do every day what should be done, and every sunset will see you that much nearer the goal.

The line between failure and success is so fine. . . that we are often on the line and do not know it.

Art is not a thing; it is a way.

Folks who never do any more than they get paid for, never get paid for any more than they do

This will never be a civilized country until we expend more money for books than we do for chewing gum.

If put to the pinch, an ounce of loyalty is worth a pound of cleverness.

If you can not answer a man’s argument, all is not lost; you can still call him vile names.

The recipe for perpetual ignorance is: Be satisfied with your opinions and content with your knowledge.

It is easy to get everything you want, provided you first learn to do without the things you cannot get.

Constant effort and frequent mistakes are the stepping stones to genius.

We awaken in others the same attitude of mind we hold toward them.

How many a man has thrown up his hands at a time when a little more effort, a little more patience would have achieved success?

The supernatural is the natural not yet understood.

Many a man’s reputation would not know his character if they met on the street.

Men are punished by their sins, not for them.

A conservative is a man who is too cowardly to fight and too fat to run.

Laughter is higher than all pain.

It’s a fine thing to have ability, but the ability to discover ability in others is the true test.

No

A retentive memory may be a good thing, but the ability to forget is the true token of greatness.

Responsibility is the price of freedom.

The stronger a man is, the more gentle he can afford to be

The sculptor produces the beautiful statue by chipping away such parts of the marble block as are not needed – it is a process of elimination.

Football: A sport that bears the same relation to education that bullfighting does to agriculture.

Men are only as great as they are kind.

We work to become, not to acquire.

A failure is a man who has blundered but is not able to cash in on the experience.

Little minds are interested in the extraordinary; great minds in the commonplace.

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade

Cultivate only the habits that you are willing should master you.

Friendship, like credit, is highest when it is not used.

No one gets very far unless he accomplishes the impossible at least once a day.

The happiness of this life depends less on what befalls you than the way in which you take it.

Opportunities for education should be within the reach of every individual, not for the lucky few.

Life is unrest, and its passage at best a zigzag course, that only straightens to a direct line when viewed across the years.

Professor [John] Tyndall once said the finest inspiration he ever received was from an old man who could scarcely read. This man acted as his servant. Each morning the old man would knock on the door of the scientist and call, ‘Arise, Sir: it is near seven o’clock and you have great work to do today.

Character is the result of two things, mental attitude, and the way we spend our time. It is what we think and what we do that make us what we are.

Live truth instead of professing it.

Positive anything is better than negative nothing.

Art is the beautiful way of doing things. Science is the effective way of doing things. Business is the economic way of doing things.

Business, to be successful, must be based on science, for demand and supply are matters of mathematics, not guesswork.

The graveyards are full of people the world could not do without.

In these days, a man who says a thing cannot be done, quite apt to be interrupted by some idiot doing it.

Do not dump your woes upon people — keep the sad story of your life to yourself. Troubles grow by recounting them.

Responsibilities gravitate to the person who can shoulder them.

Sympathy, Knowledge and Poise seem to be the three ingredients that are most needed in forming the Gentleman.

The typical accountant is a man, past middle age, spare, wrinkled, intelligent, cold, passive, non-committal, with eyes like a cod-fish; polite in contact but at the same time unresponsive, calm and damnably composed as a concrete post or a plaster of Paris cast; a petrification with a heart of feldspar and without charm of the friendly germ, minus bowels, passion or a sense of humor. Happily they never reproduce and all of them finally go to Hell.

Work to become, not to acquire.

The ineffable joy of forgiving and being forgiven forms an ecstasy that might well arouse the envy of the gods.

And now for something completely different

[Citation Needed]

A good reaction vessel always has an opening. If it doesn’t, it will have one soon, one way or the other

Mispronouncing words is a sign of reading a lot

The only chemistry that should be done in a bedroom is not one that many chemists get anyway

I was smart enough to make a fireball outside, but not smart enough to not make a fireball.

You don’t win the nobel prize for solving easy problems

Cascade over-current failure is always an option

This feels cheap, because it is cheap.

There are few thing more entertaining than a very British man in mild discomfort

It seems that the tinfoil hat wearers are actually on to something.

I’ve been accused of being creative.
I’m just me.

You can put down a bad book; you can avoid listening to bad music; but you cannot miss the ugly tower block opposite your house.

If you are ever trying to get the eye out of a fish, and it blinks, it may be a lion.

Medical advice is to put nothing smaller than your elbow into your ear.

We can see the moon passing by the window and it looks what I consider to be a correct size.

Ah, thank you babe.

Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word ‘No’.

There is no such thing as fish!

I recognize that the council has made a decision, but given that it’s a stupid decision I’ve elected to ignore it

If two trains meet on the same track neither is allowed to continue until one of them has passed.

Gordon doesn’t need to hear that, he’s a trained professional

If you want to camouflage an airplane, simply paint it as a ship!

Pluto is not a planet, its a Disney character

CAUTION: Hot things are hot!

Warning: Widget might display things other than quotes!

Sometimes, it doesn’t just work

There is nothing funny about making people laugh

It’s a mans job to protect his bitch from seagulls

The one I can vaguely remember, I’m 90% sure, is a 100% correct!

Every defect gets respect

I never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude.

Men profess to be lovers of music, but for the most part they give no evidence in their opinions and lives that they have heard it.

When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest.

Music is perpetual, and only the hearing is intermittent.

The pleasure we feel in music springs from the obedience which is in it.

Listen to music religiously, as if it were the last strain you might hear.

You cannot hear music and noise at the same time.

I love a bar that is so low that I can crawl over it.

I have no training legally….. But I am right.

This is more annoying than my microwave!

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.

Scientists conducted an experiment on how far frogs can leap after being startled by a loud noise.
1. A frog was startled by a klaxon and the jump measured 44 inches.
2. Scientists removed one foreleg. The startled frog jumped 33 inches.
3. Another foreleg removed and the startled frog jumped 22 inches.
4. One rear leg removed and the startled frog jumped 12 inches.
5. The other rear leg removed and the startled frog didn’t move forward 1 inch.
6. Scientists deduced that a frog with all four legs removed becomes deaf.

I don’t want to be relatable, I want to be trustworthy

Success isn’t a result of spontaneous combustion. You must set yourself on fire.

Mile for mile, elevators are the safest form of travel.

Less a shot in the dark, more a duel at dawn.

I’ll make it my number three priority!

Step 1: read all the instructions

With patience, everything goes faster

“That’s tomorrow problem”
“How did you think we arrived at today”

Int is just blue dex

One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.

Slow progress is lasting progress

According to a popular legend, during a tour of NASA headquarters in 1961, John F. Kennedy encountered a janitor mopping the floors.
“Why are you working so late?” Kennedy asked.
“Mr President,” the janitor responded, “I’m helping put a man on the moon.”

Rocketry
For when gravity is keeping you down

God help us, were in the hands of engineers!

I’m not negative, I’m realistic.

Nuclear weapons may be a currency of peace….
But what a terrible price.

People think it must be fun to be a super genius, but they don’t realize how hard it is to put up with all the idiots in the world.

It’s not that we deny climate change, it’s more like we ignore it to stay competitive

Balloon shaped tanks, the Zeppelins of the floor

As long as you know which end of the screwdriver to hammer on, you’ll be fine.

A camel is a horse designed by a committee

There’s no nondestructive test for indestructibility.

Nobody likes a naked singularity.

Nature will castigate those who don’t masticate.

Certain things are still going to take all week no matter how half you ass them.

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

The line between variety and chaos, is a fine one.

People have interesting relationships with monoliths

Never half-ass two things, whole-ass one thing.

我的中文不好

To give real service, you must add something which cannot be bought or measured with money

What kind of man would live where there is no daring?
I don’t believe in taking foolish chances, but nothing can be accomplished without taking any chance at all.

Art without engineering is dreaming.
Engineering without art is calculating.

I love cheese, It’s like butter

Martin Scorsese calls modern movies theme park rides, and modern movies respond by shaking your chair around and covering you in fake snow.

How does it feel to have lived long enough to see all your favorite franchises go down in flames?

I fear not a man who sold thousands of games, I fear a man who sold one game a thousand times.

Don’t stress it, just try it.

As soon as you see a bug, you fix it. Do not continue on. If you don’t fix your bugs, your new code will be built on a buggy codebase and ensure an unstable foundation.

One problem solved is another hundred revealed

Don’t shoot, I’ve got so many year to live!

The welsh language, clearly invented by someone losing at scrabble.

Guns are magical. I point at creature and it dies.

If you are attempting to keep me quiet on the subject you’ve just made a horrendous error

In my house we don’t throw away perfectly good food.
We put it in the back of the refrigerator for a few weeks until it goes bad and then we throw it out.

Please don’t dump radioactive waste in the municipal trash.

Different people are different

It’s not good, but its not that bad.

I’d call for all the chemists who’ve ever worked with a hexanitro compound to raise their hands, but that might be assuming too much about the limb-to-chemist ratio.

[…] and you’re left with crystals of pure CL-20 soaking in liquid TNT, a situation that will heighten your awareness of the fleeting nature of life.

One eyewitness described the incident by stating, “The concrete was on fire!”

If I’m running, try to keep up.

Will it work? You only know after the experiment!

The art of wondering makes life worth living

Don’t expect something that never happened

The trick is to play music louder than your thoughts.

With great processing power comes great responsibility

If a person builds it a person can break it

So now you see that evil will always triumph because good is dumb.

Never confuse education with intelligence, you can have a PhD and still be an idiot.

There’s ALWAYS more room to store stuff on the Z axis, if you’re paying attention.

When life gives you lemons, you’ve run out of oranges

Sweet biscuits, I’m alive

I’m confused, are you an idiot, or do you think I am.

Introducing the elephants, as if donkeys weren’t enough

New and improved!

And now for something completely different.

In every walk with nature
one receives far more than he seeks.

The last 10% of a job takes as much effort as the first 90%
Which is why it’s so important to always give 110%

The last 10% of a job takes as much energy as the first 90%
Which is why it’s so important to always give 110%

Quantum mechanics is kinda weird

More bacon, child!

There is no point! this is a pointless exercise! we are whining away our finite time before the grave!

You can have anything you want, so long as it’s in moderation.

Any sufficiently crude magic is indistinguishable from technology

Who as a child did not lie in bed filled with a slowly mounting terror while sinking into the idea of a universe that goes on and on, for ever and ever?

Safety was later invented by John H. Safety in 1959

How are we going to land?
To the best of our ability.

“What’s the worst can happen?”
“Let’s find out and keep notes!”

Voltage does not flow, nor does it go.

I do 7 things at a time, I do them very well, and then I move on.

We’re Germans, so it must be correct in the end.

Aircraft design is aggressively safe

The cats, respiratorily failed

Creativity is the art of hiding one’s influences

I was looking forward to that plot twist

The O-ring will not function at that temperature!

Main bus B undervolt

The wrist is like the achilles heel of the body

Good golly, miss molly!

I made a plan that was fool proof. Too bad it isn’t moron proof.

The maniacal laugh is not just a luxury, it’s a necessity

For some, the maniacal laugh is not just a luxury, it’s a necessity

Talent is like electricity.
We don’t understand electricity, we use it.

Falling off a bicycle is like dying: You will.

Curdled milk, of a peculiar kind, made after a Bulgarian recipe and called “yaghurt,” is now a Parisian fad and is believed to be a remedy against growing old.
A correspondent who has tried it, says he would prefer to die young.

If C gives you enough rope to hang yourself, Forth is a flamethrower crawling with cobras.

Bits are bits, provided you have all of them

In my defense, I was left unsupervised

Two is one
One is none

This is the future.
To find out what I’m talking about, let’s go, to the past.

Here’s something I’m not looking forward to, all of it!

We have a T-Rex!

The true beauty of a self-inquiring sentient universe is lost on those who elect to walk the intellectually vacuous path of comfortable paranoid fantasies.

Knowledge is useless without wisdom

Wisdom is useless without knowledge

There are only two hard things in computer science: Cache invalidation, naming things, and off by one errors

The space shuttle was designed, at least in part, to broaden our knowledge of the universe. To scientists, the vehicle was a tool; to engineers, it was their creation.

To know what you know and what you do not know, that is true knowledge.

To know, is to know that you know nothing. That is the meaning of true knowledge.

To know that we know what we know, and to know that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.

We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge.

Without knowledge action is useless and knowledge without action is futile.

A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.

Knowledge is power. Information is liberating. Education is the premise of progress, in every society, in every family.

Opinion is the medium between knowledge and ignorance.

Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing.

To acquire knowledge, one must study; but to acquire wisdom, one must observe.

Knowledge is power. Information is power. The secreting or hoarding of knowledge or information may be an act of tyranny camouflaged as humility.

Where is all the knowledge we lost with information?

Wisdom is the right use of knowledge.
To know is not to be wise.
Many men know a great deal, and are all the greater fools for it. There is no fool so great a fool as a knowing fool.
But to know how to use knowledge is to have wisdom.

Many new technologies come with a promise to change the world, but the world refuses to cooperate.

Successful engineering is all about understanding how things break or fail.

The definition of ‘safe’ is not strictly an engineering term; it’s a societal term. Does it mean absolutely no loss of life? Does it mean absolutely no contamination with radiation? What exactly does ‘safe’ mean?

An over-reliance on past successes is a sure blueprint for future failures.

Engineering is achieving function while avoiding failure.

Any design, whether it’s for a ship or an airplane, must be done in anticipation of potential failures.

Everything we do is designed, whether we’re producing a magazine, a website, or a bridge. Design is really the creative invention that designs everything.

I’m a firm believer that no matter how small an object is, you can find interesting things out about it and its history.

It is really want, rather than need, that drives the process of technological evolution.

As long as there are things to wonder about, there are stories to be written about them.
That makes me happy, because writing about things seems to be my thing.

Read and write with a sensitive ear. The craft of writing is very important. Practice the craft.

For as long as I can remember, I have been fascinated by things large and small. I wanted to know what made my watch tick, my radio play, and my house stand. I wanted to know who invented the bottle cap and who designed the bridge. I guess from early on I wanted to be an engineer.

Although engineers want always to make everything better, they cannot make anything perfect. This basic characteristic flaw of the products of the profession’s practitioners is what drives change and makes achievement a process rather than simply a goal.

Luxury, not necessity, is the mother of invention. Every artifact is somewhat wanting in its function, and that is what drives its evolution.

The same aspirations to celebrate and uplift the spirit that drove the Egyptians to build the pyramids are still driving us. The things we’re doing differ only in magnitude.

It seems to be a law of design that for every advantage introduced through redesign, there is an accompanying unintended disadvantage.

All conventional wisdom has an element of truth to it, but good design requires more than an element of truth – it requires an ensemble of correct assumptions and valid calculations.

No design, no matter how common or seemingly insignificant, is without its adamant critics as well as its ardent admirers.

It has been said, by engineers themselves, that given enough money, they can accomplish virtually anything: send men to the moon, dig a tunnel under the English Channel. There’s no reason they couldn’t likewise devise ways to protect infrastructure from the worst hurricanes, earthquakes and other calamities, natural and manmade.

We can’t simply blame the engineers when things go wrong because, no matter how well they plan, things don’t always go according to plan.

I relax by looking at things and reading about things. Even the simplest thing can reveal a great deal about the world around us. It relaxes me greatly to sit back with my feet up and look around my study at the everyday things that surround me.

Indeed, an engineer designing a structure is not unlike an artist painting one. Both start with nothing but talent, experience, and inspiration. The fresh piece of paper on the drawing board is as blank as the newly stretched piece of canvas.

Relying on nothing but scientific knowledge to produce an engineering solution is to invite frustration at best and failure at worst.

Design is nothing if not decision making.

Many of the familiar little things that we use every day have typically evolved over a period of time to a state of familiarity. They balance form and function, elegance and economy, success and failure in ways that are not only acceptable, but also admirable.

Life can be a challenge, it’s never easy when there’s so much on the line. But you and I can make a difference. Just look inside, and you will find the Pokémon.

If someone ever calls you a “nerd” on the internet, in a derogatory fashion, simply use the same technology he is using to gently remind him of the group of people that actually designed it
Him calling you a nerd is only possible because of the talented nerds of the world

As the size of an explosion increases, the number of social situations it is incapable of solving approaches zero.

I’m like lead, slightly toxic but otherwise inert

Normal people use audio hardware to listen to music, audiophiles use music to listen the audio hardware

“That doesn’t make any sense”
“Does anything”

Work smart, not hard

You see, the thing about being a corn farmer, is that you don’t just grow the corn, you grow with the corn.

There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.

Well-informed people know it is impossible to transmit the voice over wires and that, were it possible to do so, the thing would be of no practical value

I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won’t last out the year.

The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?

If I had thought about it, I wouldn’t have done the experiment. The literature was full of examples that said you can’t do this.

Professor Goddard does not know the relation between action and reaction and the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react.
He seems to lack the basic knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.

Drill for oil? You mean drill into the ground to try and find oil? You’re crazy.

Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.

Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value.

Everything that can be invented has been invented.

While working one should be committed and not just involved, in a bacon and egg breakfast as an example: The chicken is involved but the pig is committed.

Did we really fight our way to the top of the food chain to become vegetarians?

Las Vegas is a town built on bad mathematics.

Be safety conscious. 80% of people are caused by accidents.

WARNING! The dates in a Calendar are closer than they appear.

Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and nowhere to go.

Man has always assumed that he is more intelligent than dolphins because he has achieved so much –the wheel, New York, wars and so on — while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time.
But, conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man — for precisely the same reasons.

I’m a simple man trying to drive a simple photochemical ring closure reaction. What could be more simple?

Dr. Frankenstein reanimated the Dead.
Only a Monster would kill the living.

Anyone who’s tells you they’re certain about how the world works is either a mathematician or they’re selling something

History is fractal

Life isn’t measured by the number of breaths we take , but by the moments that take our breathe away

Economics is just astrology with uglier graphs.

Look At You, Sailing Through The Air Majestically, Like An Eagle…Piloting A Blimp.

How Are You Holding Up? Because I’m A Potato.

Man, are you hungry? I haven’t eaten since later this afternoon.

I think my body’s getting used to these 36-hour days.

The world trembled at the sound of our rockets, well they will tremble again, at the sound of our silence

Remember, the S in IoT stands for “security”!

The failure modes of a spanner are far fewer than that of a helicopter.

Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.

A lie told often enough becomes the truth.

Remember that all is but opinion and conceit

Spooky math at a distance

Only entropy comes easy

If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.

We can neither confirm nor deny the existence of the information requested but, hypothetically, if such data were to exist, the subject matter would be classified, and could not be disclosed.

Cause of death: Presumed dead

Very little gets in the way of human error

The fact that no one has ever hijacked a plane with a pair of nail scissors is a demonstration of the effectiveness of confiscating them at airport security.

Debt is like rocket fuel, it can either bring you to the moon, or end like the N-1

Rules are there to make you think before you break them

Don’t eat it!

я не говорю по-русски

The degree of failure is in direct proportion to the effort expended and to the need for success.

A mosquito was heard to complain:
“A chemist has poisoned my brain!”
The cause of his sorrow
was para-dichloro-
diphenyltrichloroethane

Once you pull the pin, Mr. Grenade isn’t your friend anymore.

A man must love a thing very much if he not only practices it without any hope of fame and money, but even practices it without any hope of doing it well.

There’s a lot to be said for putting competing non-existent services in the same RF band, I suppose….

Oh God, please make the world linear and Gaussian, just for today.

Happiness is the derivative (in the mathematical sense) of progress.

There once was an old man from Esser,
Who’s knowledge grew lesser and lesser.
It at last grew so small,
He knew nothing at all,
And now he’s a College Professor.

It is so easy to miss pretty trivial solutions to problems deemed complicated.
The goal of a scientist is to find an interesting problem, and live off it for a while.
The goal of an engineer is to evade interesting problems.

For myself I am an optimist – it does not seem to be much use being anything else.

A ship is safe in a harbor. But a harbor is not what a ship is for.

Only in growth, reform, and change, paradoxically enough, is true security to be found.

I have learned the novice can often see things that the expert overlooks.
All that is necessary is not to be afraid of making mistakes or of appearing naive.

In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few.

How Specs Live Forever

The US Standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That’s an exceedingly odd number. Why was that gauge used? Because that’s the way they built them in England, and the US railroads were built by English expatriates. Why did the English people build them like that? Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that’s the gauge they used.

Why did “they” use that gauge then? Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing. Okay! Why did the wagons use that odd wheel spacing? Well, if they tried to use any other spacing the wagons would break on some of the old, long distance roads, because that’s the spacing of the old wheel ruts.

So who built these old rutted roads? The first long distance roads in Europe were built by Imperial Rome for the benefit of their legions. The roads have been used ever since. And the ruts? The initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagons, were first made by Roman war chariots. Since the chariots were made for or by Imperial Rome they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing.

Thus, we have the answer to the original questions. The United State standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches derives from the original specification for an Imperial Roman army war chariot. Specs and Bureaucracies live forever. So, the next time you are handed a specification and wonder what horse’s ass came up with it, you may be exactly right. Because the Imperial Roman chariots were made to be just wide enough to accommodate the back-ends of two war horses.

Giving up is the ultimate tragedy.

A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any other invention in human history, with the possible exception of handguns and tequila.

There were in this country two very large monopolies.

The larger of the two had the following record: the Vietnam War,
Watergate, double-digit inflation, fuel and energy shortages, bankrupt
airlines, and the 8-cent postcard.

The second was responsible for such things as the transistor, the solar
cell, lasers, synthetic crystals, high fidelity stereo recording, sound
motion pictures, radio astronomy, negative feedback, magnetic tape,
magnetic “bubbles”, electronic switching systems, microwave radio and
TV relay systems, information theory, the first electrical digital
computer, and the first communications satellite.

Guess which one got to tell the other how to run the telephone business?

When flying at such altitudes, with strong winds changing direction and speed with altitude, you were lucky if your bombs at least hit the ground

The best argument against Democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.

The only good way to solve a differential equation is to know the answer already.

Don’t train alone, it’ll only reinforce your mistakes.

How could we have seen this coming?
Well it turns out, by reading a book!

Ideas are worthless if you can’t turn them into reality

Ideas are worthless, execution is everything

Ideas are worthless unless we act on them.

Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.

Speed never killed anyone, suddenly becoming stationary, that’s what gets you

The job of a pilot is not to land the aircraft, but to land it in a way that allows it to take off again

Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.

Obviously, this blue part here is the land.

I am a certified expert in falling upwards

What’s he up to now? It’ll be something devious and over-complicated. He’d get dizzy if he tried to walk in a straight line.

Fate is like a caged gorilla. It will pelt you with dung if you mock it.

Mal: But say you do it. You kill me. What then?
Dobson: I dunno. I imagine I’ll get a hobby or something.

What a terrible day to be literate

I don’t need the threat of Hell to be a good person.

How hard can it be?

If you are clinically insane, by which I mean you wake up in the morning, and you think you are an onion, this is your car

Hollywood movies are designed for 15-year-old youths from North Dakota who, intellectually speaking, are on equal terms with a British zoo animal.

These people go on to tell us that mobile phones will cook our children’s ears, that long-haul flights will fill our legs with thrombosis and that meat is murder. They want an end to all deaths – and it doesn’t stop there. They don’t even see why anyone should have to suffer from a spot of light bruising.
Every week, as we filmed my television chat show, food would be spilt on the floor, and every week the recording would have to be stopped so it could be swept away. ‘What would happen,’ said the man from health and safety, ‘if a cameraman were to slip over?’ ‘Well,’ I would reply, ‘he’d probably have to stand up again.’

She can take a year to read something, whereas I like a book that becomes more important in my life that life itself.
When I was in the middle of ‘Red Storm Rising’ by Tom Clancy – which was not selected for the Man Booker shortlist – you could have taken my liver out and fed it to the dog. And I wouldn’t have noticed.

Why is the forecast so bland? Why instead of ‘stormy’ don’t they just say the sea’s ‘a frothing maelstrom of terror and hopelessness’?

We are going to have to stop penalizing people for making that most human of gestures- a mistake

I wore a groove in the kitchen floor with endless trips to the fridge, hoping against hope that I had somehow missed a plateful of cold sausages on the previous 4,000 excursions. Then, for no obvious reason, I decided to buy a footstool.

Like every big organisation these days, the BBC is obsessed with the wellbeing of those who set foot on its premises. Studios must display warning notices if there is real glass on the set, and the other day I was presented with a booklet explaining how to use a door. I am not kidding.

No really. If you only have seven years left, that means the Reaper will be dropping round for tea and buns in about 61,000 hours from now. You therefore shouldn’t be wasting time by pootling to the garden centre at walking pace. So come on, grandad. The clock’s ticking. Pedal to the metal. Or you’ll be in your flowerbed before the plants you bought.

Lego, however, is always opened and then left lying around so adults have something to tread on when they are prowling around around the house at two in the morning, in bare feet, looking for the source of a noise.

…it seemed appropriate that I should develop some kind of illness. This is a good idea when you are at a loose end because everything, up to and including herpes, is better than being bored.

This is what should be meant by people power. The power for people to choose which of the government’s petty, silly, pointless laws they want to obey. And which they don’t.

Let’s be perfectly clear, shall we. The fox is not a little orange puppy dog with doe eyes and a waggly tail. It’s a disease-ridden wolf with the morals of a psychopath and the teeth of a great white shark.

and although the W came along in the tenth century, modern Germans still seem to manage perfectly well by using a V instead. Except when the German managing director of Aston Martin tries to say ‘vanquish’.

In the olden days it was easy to make a television work.You plugged an aerial cable into the back, then bashed the top with your fist until, eventually, Hughie Green stopped jumping up and down.

Do they think that, if left to our own devices, we’d all park on zebra crossings for a year? If they do, it means they don’t trust us. And if they don’t trust us, then the relationship has broken down and it’s time for some civil unrest.

Maybe it’s an attention-span thing. Music is now the backdrop to our lives rather than an event in itself. We put on a CD while we’re doing something else. I can’t remember the last time I put on an album and listened to it in a chair with my eyes closed.
(Denneth note: I read this only moments after casually putting on some music to add a backdrop to feeding these quotes into my website, make of that what you will)

Even NASA’s most respected engineers have admitted to me, in private, that designing and building a supersonic airliner was a greater technological challenge than putting a man on the moon.

Mix an anorexic body with a heart made of pure fire and you are going to go with a savagery that’s hard to explain.

To address this, we must wage a war on the militants. First, we must make it an offence, punishable by many years in jail, to ride a bicycle in anything other than what I like to call home clothes. Cycling shops selling gel for your bottom crack and outfits with padded gussets will be raided by the police and the owners prosecuted. This way, cyclists will be stripped of their uniforms and made to look like human beings.

Everything I have ever bought is in my car. People say it’s a skip and disgusting, and refuse to get in there. That’s one advantage. Another is that last week, I needed a headache pill and it was simply a case of rummaging under the seat until I found one. Because it’s so full of junk, I always have everything I could conceivably need. A Biro, a refreshing drink, lots of loose change, all sorts of maps, an iron lung, and so on. I kid you not. There’s even a wetsuit in there.

I came up with the best pastime in the history of man. What you do is find an aerosol tin of spray adhesive, such as you would use to stick posters to a wall. You then lie in wait and when a wasp flies by, you leap out and give it a squirt. Bingo. One minute it’s flying; the next it’s tumbling silently out of the sky with a confused look on its stupid little face.

I’ve said it before and I’m going to say it here again, now. Nothing brilliant has ever resulted from a meeting.

I would like to see a fund set up that does nothing but pay for great public buildings, follies, laser shows, towers, fountains, airships, aqueducts. Big, expensive stuff designed solely to make us go ‘wow’. I even have a name for this fund. We could call it the lottery.

(on iPhone) the battery is fine. It lasts for four days. Though this might have something to do with the fact that I’m a man, and therefore only think to use a phone when I’m on a cliff, clinging to a branch, in a howling gale. And only then as a last resort.

Underneath the report about a shortage of scientists was another which said that a professor of acoustics at Salford University has proved that, contrary to popular belief, a duck’s quack does echo.

The rules of war, then, have always changed as a reaction to the conflict that’s just been fought.

But here too there’s a problem – the faster you go, the more time slows down. This is a scientific fact. I spend my life driving quickly, which is why I have a 1970s haircut.

A saloon car has to be fast and comfortable and refined, and all of this stuff costs millions of pounds to develop. An SUV just needs to be big and full of buttons. That costs 8p.

Some well-known acronyms simply don’t work at all. Pin number, for example. Because what you’re actually saying is ‘personal information number number’. It’s the same with those who refer to the HIV virus. Or an ATM machine. Or an LCD display. Or an ISDN network. Then you have abbreviations that are longer to use than the actual words. Worldwide web, for instance, is three syllables, whereas WWW is nine. And why say: ‘Have you RSVPed?’ when you mean ‘Have you replied?’?

Many think the steering wheel is nothing more than a handy place to rest a laptop. Going round a corner at more than 2mph would cause your bucket of coffee to fall over. So why bother?

Mercs used to be styled by a man called Brown Bag. I’m not joking. That was his name. Oh, he said it in Italian to make it sound more interesting, but there’s no getting round the fact that Bruno Sacco means Brown Bag.

There are many ways to tell if someone is a bit thick. You can sit them in a room and ask them to push various bits of plastic into a wooden box. Or you can ask them to describe a cloud. Or you can carefully measure the distance between their eyes, the height of their forehead or the length of their arm.

The next day I called my neighboring farmers to say I was going to have a coronary, and they all had the same piece of advice. I had to accept whatever happens, because that’s farming. They also said I had to be patient, which is not possible. I can’t be patient. It’s not in my DNA. It’s a bit like telling Nicholas Witchell he has to be a Moroccan cage fighter.

The problem is that social media, which is seen as the pulse of the nation, is actually nothing of the sort. It’s the pulse of the young and the idealistic.

Back in August 1960 an American pilot called Joe Kittinger climbed into the open gondola beneath a balloon called Excelsior III and floated up to 102,800 feet. At this point, 20 miles above the Earth in what is technically space, he jumped. Moments later he became the first man to go through the sound barrier without the benefit of a plane. It was, and still is, the highest parachute jump ever, and it proved you can ‘abandon ship’ even when you’re in space.

On top of the dashboard are three dials in a raised binnacle. They tell you nothing you need to know but they look good. They look sporty. They tell you that you are a man in a hurry, but here’s hoping you aren’t, because this is not a fast car.

No. I suspect the reason we choose to visit a supermarket rather than flog around a town that was designed by King Alfred is that it’s so much more convenient. And that, I think, is where a solution to the problem of urban decay can be found. Realistically, we can never do anything to reverse the spread of supermarkets, but we can level the playing field. We just have to make town-centre shopping easier. And that can be achieved by getting rid of traffic wardens. Or civil enforcement officers, as they are now called.

As I’ve said before, I never understand why people ski down a slope to a bar and then go on a lift so they can ski down the same slope again. That’s like walking to the pub on a Sunday, then going home and walking to the pub again. Madness.

We waste an enormous amount of time making decisions based entirely on this fanciful notion that we like alternatives.

Iron ore

Now at this point you are probably thinking: so what? There is no Ebola in the world at the moment. Oh yes there is, but despite a twenty-year, multi-million-dollar hunt nobody has been able to find where it lives. Some say the host is a bat, others say it’s a spider or a space alien. All we know is that occasionally, and for no obvious reason, someone comes out of the jungle with bleeding eyes and his stomach in a bag.

A book needs more than beautiful sentence construction, a left-wing take and wry observation. It needs, more than anything else, a story.

My sister once asked why it always feels, in any car, as if you’re sitting inside a man’s wash bag, and she has a point. They’re normally black and dark and enlivened only by some red stripes.

The prime minister is a Labour Tory. There’s a mosque at the end of your street and a French restaurant next door. We are neither in nor out of Europe. We are famous for our beer but we drink in wine bars. We are not a colonial power but we still have a commonwealth. We are jealous of the rich but we buy into the Hello! celebrity culture. We live in a United Kingdom that’s no longer united. We are muddled.

Only once was this not an option. A girlfriend had been pinned against the wall by a wiry, tattooed man whose speech was slurred by a combination of drink and being from Glasgow.

Well now look. The human being, and the human male in particular, is programmed to take risks. Had our ancestors spent their days sitting around in caves, not daring to go outside, we’d still be there now. Sure, we’re more civilised these days, what with our microwave ovens and our jet liners, but we’re still cavemen at heart. We still crave the rush of adrenaline, the endorphin highs and the buzz of a dopamine hit. And the only way we can unlock this medicine chest is by taking a risk. Telling us that speed kills and asking us to slow down is a bit like asking us to ignore gravity. We don’t drive fast because we’re in a hurry; we drive fast because it pushes the arousal buttons, makes us feel alive, makes us feel human. Dr Peter Marsh, from the Social Issues Research Centre in Oxford, says the recent rise in popularity of bungee jumping, parachuting and other extreme sports is simply man’s reaction to the safer, cotton-woolly society that’s being created.

I tapped the drunken Scotsman on the shoulder and said, as politely as possible: ‘Excuse me.’ He whirled round, his eyes full of fire and his hands balled into steel-hard fists. But the blow never came. ‘Christ, you’re a big bastard,’ he said, and ran off. It was the proudest moment of my life.

I can’t imagine that I would be terribly happy living in Afghanistan, either, though I dare say there is some satisfaction in going to bed thinking: ‘Well, at least I wasn’t shot today.’

And I’m not sure I would like it in Brazil, either, having to walk around in a thong to demonstrate that I had nothing about my person worth stealing.

I must say, at this juncture, that I don’t like fighting. I prefer passive resistance and, if that doesn’t work, active fleeing.

Everyone was jolly cross with Michael Fish when he didn’t see the 1987 storm coming. But it turns out that he had no satellites and no computers, just a big checked jacket. Big checked jackets are no good at predicting the weather.

Then you have people who say you can tell when rain is coming because the cows are lying down. Not so. According to my new friend at the Met Office, cows lie down because they are tired.

Flirting is the oil that lubricates the engine of ingenuity and wit

Yes, it’s true, you can only be as happy as your least happy child and they are a constant font of worry and stress.

It won’t be a volcano that ends man’s existence on this planet. It’ll be the no-win no-fee lawyers. They are the ones who brought Europe to a halt last week. They are the ones who made a simple trip from Berlin to London into a five-country, all-day hammer blow on your licence fee. They are the ones who must be stopped.

Stick to breathing. It’s the only thing you’re any good at.
(Denneth Note: I’m currently not actually all that good at breathing, managing to accidentally hold it for extended periods of time, including but not limited to while typing this, but I am eager to improve)

I think it’s because, in our complicated lives, we yearn only for the simple. An evening in front of the telly. A nice sit-down. A game of cards. At a drinks party, I can find myself talking to a fascinating and beautiful woman who’s just written a book about something interesting and clever. But what I yearn for is to be in the pub with my mates.

More importantly, if you can’t enjoy a glass of wine on a lovely sunny day then you have removed one of the tent poles of civilization from your life. You have become no better than a cow, or a rabbit.

Flying means boredom. Next time you’re going away, just drive. You can leave when you want. You don’t have to sit next to a stranger. You can listen to all sorts of loud music without headphones and look at things out of the window that aren’t just clouds. Driving is sensible alternative to flying.

Make no mistake, Concorde was an extraordinary technological achievement. Almost certainly, one of the greatest.

…sips fuel like a mouse sipping sherry from a hypodermic needle.

Deadlines refine the mind. They remove variables like exotic materials and processes that take too long. The closer the deadline, the more likely you’ll start thinking waaay outside the box.

Lists are how I parse and manage the world.

The only thing that differentiates you and me from a couple of fourteen year old pyromaniacs is balistic glass!

Being a geek is all about learning the inventories of things.

I’ve learned over decades of building that a deadline is a potent tool for problem-solving.

I’ve always thought something that makes you laugh, it makes you laugh because there’s a little bit of truth to it.

Of course, I love tools. I also love arranging them, to the point where I came up with a name for my organizing metric: first-order retrievability.

In theory, cars are fairly simple. If they don’t start, it’s either the fuel system or the electrical system. Teach yourself about the path of each in your engine and tracing it is fairly straightforward. But at the beginning, mastering each new system seems like an unreachable shore. The car is effectively a black box.

Technology is usually there to let some process go on hidden in the background. For us on ‘MythBusters,’ we’re always trying to make the process apparent. So, we have learned to try and never rely on a technological solution when an analogue one is in front of us.

The best-case scenario is that the glass shatters in my face! How do you think that makes me feel?

Again, like I said, my life has been about being fascinated by objects and the stories that they tell, and also making them for myself, obtaining them, appreciating them and diving into them.

Jamie’s gonna go take a break now, and I am going to continue the on-going process of making a fool of myself and go ahead and try it myself.

I think LEGOs are one of the best toys ever developed.

I would have to say that looked like it hurt.

Bigger is always better.

The coolest toys don’t have to be bought; they can be built. In fact, sometimes the only way they’ll ever exist is if you make them yourself.

Remember kids, I have life insurance.

I’m not gonna shoot anyone with the pellet gun… Not unless I have to!

Firemen have the coolest toys ever!

In the spirit of science, there really is no such thing as a ‘failed experiment.’ Any test that yields valid data is a valid test.

The fact is that the British Museum had a complete specimen of a dodo in their collection up until the 18th century – it was actually mummified, skin and all – but in a fit of space-saving zeal, they actually cut off the head and they cut off the feet and they burned the rest in a bonfire.

Mostly I make lists for projects. This can be daunting. Breaking something big into its constituent parts will help you organize your thoughts, but it can also force you to confront the depth of your ignorance and the hugeness of the task. That’s OK. The project may be the lion, but the list is your whip.

My advice is keep your lips away from the spinning things.

Am I about to feel really, really stupid?

Let’s blow some stuff up.

I like to work fast. I despise not having the right tool or, worse, knowing I have it but not being able to find it. It’s a pointless delay that wrecks my pace – and mood.

Jamie doesn’t like to do anything hastily, and I like to do everything incredibly hastily. So therein you have the dichotomy of our patterns.

This is the point in the show where we say, ‘Oh, what else do we have in the van that’s flammable?’

Prayer doesn’t work because someone out there is listening, it works because someone in here is listening. I’ve paid attention. I’ve pictured what I want to happen in my life. I’ve meditated extensively on my family, my future, my past actions and what did and didn’t work for me about them.

I had saved a few hundred photos of dodo skeletons into my ‘Creative Projects’ folder – it’s a repository for my brain, everything that I could possibly be interested in. Any time I have an Internet connection, there’s a sluice of stuff moving into there, everything from beautiful rings to cockpit photos.
(Denneth note: I also have on of these folders, which functions as my background image repository on my pc. Complete lack of dodo skeletons and (non planetary) rings however)

I just had one of those ‘what the hell are we doing’ moments.

I am now standing in a mixture of cooling fluid, gasoline, and cola.

Stand back! I gotta get some rocket fuel out of the fridge!

I have some ideas on how to fix that. They’re not very good ideas, but at least they’re ideas!

That’s the show. it’s like 5 minutes of science and then 10 minutes of me hurting myself.

I’m obsessed with the form of a toolbox. The idea of a portable kit that has everything you might need ignites something inside me. It’s like Batman’s utility belt.

I learned at an early age that I could make the things that I wanted. That’s a very powerful thing to realize as a kid. LEGOs were a key part of that.

There is water at the bottom of the ocean

I know exactly what I’m doing. I just don’t know what effect it’s going to have.

They asked me how well I understood theoretical physics. I said I had a theoretical degree in physics. They said welcome aboard.

Never invest more than you are willing to lose

It looked full of menace, like a shark

There are obviously many things which we do not understand, and may never be able to.

No stealth bombers in sight

This situation does have one advantage, things can’t get any worse

I guess if you’re rich enough you can build any sort of madhouse to live in.

I don’t know what’s going on, and I don’t like that.

This hobby isn’t cheap and when you try to make it cheap you make it even more expensive

“You destroyed three quarters of a solar system!”
“Well, five sixths. But it’s not an exact science.”

The ultimate piece of adventuring gear – of course, a stick.

The biggest benefit of Apollo was the inspiration it gave to a growing generation to get into science and aerospace.

There is no such thing as innocence, only degrees of guilt.

Foolish are those who fear nothing, yet claim to know everything.

Don’t despair at the clownery of the world, laugh at the circus and let the mirth that brings give you strength to burn the tent down.

People have impressive willpower when it comes to missing the point

The days are long, the years are short, cherish them while you can.

The days drag on, but the years fly by.

War is what happens when diplomacy fails

“I believe in it”
Should never be a qualifier for
“You should believe in it”

Out of sight, out of mind.

The trouble with life was that you didn’t get a chance to practice before doing it for real.

The words, ‘Go Hang a salami! Im a lasagna hog’, are a perfect palindrome down to the exclamation mark

Do not trust anyone trying to sell you a simple solution to a complex problem

I got a gun in front of me and a warmongering nation behind me […]

We are too poor for cheap things

The past is a foreign country. They do things different there.

The direction tells you… the direction.

There is no cloud, it’s just someone else’s computer

Sheep are born trying to die; it is a good shepherd’s job to try and stop them.

He took nobody by surprise; there was nobody to take.

Only George Lucas and wedding photographers are allowed to use wipes in editing.

The naked truth of it is, I have no shirt.

The con man is not interested in convincing the doubters, but only in keeping the believers on board.

To confuse the enemy, you must first confuse yourself

It’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission

How Can Mirrors Be Real If Our Eyes Aren’t Real

The difference between analog and digital circuit engineers is that the analog circuit engineers know when they are building a radio transmitter.

Copper is actually surprisingly toxic to all forms of life, which is kinda nice

I’m playing all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order.

Proper Planning Prevents Poor Performance

It’s almost as if when you go up, you’re increasing in elevation

Overconfidence can lead to accidents

Bypassing a PAL should be, as one weapons designer graphically put it, about as complex as performing a tonsillectomy while entering the patient from the wrong end.

Anyone can design a bridge that stands, but it takes an engineer to design a bridge that barely stands

There’s two kinds of “revolutionary transport systems”: “Bikes but worse”, and “Trains but worse”.
The Shweeb has the dubious honor of being both.

Toasters, Machine Guns, it’s all just engineering.

I knew everyone would die. I just wasn’t sure what would kill us first.

Premature Optimization is the root of all evil

Gotta start small
or big, and end in tragedy

Don’t patronize us, we’re in hell

Delightful news for someone who cares

Hang on, I have a quote for that

Trust, but verify

That sounds like a lot, but it’s more than that.

I never took flying lessons, but I did take a crash course!

Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.

If you sat a monkey down in front of a keyboard,
the first thing typed would be a UNIX command.

BSD is for people who love UNIX; Linux is for people who hate Windows.

A sysadmin’s life is a sorry one. The only advantage he has over Emergency Room doctors is that malpractice suits are rare.
On the other hand, ER doctors never have to deal with patients installing new versions of their own innards.

… has the gift on compressing the largest amount of words into the smallest amount of thoughts.

Failure is success if we learn from it.

Small opportunities are often the beginning of great enterprises.

All generalizations are false.

Ever stop to think, and forget to start again?

Out of my mind. Back in five minutes.

Time is what keeps everything from happening at once.

Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine.

The more people I meet, the more I like my dog.

Work is for people who don’t know how to fish

If you don’t like the news, go out and make some.

I don’t suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!

Okay, who stopped the payment on my reality check?

It’s lonely at the top, but you eat better.

According to my calculations the problem doesn’t exist.

Give me ambiguity or give me something else.

Be nice to your kids. They’ll choose your nursing home.

Consciousness: that annoying time between naps.

Why is ‘abbreviation’ such a long word?

Lead me not into temptation, I can find it myself.

I like you, but I wouldn’t want to see you working with sub-atomic particles.

I’m out of bed and dressed, What more do you want?

Energetic materials safety rule #1: when you think about synthesis of some organic peroxide, slap yourself really hard and think about something else

“You can tell it’s a grenade in a glass because of the way it is.”

If the sea was vodka, I would become a submarine

No one is more tired than I am […]

Vimes looked blankly into the immediate future

“Although this phenomenon should have been anticipated for human space activities in weightlessness, it wasn’t.”

The plot twists and turns like a python in a sack

In critical situations, it is harder to quickly dispose or destruct a memory stick, floppy disk or compact disk than to, for example, eat a small paper sheet.

Yes, but not quite yes

I kept out of his way, worked in silence, and heartily wished him a cancer

The battle won, you switch over to teaching Aircraft Engines and Communications.
I knew nothing about aircraft engines. Fortunately neither did the cadets.

Shutting down a reactor is not the hard part, generally¹

I am *not* moping. I am merely… moodily dejected.

You lye, you are not sure; for I say, Woman, ’tis impossible to be sure of any thing but Death and Taxes

I’m not convinced the special wasn’t ultimately written and directed by a sentient bag of cocaine.

Don’t pander to me, kid. One tiny crack in the hull and our blood boils in thirteen seconds. Solar flare might crop up, cook us in our seats. And wait’ll you’re sitting pretty with a case of Andorian shingles, see if you’re still so relaxed when your eyeballs are bleeding. Space is disease and danger wrapped in darkness and silence.

The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible.

Adventure is closest when farthest from home.

We can live while we’re alive

I deal with entropy every day. It’s degrading.

Do you have ANY idea how difficult it is to make something people actually want to buy? It’s ridiculously hard!

And like all central processing units, this thing processes centers.

“I have yet to hear anyone complain about being dead.”

“1 in 20 people have been a victim of crime, which means 19 out of 20 people are criminals”

It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a photograph, or a telephone or any other important thing – and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others. He added his little mite – that is all he did. These object lessons should teach us that ninety-nine parts of all things that proceed from the intellect are plagiarisms, pure and simple; and the lesson ought to make us modest. But nothing can do that.

“Wait, so this is normal?”
“No, but it happens a lot”

For the real existential panic you’ve gotta put in work

We are stuck between a void and a hard place and the only upside I can think of is that we will probably destroy ourselves way before we actually have to deal with any of it.

Numerous sentences could be constructed without employing the first letter of the English lexicon

Those all have one thing in common, other than potential lawsuits, and that is how much I want to keep them away from my head

Well, there was a spaceship, and then there was a problem, and now there’s no spaceship.

Don’t you think we should recalculate those resonance dampening factors again?

On-site personnel should be reassured that the spiders are harmless and the facility’s immense shroud of silk should be presented in a positive light as a record-breaking natural history wonder.

Shechtman said later that when he saw the first electron-diffraction data, he told himself, “There can be no such creature.”

If a site looks like it’s from 2012 and ugly as hell, they’re either at 0 users, or they’re doing 50m a year in an industry you didn’t even know existed.

Inventions are the perfection of other people’s ideas

I am amazed at your stupidity,
humbled by your bravery,
and not at all surprised by your laziness.

The only way out is through.

It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him.

If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.

A plum doesn’t resent the hungry man, but the farmer who planted the tree

We buy things we don’t need to impress people we don’t like

I can’t wait, for the weekend to begin!

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice

Be careful what you shoot at. Most things in here don’t react too well to bullets.

A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.

We’re fine, We’re fine.
We’re not fine!

Hangman teaches us a valuable lesson. Saying the wrong thing can harm someone.

Practical, affordable fusion power will always and forever be just as close as the nearest star.

If you can’t do good, at least do no harm

A man who makes no mistakes, makes nothing.

The Doctor: Looks like a spatio-temporal hyperlink.
Mickey: What’s that?
The Doctor: No idea, just made it up. Didn’t want to say “magic door”.

Beakers? Of colored liquids? But that means… there’s SCIENCE going on here!

If you see this in the air, the good news is you can probably live long enough write your last will and testament.
If you write very quickly.

What manner of mad scientist neglects his flasks of colored liquid? Next you’ll question the Van de Graaff generator in the middle of the room — and where will *that* leave us?

I love tools. I have money now so I can buy things I don’t need. I have a gear puller…
I have no idea what this is, looks GREAT on the pegboard though.

Kim, PeeJee is our friend. And if someone is worth caring about, they’re worth the effort of a long, convoluted solution that doesn’t actually address the problem. Now, I need four cellphones, ten balls of yarn and two nights worth of cigarettes. I’ve got a miracle to perform.

Whatever was due to happen at 00:00:00 was unlikely to be good.

If I ever MUST put a digital timer on my doomsday device, I will buy one free from quantum mechanical anomalies. So many brands on the market keep perfectly good time while you’re looking at them, but whenever you turn away for a couple minutes then turn back, you find that the countdown has progressed by only a few seconds.

Under the nightmare of Communism, moustaches were, of course, compulsory.

It’s that moment of dawning comprehension I live for.

Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying ‘End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH’, the paint wouldn’t even have time to dry.

A bad workman blames his tools, but a good workman has good tools.

Last night Chernobyl nuclear power plant fulfilled the Five Year Plan for heat energy generation in four microseconds.

Stirlitz had a thought. He liked it, so he had another

I’ve been to many planets in the solar system, and you’d be surprised how many of them look like quarries in Wales.

There are now two great nations in the world, which starting from different points, seem to be advancing toward the same goal: the Russians and the Anglo-Americans. Each seems called by some secret design of Providence one day to hold in its hands the destinies of half the world.

I like Mr. Gorbachev. We can do business together.

Therkla: Elan, I left the door open for you, you know.
Elan: Right, that’s why I had to go around and find another way to crash dramatically into the scene.

Q: How do you know that the Stasi has bugged your apartment?
A: There’s a new cabinet in it and a generator running outside.

[…] and if science has taught me anything, it’s that if something is spinning, it’s important.

“Sergeant Colon!” he snapped, his mind still buzzing with universal policemanhood, “shoot the lock off!”
The sergeant hesitated. “What, sir? With a bow and arrow, sir?”
“I mean—” Vimes hesitated. “I mean, open these gates!”

We are dreamers, shapers, singers, and makers. We study the mysteries of laser and circuit, crystal and scanner, holographic demons and invocations of equations. These are the tools we employ, and we know many things.

He said: ‘To hell with moisture detectors. I’m going to build a giant robot.’ So we built a giant robot.

Spencer: Hey, come check out my automatic fish feeder! I’m making it a lot more complicated than it needs to be!
Freddie: Why?
Spencer: Because it’s fun!

Probably the last man who knew how it worked had been tortured to death years before. Or as soon as it was installed. Killing the creator was a traditional method of patent protection.

Al: Don’t worry, it won’t cost much… cause I’m gonna build it myself!
Bud: Mom, I’m scared.

Music, landscape gardening, architecture — there was no start to his talents.

Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.

Life is not a malfunction.

Terrible, isn’t it? On a scale of one to ten, ten being the most revolting and one being almost edible, I believe that rating this recipe would require the use of exponents.

Ernest Hemingway once wrote, ‘The world is a fine place and worth fighting for.’ I agree with the second part.

Soviet villager: Can it be that you have come from outer space?
Yuri Gagarin: As a matter of fact… yes.

Efficiency and progress is ours once more,
Now that we have the Neutron Bomb,
It’s nice and quick and clean and gets things done.

The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.

If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.

Anyone who thinks one book has all the answers, hasn’t read enough books.

I do not understand why everything in this script must inevitably explode.

I find that people are always jumping to conclusions about nuclear reaction. Science fact and science fiction are not the same thing, not the same thing at all.

Thank you for activating the self destruct mechanism. This ship will detonate in three minutes. In the meantime, please enjoy some random explosions and blasts of steam. Human Resources thought it would make things more dramatic than a red light and a klaxon.

Don’t examine this too closely.

They may be called the Palace Guard, the City Guard, or the Patrol. Whatever the name, their purpose in any work of heroic fantasy is identical: it is, round about Chapter Three (or ten minutes into the film) to rush into the room, attack the hero one at a time, and be slaughtered. No one ever asks them if they wanted to.

Dr. Hugo Sign: Lynn, what is the one and only way to prevent being killed by the explosion of a nuclear weapon?
Lynn: I dunno, don’t be there when it goes off?
Dr. Sign: Actually, that’s exactly right.

“Evil sows the seeds of its own destruction”, sayeth the fortune cookie.

I’d like to quote the great William Shakespeare, but to tell you the truth, I don’t actually think he said it.

Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here! This is the War Room!

If I build a bomb, I will simply remember which wire to cut if it has to be deactivated and make every wire red.

Some days you just can’t get rid of a bomb!

If my fireballs always form a mushroom cloud, time to tone it down a bit.

What an odd-sized explosion.

If God is Dead, he was probably screwing with Arconite

Sam: Max, where should I put this so that it doesn’t hurt anyone we know or care about?
Max: Out the window, Sam! There’s nothing but strangers out there.

A reaction drive’s efficiency as a weapon is in direct proportion to its efficiency as a drive.

If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying ‘End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH’, the paint wouldn’t even have time to dry.

The self destruct is over there, next to the A-C options. I guess don’t press that either.

A promising student, though just a learner,
Blew himself up with a Bunsen burner.
If only he’d had a bit more ambition,
He might have done it with nuclear fission.

Thunder’s just a noise, boys, lightning does the work.

Warning! All control consoles double as Firework Storage Lockers. On detonation of fireworks, please leap dramatically to the floor and feign unconsciousness.

Engineers like to solve problems. If there are no problems handily available, they will create their own problems.

“Why does marketing feel like manipulation?”
“Because it is.”

If you can walk away from a landing, it’s a good landing. If you use the airplane the next day, it’s an outstanding landing.

Because of the employment of the Signetics’ proprietary Sanderson-Rabbet Channel the 25120 will provide 50% higher speed than you will obtain.

I fear the worst too, Bill, because fearing the best is a complete waste of time.

If you put a gun to my head and said, ‘You have to come up with a story for Happy Feet 3,’ I’d say shoot me.

I wish you knew you were in the good old days before you left them.

Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.

Canadians. They walk among us.

There’s a time to think, and a time to act. And this, gentlemen, is no time to think.

There is no me. I do not exist…
There used to be a me, but I had it surgically removed.

We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives.

Space is the hole that we are in.

There’s a Zen koan. It says that if you want to find something, you have to stop looking.

The best offense is a good defense

The best defense is a good offense

By the time you figure out what was wrong with that, it won’t matter anymore!

If I try to think about how it works, it doesn’t work.

Under certain circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.

There is no terminal velocity when you are falling from grace

It’s like reading russian literature, except you ate half the pages and the other half is trying to kill you.

Fusion, always just 10 years away!

Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.

Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.

As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.

Things do not change; we change.

A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.

Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.

All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.

I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.

Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.

Every path but your own is the path of fate. Keep on your own track, then.

In the long run, we only hit what we aim at.

In the long run men only hit what they aim at.
Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high.

They sent men to the moon on technology less advanced than a keyfob

Space is disease and danger wrapped in darkness and silence.

Brevity is for the weak

This seems like as good a time as any to ask: why are we doing this?

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

The human race is at war. Our biggest enemy, pure and simple, is ignorance.

One curious thing about Apollo 11: while it was happening, no one knew for sure exactly where Eagle had actually landed!

In a nutshell, Columbia experienced two failed computers, one of which we restored only to have it fail again at landing. The cause of one of the failures turned out to be a sliver of solder eleven-thousandths of an inch thick that became dislodged when the thrusters were fired, shorting out the CPU board. During the postflight debriefing, I remarked about this incident, “Had we activated the backup flight software when the problem first emerged, loss of vehicle and crew would have resulted.”

As suggested earlier, postflight investigation found that the computer failures had been caused by particles in the GPC amplifiers. The general-purpose computers had not been given the normal zero-gravity “particle impact noise detection” tests. So, again, we were lucky that the computers did not totally fail. If GPC 2 had failed during entry and we had used the recommended procedures to fix it, we would have lost flight control of the orbiter. That would have been very bad for us.

Humans are actually far more likely to get taken out by an impact event or a supervolcano than we are to get killed in a crash of a commercial airliner.

RTLS requires continuous miracles interspersed by acts of God to be successful.

I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.

Brian quipped that a 140-ish character description of a paper isn’t all that novel:
It’s called the ‘title.’

We live in acronyms in the government

The price of nuclear power is eternal vigilance

Too much is almost enough

It’s okay to fail by succeeding too hard

[…], and massive means expensive.

Everything should be as simple as possible, but no simpler

Apart from the obvious requirement that you don’t make any mistakes, construction is not critical.

“What are you doing?”
“I’m not sure yet”

[…], for I made no haste in my work, but rather made the most of it, […]

Thousands have lived without love. Not one without water.

Never underestimate the power of the ocean.

Most of the applications that lumber the patent office are slightly mad.
Just like the inventors themselves.

If you don’t take risks, you can’t create a future!

I wish I had enough money to buy these. Mind you, I wouldn’t buy them, I just wish I had the money to.

I wish I could afford all of the hobbies I have

What I just described is more than a little askew with reality.

Don’t ask fish for advice on catching fish, ask a fisherman

You don’t ask the fish how to catch fish, you ask a fisherman.

A majority of the post-Freud developments in psychology were made simply because people heard Freud’s explanations and hated them so much that they just had to prove him wrong.

The cup holder holds anything as long as it’s a cup

You have left me confused, not convinced

There are things money can’t buy, but fewer, perhaps, than you’d like to believe.

“röntgen” and “rem” are 20th-century physics terms that mean “no trespassing.”

You can get anywhere with a pizza box.

Y’know, Grady, some people think I’m ‘overprepared’. ‘Paranoid’. Maybe even a little ‘crazy’. But they never met any precambrian life forms, did they?

Hardin once said: ‘To succeed, planning alone is insufficient. One must improvise as well.

The key to strategy… is not to choose a path to victory, but to choose so that all paths lead to a victory.

Do you know how many degrees I have?!

Take nothing on its looks; take everything on evidence. There’s no better rule.

There are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal, kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do.

Are you aware of what a serious breach of security that would be? He’ll see everything! He’ll see the Big Board!

Restraint? Why are you so concerned with saving their lives? The whole idea is to kill the bastards. At the end of the war, if there are two Americans and one Russian left alive, we win!

No Plot? No Problem!

Look, in every video game where there’s a chain of sets of rewards, it’s like: you use your gold to buy diamonds, you use your diamonds to buy gilded metal, you use your gilded metal to buy clothes…it’s always clothes. It always ends with clothes. You never trade your clothes for something, unless it’s other clothes.

The only thing between you and the vacuum of space is six feet of solid style.

Close the blast door! Close the blasted door!

The door dilated.

I don’t know what’s scarier, losing nuclear weapons, or that it happens so often there’s actually a TERM for it.

The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.

As we’ve learned from all films ever made, whenever you have a special skill, it will eventually save your life, regardless of how impossibly stupid it is.

Family, religion, friendship. These are the three demons you must slay if you wish to succeed in business.

Det. Mishka: You’re not FBI. Who are you?
Darien Fawkes: BWM.
Det. Mishka: Which stands for…
Bobby Hobbes: Bureau of Weights and Measures.

You have nice manners, for a thief, and a liar.

If excessive ambition was the fault most commonly attributed to the middle class, failure to provide a suitable example and to care properly for their subordinates were the most common complaints against the rich. The aristocracy was widely seen as preoccupied with duels, London, adultery, foreign fashions, fox hunts, and gambling.

See, only made you wait a year before explaining what was up with that.

When there is a plan, things cannot go according to it. If they do, the plan becomes a spoiler.

We pretend to work and they pretend to pay.

They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work

proof by proctological extraction.

Life will give you lemons.
Just eat them.

It’s Beige, the coolest kind of brown

I might not die.
Evidence: I have never died.

We are not back today

A great first line is the collateral that grants the author a line of intellectual credit from the reader.

Evil is just a word. Under the skin, it’s simple pain.

There can be no place more desolate, despairing and awful.

Everything is more complicated than you think.

All you really need to know for the moment is that the universe is a lot more complicated than you might think, even if you start from a position of thinking it’s pretty damn complicated in the first place.

The most complicated skill is to be simple.

Everything is complicated if no one explains it to you.

There’s no limit to how complicated things can get, on account of one thing always leading to another.

Every Canadian has a complicated relationship with the United States, whereas Americans think of Canada as the place where the weather comes from.

A lot of people like snow. I find it to be an unnecessary freezing of water.

But who wants to be foretold the weather? It is bad enough when it comes, without our having the misery of knowing about it beforehand.

From where we stand the rain seems random. If we could stand somewhere else, we would see the order in it.

It always rains on tents. Rainstorms will travel thousands of miles, against prevailing winds for the opportunity to rain on a tent.

If Disneyland was indeed the Happiest Place on Earth, you’d either keep it a secret or the price of admission would be free and not equivalent to the yearly per capita income of a small sub-Saharan African nation like Detroit.

Baseball is a resplendent metaphor for life.

The explosion would be just the right size to maximize the amount of paperwork your lab would face. If the explosion were smaller, you could potentially cover it up. If it were larger, there would be no one left in the city to submit paperwork to.

Don’t ask for security, ask for adventure.

You don’t become great by trying to be great. You become great by wanting to do something, and then doing it so hard that you become great in the process.

But I’ve never seen the Icarus story as a lesson about the limitations of humans. I see it as a lesson about the limitations of wax as an adhesive.

If at first you don’t succeed, that’s one data point.

High up in the North in the land called Svithjod, there stands a rock. It is a hundred miles high and a hundred miles wide. Once every thousand years a little bird comes to this rock to sharpen its beak. When the rock has thus been worn away, then a single day of eternity will have gone by.

Things are rarely just crazy enough to work, but they’re frequently just crazy enough to fail hilariously.

You don’t use science to show you’re right, you use science to become right.

I never trust anyone who’s more excited about success than about doing the thing they want to be successful at.

It’s weird how I am constantly surprised by the passage of time when it’s literally the most predictable thing in the Universe.

That’s if everything goes as planned.

As comedian Ron White said about hurricanes, “It’s not that the wind is blowing, it’s what the wind is blowing.”

The Pauli exclusion principle keeps electrons from getting too close to each other. This effect is one of the main reasons that your laptop doesn’t fall through your lap.

I’ve always thought that one of the the great thing about physics is that you can add more digits to any number and see what happens and nobody can stop you.

Our brains have just one scale, and we resize our experiences to fit.

I learned very early on in life that not everyone wants to hear every fact in the world, even if you want to tell them everything you’ve ever read.

Sometimes I mistake this for a universe that cares.

Then the 92nd little pig built a house out of depleted uranium and the wolf was like, “dude.”

If people had wheels and could fly, how would we differentiate them from airplanes?

If you liked it, then you should have moved a mass inside its Roche limit.

There’s no material safety data sheet for astatine. If there were, it would just be the word “NO” scrawled over and over in charred blood.

That’s one in 27 quinquatrigintillion.

Do not build the seventh row.

I can’t leave without my buddy Superfly

If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family Anatidae on our hands.

If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck but it needs batteries, you probably have the wrong abstraction.

I can’t prove you are a Communist. But when I see a bird that quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, has feathers and webbed feet and associates with ducks—I’m certainly going to assume that he is a duck.

[…], And if it looks like a duck and talks like a duck, it should be taxed like a duck.

If something cannot be settled by experiment or observation, then it is not worthy of debate.

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

There is no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do.

The purpose of a system is what it does

‎‎

If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.

When you stop digging, you are still in a hole.

My postillion has been struck by lightning

I’ve written 1200 poems and at least five of ’em are good.

There are unknown unknowns

I got it there then (8068).

That feels weird, but I’ll allow it.

Nothing comes from nothing

Zachtronics games are my favorite games to beat the first half of.

It is easy to predict the future as humans tend to excel in repeating their errors from the past.

This paper explains why they are wrong and why they don’t admit that

Event’s cannot be explained by advanced VFX in a shot where crappy VFX are present.

Never invest in something that violates a conservation law

The optimal part is no part.

What you don’t have can’t break.

It’s important to recall the distinction between “grownup” and “grown up”.

“The time has come,” the Hacker said,
“To talk of many things:
Of plastic foam—and tuna cans—
Of chunks of lead—and string—
And how the force of gravity—
Will make the balance swing.”

In 1969, you could get LEDs in any colour you wanted, as long as they were red or infrared.

Sixty-seven spiders!

Nuclear powered vacuum cleaners will probably be a reality within 10 years.

I’ve never gotten along well with colour printers.

Absolute values don’t exist—only differences matter.

In hindsight, I don’t know why I ever thought that was a good idea

I feel like two children in a trench coat unconvincingly cosplaying as an adult

There is nothing in the universe so massively useful as a towel.

I think the screws need to have a fine coat of snake oil to maintain the sonic properties of the power supply.

I don’t know what they’re gonna do.
I just know it’s not gonna work.

Sometimes I amaze even myself with my brilliance

Sometimes my genius is… its almost frightening

Although the Sputniks and Luniks did not themselves provide better cars, refrigerators, color TV sets, and homes for the peasants and laborers of the Soviet Union and her satellite states, they did evoke added inspiration for the earthbound followers of the communist way of life helping to take their minds off shortages of consumer goods. The people were spurred on to work just a little harder for the glorious motherland and to outstrip the west in the less dramatic and more basic things of life, like coal and steel production.

Clouds are for rain

I’d ask you to think outside the box on this, but it’s obvious your box is broken.
And has schizophrenia.

Now I don’t know how legitimate that fear was
I know basically nothing about electricity other than you shouldn’t put it in your mouth

Remember: “Unexploded Ordnance” doesn’t mean it’s safe; it means it’s taking its sweet time trying to remember when to kill somebody.
Don’t jog its memory.

Every man dies, but not every man really lives.

The missile has failed to find its target.
| Returning to base |

It’s a reality show. It’s all fake.

Things look more real the more terribly they’re filmed.

Only a guy with my nutty luck could end up being his own competition!

I love lag, especially when you have eight processors and no excuse!

There’s a word for games where the code is barely hanging together, with stupid layout, utterly unscaleable fixes and workarounds on top of workarounds.
“Shipped”

No matter what you do, somebody will call you an idiot

I was so careful. I picked the wrong play, the wrong director, the wrong cast. Where did I go right?

The big downside of the plan to infuriate an emotionally traumatized psychopath into trying to kill me was part two, where the lunatic actually did it.

[…] ME crashed often and with great enthusiasm.

[…] Vista was perfectly intuitive, provided you had a trained expert holding your hand every step of the way.

[…] the paragon of instability known as Internet Explorer 4.

See “Modern Production Techniques” by T. Arrieta (not yet written).

Engines are out, steering jets are on the fritz, and someone’s fitted us with a Stuka dive-bombing siren!

If in doubt, break it.

This is how we fix things on the Russian Space Station!

Hit it until it starts working

Why are people born? Why do they die? And why do they spend much of the intervening time wearing digital watches?

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

Oats. -A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.

For every doubling of network and hardware speed, inefficiencies in software quadruples.

Ignore when people say that the length of a game’s title is not important, that a title should just convey what the game is about. They’re just jealous theirs isn’t as long.

You don’t have to remind me, I’m all too familiar with my misguided words.

Well well well, if it isn’t the consequences of my own actions

Drink coffee! Do stupid things faster and with more energy!

Careful with that axe, Eugene…

The concept is baffling

I think there’s more to life than 9 to 5 and eating spaghetti every day

Virtually unbreakable unless dropped or hit

Did you ever try to put a broken piece of glass back together? Even if the pieces fit, you can’t make it whole again the way it was. But if you’re clever, you can still use the pieces to make other useful things. Maybe even something wonderful, like a mosaic. Well, the world broke just like glass. And everyone’s trying to put it back together like it was, but it’ll never come together in the same way.

Truly one of the joys of math is constantly realizing how much more math there is

My name is Greg and I’ve killed a chicken with a man!

“But all [experts] agree that [XYZ is BS]!”
Have you ever spent the five seconds it would take to look up a survey of what percent of [experts] believe [XYZ is BS]? Or are you just assuming that’s true because someone on your side told you so and it seems right?

It can be done safely. It cannot be done legally.

A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have.

[…] any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

Would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now?

He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.

Space is big.
You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.

I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

There are some people you like immediately, some whom you think you might learn to like in the fullness of time, and some that you simply want to push away from you with a sharp stick.

‘The Answer to the Great Question… Of Life, the Universe and Everything… Is… Forty-two,’ said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.

Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.

One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious.

You shouldn’t judge a book by its tutorial

Actual human life was invested, to make this worse.

Q: How did they make a transistor that small?
A: With great difficulty

I know it when I see it

A good man lives a life of truth, but a great man knows when to hide it.

There is light in the darkness

Am I dreaming?
Has the world gone mad? Or have I?

The more you learn, the more you know.
The more you know, the more you forget.
The more you forget, the less you know.
So why bother to learn.

These next tests require cooperation.
Consequently, they have never been solved by a human.
That’s where you come in.
You don’t know pride; you don’t know fear.
You don’t know anything.
You’ll be perfect.

Revolvers are the katana’s of guns

We’re going over there, and bringing the most lethal killing machine ever devised. We’re capable of launching more firepower than has ever been released in the history of war. For one purpose alone: to keep our country safe. We constitute the front line and the last line of defense.

I’m going to go out to the site and test the nuclear device which will launch the rocket [because it might fail]. If you see a Hiroshima Mushroom you do not come to the site; instead, turn around and leave immediately.

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.
Specialization is for insects.

Only a few select personality types, outlined in the attached report, have any desire to re-activate the device. Most notable are the D-class sociopaths who show similar amusement when presented with a big red button that says ‘kill everything.’

To repress one’s feelings only makes them stronger.

For many newcomers, PC stands for “Pain and Confusion”

Cars are terrible things.

A war with no battles, no monuments… only casualties.

“Underpromise, overdeliver”
I am doing at least half of that.

No, [this isn’t more government control,] this is a government body stepping in to reduce corporate control.

The quickest way to a man’s heart is through the fourth and fifth ribs.

At a comma, stop a little; at a semicolon, somewhat more.

One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue […] The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.

The forest was shrinking but the trees kept voting for the axe, for the axe was clever and convinced the trees that because his handle was made of wood, he was one of them

The key to photorealism is camera shake

I fear, people will misquote me in future

A person who is nice to you but rude to the waiter is not a nice person.

While I would never wish a man dead, I have read several obituaries with great pleasure

I don’t like these valid comebacks you’re throwing at me

Famed pool game inventor ‘Marco Polo’ […]

Shhh, listen. Do you smell something?

These chips, are fries
This queue, a line
This tap, a faucet
Wardrobe, a closet
Vacation, holiday
Underground, subway
Chemist, a drugstore
Autumn, is fall
A garden, a yard
You see now? It’s not hard

We could all have been killed — or worse, expelled.

Never do anything by halves if you want to get away with it. Be outrageous. Go the whole hog. Make sure everything you do is so completely crazy it’s unbelievable.

My first thought when I heard that was, ‘I am so going to quote that out of context’, but on reflection it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense in context, either.

[…], you could fit into a matchbox without taking out the matches first

Ford carried on counting quietly. This is about the most aggressive thing you can do to a computer, the equivalent of going up to a human being and saying “Blood…blood…blood…blood…”

Looking up into the night sky is looking into infinity — distance is incomprehensible and therefore meaningless

“So the hours are pretty good then?” he resumed.
The Vogon stared down at him as sluggish thoughts moiled around in the murky depths.
“Yeah,” he said, “but now you come to mention it, most of the actual minutes are pretty lousy.”

Inflammable means flammable?! What a country!

Nature abhors a vacuum and also anything that is not a crab

Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.

It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely

Things tend to arrive loudly and disappear quietly

God is always doing Geometry.

He is like an Astronomer who, with the help of Code, finds the most wonderful Stars.

Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.

You go from being biology to being physics

[…], The bridge quickly proved that being cheap to build had come at a cost.

The sleekness of the design made it very aerodynamic.
As in, the air made it dynamic.

The fewer words a magic sword has, the more dangerous it is.
You don’t want to end up at the wrong end of Dark King Grutemores Edge of Annihilation but you definitely don’t want to go near the Bongler.

There really is no service that you can provide that someone, somewhere will not take advantage of.

Enough is enough! I’ve had enough of these [monkey-fighting] snakes on this [Monday-to-Friday] plane!

There are two motives for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it [on Goodreads].

Never has a generation so thoroughly documented itself doing so little.

Top Secret. Burn before reading.

“That’s enough of that, that goat’s been properly inventoried!”
“A goat, inventorised?”
“It’s not a goat! It’s one of our employees!
“Then let it show me it’s papers!”

Chernobyl: the peaceful atom in every home

The author has considered asking for advice […], but has rejected this idea on the grounds of being a coward

Blue is not a colour, its a state of mind

In the fight between Microsoft and Nintendo, I root for the fight.

I need something stronger than vodka, like reinforced concrete, or titanium

In matters of days, Sex went on to sell more than 1.5 million copies worldwide and remains the best and fastest-selling coffee table book.

That made Cavell liable to capital punishment under German military law, which was duly implemented by a German firing squad.

Devs keep trying to simulate reality but forget reality is horribly unbalanced.

Your brain is like a muscle, it wasn’t made for mathematics

It has continually amazed researchers to discover that human beings are more rugged than the devices they travel in. Studies of human acceleration and jolt tolerances have shown that, in nearly all cases, properly restrained and supported people have withstood crash forces only to be crushed by the vehicle structure collapsing on them. This has led to the re-design of automobiles as well as airplanes. And it’s one area where aerospace research has paid off in everyone’s lives.

The Maginot Line might have reflected a feeling of security for those living behind it, but it could not inspire them as did the image of a Finnish soldier hurling a bottle at a tank.

Its one weakness was a certain degree of over-manufacture in its moving parts, tolerances too fine and too numerous, so that it sometimes froze in severe cold, precisely the kind of weather it would be used in. When that happened, it was sometimes possible to reactivate a frozen Lahti by the simple expedient of urinating on it.

To check if a hole in the ground is dangerous, throw a bird into it
If you hear it hit the bottom, its filled with poisonous gas

I like to predict both sides so I always come out half right

The War On Christmas will only end when Christmas ends its illegal occupation of November!

The Red Army possesses all the advantages over the armies of other states in its ability to operate in the harsh conditions of the winter period. …

Science always triumphs!

When an article says “some scientists think” then remember this:
I, a scientist, once thought I could fit a whole orange in my mouth.
I could, it turns out, get in in there, but i hadn’t given sufficient thought to the reverse operation.

Polonium has few applications, and those are related to its radioactivity: heaters in space probes, antistatic devices, sources of neutrons and alpha particles, and poison.

To load a Nagant revolver in the battle you need to
1. Open the valve of the special loading window located on the right side of the revolver frame;
2. Turn the head of the ramrod located under the barrel of the revolver, release its lock and turn the ramrod so that it stands opposite the opening of the charging chamber of the drum;
3. With a sharp blow of the ramrod, knock the empty casing out of the drum;
4. Rotating the drum, line up the next charging chamber with the ramrod;
5. Knock out the next empty casing and repeat these actions until all the chambers are empty;
6. Return the ramrod to its original position under the barrel of the revolver and fix it;
7. Insert seven new cartridges into the empty charging chambers, one by one, one by one, through the loading window;
8. Close the loading window;
9. Pay attention to the German infantry squad, which has been watching your actions with interest all this time;
10. Boldly take lead in the chest from the German infantry squad.

The Wiener process has applications throughout the mathematical sciences.

Shutting down a reactor is not the hard part, generally¹

When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.

People say the KGB was cold and uncaring, but you’ve got to give them credit for being great listeners.

Less a shot in the dark, more a duel at dawn

Rocket Science is hard, yes, but the real hard part is Rocket Engineering

I’m guessing that the mind which finished this project is no worse off than the one which decided to undertake it in the first place.

And for my next trick, I’ll make the island of Elugelab disappear!

It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.

Orbiting Earth in the spaceship, I saw how beautiful our planet is. People, let us preserve and increase this beauty, not destroy it!

They encountered a series of problems but solved each one.

With irradiation of meat products, the salesperson or butcher in the store would no longer be able to sell hamburger like that offered to me with the claim, “It’s not spoiled. It only smells. When it’s spoiled, it’s green.”

Artsimovich joked that plasma physics was not science, because the subject of natural science was objects created by nature and the subject of plasma physics was objects created by the experimentalist.

The method of satisfying your own curiosity at the expense of the government.

Remember, an experimentalist, in contrast to a theoretician, will be mistaken only once, and then they will no longer believe him.

Shouldn’t every republic have its own 2,000-kilowatt reactor and 150-megaelectronvolt accelerator?

Other RBMKs were promised, but fortunately they were never built.

If anyone wants a hole in the ground, nuclear explosives can make big holes.

Unfortunately, their return reflects only the resilience of storks, not a resolution to the legacy of atomic-powered communism.

[…] But Skvirskii’s concerns were the tip of the reactor pile.

At least the emergency safety system at Ignalina works well: One of the turbogenerators of the second block was tripped when a crow’s nest built on a tower shorted out a 330-kilowatt power line.
The fried bird and the tower fell to the ground.

7

Seven

The world will surely teach one; if nothing else, than to walk slowly

It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.

Only when the last tree is cut;
only when the last river is polluted;
only when the last fish is caught;
only then will they realize that you cannot eat money

Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?

I’m not scared,
I’m petrified!

The covers of this book are too far apart.

From these two incontrovertible premises he deduced that the Library is total and that its shelves register all the possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols (a number which, though extremely vast, is not infinite). Everything: the minutely detailed history of the future, the archangels’ autobiographies, the faithful catalogues of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of those catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of the true catalogue, the Gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary on that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book in all languages, the interpolations of every book in all books.

Ah, but I was so much older then,
I’m younger than that now.

…in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself… [In] all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions.

Pick up that can.
Now put it in the trash can.

It’s not DNS
There’s no way it’s DNS
It was DNS

Logs told us it was DNS
It felt like DNS, it had to be DNS
It wasn’t DNS

Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.

You can do anything you want, except for the things you can’t do

The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.

The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be lighted.

Common sense is not so common.

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.

Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.

An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.

A smart man makes a mistake, learns from it, and never makes that mistake again. But a wise man finds a smart man and learns from him how to avoid the mistake altogether.

Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.

I know that I am intelligent, because I know that I know nothing.

The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.

Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.

I had the ambition to go not only farther than man had gone before, but to go as far as it was possible to go.

All of humanity’s problems stem from our inability to sit quietly in a room alone

I’m going to turn into a citrus product is what I’m gonna do.

Well, it’s back to the drawing boards—or wherever geologists go

Time is relentless

There were probably as many emotions in that room as there were people

You reap what you sow, Artyom. Force answers force, war breeds war, and death only brings death. To break this vicious circle one must do more than just act without any thought or doubt

You can’t hide from the future.

Wicked phenomenon, yes? But, you know, it’s not any more “evil” than, say… fire. It all depends on your point of view. Try to get a better understanding of things before you make your judgement.

I know this tunnel, and it knows me.

Everything went great right up to the explosion.

Code unto others as you would have other code unto you

I am not certain, so I shall say no more

The world is complex, and you should be skeptical of simple narratives.

I pity snails, and all that carry their homes on their backs

‘Last version was better,’ says Floyd. ‘More bugs. Bugs make game fun.’

People who weren’t around in the Twenties when radio exploded can’t know what it meant, this milestone for mankind. Suddenly, with radio, there was instant human communication. No longer were our homes isolated and lonely and silent. The world came into our homes for the first time. Music came pouring in. Laughter came in. News came in.
The world shrank, with radio.

Fear exists in the one place you can never escape; your mind

My cuts, short or long, don’t go wrong!

The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself

There were two problems with Genie, mostly of a philosophical nature: there was nothing to use it against, and the troops were scared to death of it

You need money so you don’t have to think about money.

Sometimes I ask myself, what the hell are we all running around for, anyway? To make money? But what the hell do we need money for if all we do is run around making it?

Don’t trust atoms

It’s not the end of the world at all…It’s only the end for us. The world will go on just the same, only we shan’t be in it. I dare say it will get along all right without us.

Plans are worthless, but planning is everything. There is a very great distinction because when you are planning for an emergency, you must start with this one thing: the very definition of ‘emergency’ is that it is unexpected, therefore it is not going to happen the way you are planning.

‘There are not many road signs in Russia, you know.’ He laughed. ‘If you don’t know where the road goes, you shouldn’t be on it.’

Humans have intelligence without wisdom. It’s what makes them misunderstand trivial things.

In the moment of crisis, the wise build bridges and the foolish build dams.

Expect disappointment and you’ll never be disappointed

With enthusiasm, you can achieve everything. Enthusiasm is the glare of your eyes, the speed of gait, the fortress of handshake, the insurmountable tide of energy and will to implement your ideas. Enthusiasm is the cornerstone of all progress! Only with it can success. Without him, you only have the possibilities.

Who dares, wins

Don’t use seven words when four will do.

The purpose of a first draft is not to be good, its to be written.

The purpose of the first draft is not to get it right, but to get it written.

There’s only one thing that can save a man from madness and that’s uncertainty.

The number of places in paradise is limited; only in hell is entry open to all.

Do you know the parable about the frog in the cream? Two frogs landed in a pail of cream. One, thinking rationally, understood straight away that there was no point in resistance and that you can’t deceive destiny. But then what if there’s an afterlife – why bother jumping around, entertaining false hopes in vain? He crossed his legs and sank to the bottom. The second, the fool, was probably an atheist. And she started to flop around. It would seem that she had no reason to flail about if everything was predestined. But she flopped around and flopped around anyway . . . Meanwhile, the cream turned to butter. And she crawled out. We honour the memory of this second frog’s friend, eternally damned for the sake of progress and rational thought.

Russians have the unique ability to look into two abysses at once

According to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy invisibility is so hard to do that it’s easier to just to not be there instead.

When you can’t find something, take a note of the first place you looked for it. When you DO find it, or replace it, put it in that place where you looked first! Chances are likely next time you need it, you’ll look in that place first, and there it will be!

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 the infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.

“I believe we are alone in the universe”
“So there is no one else out there?”
“No, but they are alone as well”

Life after death, is just that; life.

I have fallen and I choose not get up

You can offend with a word, but with a dictionary you can kill

At my company, we had a C program which took three hours to load some data to a database.
A modern Java program has been written to replace it. That takes six hours.

The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.

I think the saddest people always try their hardest to make people happy because they know what it’s like to feel absolutely worthless and they don’t want anyone else to feel like that.

Is it better for a man to have chosen propane than to have butane imposed upon him?

“We must move at once!”
“In which direction?”

I, of course, used a time machine to ‘get the idea’ of Unseen University from Hogwarts; I don’t know what Paul [Kidby, the illustrator] used in this case. Obviously he must have used something.

If it wasn’t for the fun and money, I really don’t know why I’d bother.

I shudder if the majority of people look at my brush work and say it is pretty, for then I know it is ordinary and I have failed. If they say they do not understand it, or even that it is ugly, I am happy, for I have succeeded.

Chance favors the prepared mind

You have the fullest half glass I’ve ever seen

“There are no atheists in foxholes” isn’t an argument against atheism, it’s an argument against foxholes.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence

The world is shattered. The wise are mourning, the fools are joking.
Oh, what does it matter? The wash needs ironing and the fire needs stoking.

what you hear depends on where you’re sitting

When a problem threatens to engulf you, there’s nothing like irrelevant detail to keep you afloat.

There’s so many board games with so many different titles, but I feel like they could all have the same title: ‘Which One Of My Friends Is A Competitive Prick?’

God is on the side of who has the best artillery.

Studying category theory is like eating your vegetables.

One can think of equivalence of categories as “isomorphism up to isomorphism”

Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.

‘Rope!’ muttered Sam. ‘I knew I’d want it, if I hadn’t got it!’

History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme.

Any job worth doing is worth doing twice

Grog, which contains one or more of the following: kerosene, propylene glycerole, artificial sweeteners, sulphuric acid, rum, acetone, red dye #2, scumm, axle grease, battery acid, and/or pepperoni.

Don’t look now, but there’s a humongous fungus among us!

Never drink any drink with a paper umbrella in it,
never drink any drink with a humorous name,
and never drink any drink that changes colour when the last ingredient goes in.

I started to walk down the street when I heard a voice saying: ‘Good evening, Mr. Dowd.’ I turned, and there was this big white rabbit leaning against a lamp-post. Well, I thought nothing of that, because when you’ve lived in a town as long as I’ve lived in this one, you get used to the fact that everybody knows your name.

​

​

It’s also important to be able to control your bodily functions. You never know when a long demo is about to begin, so make sure you’re prepared to sit in front of the monitor for a long time if necessary. If you’re feeling drowsy, you should get some sleep.

my head will fly, my tongue will lie, my eyes will fry and I may die

It has a funny taste. You can’t put your finger on it, but if you had to describe it you would say it has the flavor of INTENSE PAIN.

We’ll live underground. Use bacon for clothes.

A one-time pad isn’t a cryptosystem: it’s a state of mind.

As a practical person, I’ve observed that one-time pads are theoretically unbreakable, but practically very weak. By contrast, conventional ciphers are theoretically breakable, but practically strong.

Do not irritate druids. They have ways.

History merely repeats itself. It has all been done before. Nothing under the sun is truly new.

On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], ‘Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’
I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

Fifteen million dollars is not money. It’s a motive with a universal adapter on it.

No one with their sleeves rolled up who walks purposefully with a piece of paper held conspicuously in their hand is ever challenged.

Was it you or your brother that was killed in the war?

An end is in sight to the severe weather shortage.

…the wind shining, and the sun blowing gently across the fields.

Smoking kills. If you’re killed, you’ve lost a very important part of your life.

It just as easily could have gone the other way.

Our offense is like the pythagorean theorem: There is no answer!

People think we make $3 million and $4 million a year. They don’t realize that most of us only make $500,000.

The wind always seems to blow against catchers when they are running.

I’ve never had major knee surgery on any other part of my body.

Me and George and Billy are two of a kind.

Wait a minute! I’m not interested in agriculture. I want the military stuff.

I’m not indecisive. Am I indecisive?

A man could not be in two places at the same time unless he were a bird.

The streets are safe in Philadelphia — it’s only the people who make them unsafe.

The right to suffer is one of the joys of a free economy.

When your back is against the wall, there is only one thing to do, and that is turn around and fight.

Wherever I have gone in this country, I have found Americans.

The best cure for insomnia is to get a lot of sleep.

China is a big country, inhabited by many Chinese.

A zebra does not change its spots.

Things are more like they are now than they have ever been.

If Lincoln was alive today, he’d roll over in his grave.

A proof is a proof. What kind of a proof? It’s a proof. A proof is a proof. And when you have a good proof, it’s because it’s proven.

Will the highways on the Internet become more few?

If crime went down 100%, it would still be fifty times higher than it should be.

There are two kinds of truth. There are real truths, and there are made up truths.

Outside of the killings, [Washington] has one of the lowest crime rates in the country.

Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and weigh only 1.5 tons.

The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys.

While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially it is an impossibility.

Radio has no future. Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible. X-rays will prove to be a hoax.

I see no good reasons why the views given in this volume should shock the religious sensibilities of anyone.

That Professor Goddard with his ‘chair’ in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react–to say that would be absurd. Of course, he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.

Ours has been the first, and doubtless to be the last, to visit this profitless locality.

There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will.

The bomb will never go off. I speak as an expert in explosives.

There will never be a bigger plane built.

Do you have anything good to read

However, things are not always as simple as they seem. Is all this precipitation being monitored? And if it is, why? And if why, then by whom? To all these questions, the answer is yes.

‘There’s a tendency among the press to attribute the creation of a game to a single person,’ says Warren Spector, creator of Thief and Deus Ex.

Seasonal weather for the time of year.

If England are going to win this match, they’re going to have to score a goal.

When they complained about our escorting their “Blackjack” bombers I just wanted to say that we just wanted to be there for search and rescue if they needed it.

I will not turn into a snake. It never helps.

I will make sure that my doomsday device is up to code and properly grounded.

I will make sure that my doomsday device is up to code and properly grounded.

I think I know from where your problems stem.
Would you, could you, RTFM?

Casey: I’m installing ‘Cinema-OS’, the operating system used in the movies.
Andy: Any downsides?
Casey: Yeah, it can’t show any font under 72 point.

Begin Operation: Something-Thingy!

[…] If you ask three archaeologists what long barrows were used for, you’ll probably get four different opinions.

It is doubtless true, as somebody pointed out, that a yoke of oxen would be driven, not with a whip but with a goad; but the lash of a whip can be heard on the air, whereas it is useless to ask the studio-effects-man to stand by making a noise like an ox-goad.

The bubble-top canopy rose automatically and Tom dived inside, searching frantically amongst hundreds of levers, switches and analogue dials for the start button.

“What’s the difference between a bug and a feature?”
“Marketing.”

And when everyone’s a critic, no one will be

Hope is not a strategy

I have a mouse named Gerbil and a gerbil named Mouse.
The night that I named them it was dark in the house.

A film about three men walking through the wooded territory, two of whom are mostly calm, and the third is constantly afraid of something.

My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.

Some things in life are too complicated to explain in any language.

The most complicated skill is to be simple.

The list is endless, but I shall end it here.

Excuse my lack of punctuality, I had to rework my walk because it wasn’t silly enough anymore.

The best way to communicate from one human being to another is through story.

Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.

You may live to see man-made horrors beyond your comprehension.

With Great power comes a great reconstruction of a city.

The problem with loyalty to a cause. Is that the cause will always betray you.

In retrospect, it seems completely logical that once a weapon is invented it will be used. But we forget the blindness and obsfucation of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, when the most destructive weapons were regarded as walls of protection, and when the horror of Armageddon was seen as a deterrent no sane society would risk. But the nations were not sane – rational, composed, aware, but not sane…the Death, when it came, was completely earnest and open. Every weapon was used as it had been designed to be used.

The photo team confirmed the frog is real and was captured in a single frame by one of the remote cameras used to photograph the launch. The condition of the frog, however, is uncertain.

Mr. McKittrick, after very careful consideration, sir, I’ve come to the conclusion that your new defense system sucks.

I don’t believe that any system is totally secure.

A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.

I wouldn’t trust this overgrown pile of microchips any further than I can throw it.

I loved it when you nuked Las Vegas. Suitably biblical ending to the place, don’t you think?

Jennifer: He wasn’t very old.
David: No, he was pretty old. He was 41.
Jennifer: Oh yeah? Oh, that’s old.

Russia and the United States are at war. Missiles have been fired by both sides. Washington and Moscow are in flames. Details on these and other stories in just a moment, but first, this word about hair care.

It’s such a fine line between stupid and clever

[…] if there is only a 1% chance the planet is heading toward a truly major disaster and delay means passing a point of no return, inaction now is foolhardy.

One day I’ll be dead and THEN you’ll all be sorry.

Everything I know about geography, I learnt playing Empire, Diplomacy, and Risk.

Insulin does not belong to me, it belongs to the world.

Even my errors aim to please.

Piracy is sea themed

See appendix A for a proof that Winston Churchill was a carrot.

The Internet is, like, a pipe full of Soup

I’m not right, but I’m not THAT wrong

When I said “Blame the dice”, I did not literally mean to ascribe agency to the polyhedron

There is no ‘i’ in ‘communism’

Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice

[…] you have 5 minutes of experience repeated hundreds of times

Nothing is impossible. Impossible just takes a bit longer

The difficult we do immediately, the impossible takes a little longer

It is a corvette when you ask the Treasury for money, a frigate when it is launched, a destroyer when it enters service, a cruiser when it goes to war, but only a corvette if it gets sunk.

The only dumb question is one that is not asked.

Everyone has a book inside them and, in most cases, that’s exactly where it should remain.

An hour with a book would have brought to your mind,
The secret that took the whole year to find;
The facts that you learned at enormous expense,
Were all on a library shelf to commence.

Don’t be angry at lazy people
They have done nothing

I don’t make things complicated, they do that all by themselves

We are the bork.
Your software bugs will be added to our own.
Resistance is futile.

…Machiavelli noted that ‘..there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things…’ At videodisc, I believe these words had special significance…

If you are alone in the desert and see vultures perched above you, your first thought is never, ‘Oh thank God, the vultures are coming to help.’

0xBAADF00D acknowledges the problem and offers no solution.

If I have been able to see further, it is because I have been surrounded by midgets

They say I’m old-fashioned, and live in the past,
but sometimes I think progress progresses too fast!

Filing Cabinet.

The goals of the [space] program are not scientific goals; they are political,

[…], but the problem of waste handling was eliminated by eliminating elimination.

Well, it is so often the way, sir, too late one thinks of what one should have said. Sir Thomas More, for instance — burned alive for refusing to recant his Catholicism — must have been kicking himself, as the flames licked higher, that it never occurred to him to say, ‘I recant my Catholicism.’

I am not a wit — I am a comedy writer. A wit thinks of something funny immediately; a comedy writer thinks of something very funny two hours later.

You have perhaps heard the phrase that hell is other people? In time, you will learn that it is wrong.

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.

Audiophiles don’t use their equipment to listen to your music. Audiophiles use your music to listen to their equipment.

Walking tanks must exist somewhere for there to be such attention to detail like this in mech sim.

The only dumb question is one that is not asked.

[…] What followed was one of the most epic face-offs in DRAM history.

Ratings are for transistors – tubes have guidelines

Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand

Just in case it doesn’t work, at this point I declared it a work of art.

And when I turned it on – wonder of all wonders – it didn’t explode!

I’m not sure what our application here even is, but that’s beside the point.

The first step-down module met with a tragic end involving several amps going where they shouldn’t.

Stupid, silly, pointless – it seems these are my buzzwords.

It has a look.
I can’t quite name its look, but it certainly has one.

I would not say that it is finished, only that this round is over.

Made In A Castle With Better Equipment

It was the perfect high end audio product: Exotic, inefficient, expensive, unavailable, and toxic.

I believe in censorship. I made a fortune out of it.

I kind of like it in here; it’s private.

Are the radio-waves from objects in space any threat to us?
No, they are extremely weak. The total energy collected by radio astronomers over the history of radio astronomy amounts to about the energy required for a mosquito to make one push-up!

The only person you should fail is yourself.

I’m not happy that it’s all our fault, but at least it’s not all my fault

Has anybody seen my cloak of hiding?

Change is bad because everything is currently perfect

A tip is just a complaint that read a book on positive thinking

The chaos army seems suspiciously well-organised

Fashions fade, style is eternal.

A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.

earlier investigation was done with more depth, more rigour, and, most importantly, more expensive equipment

Knowing is half the battle. The other half is the battle

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.

Too much of a good thing can be a bad thing

I’m Gabe Newell

Caution! Under no circumstances confuse the mesh with the interleave operator, except under confusing circumstances!

Exhaustive tests in our advertising department have shown that the 606 will give 50 per cent more output than you will obtain

I didn’t “crash my bike”, it just got some free, custom engraving!

Anecdotal evidence is only evidence of an anecdote

If it ain’t broke, take it apart and find out why

I hope we didn’t need that

The cold war era is known for its myriad of acronyms

One really shouldn’t use wheelbarrow per square banana units, only metric.

It was an algae space race.

Everything is different in a closed system.

The lunar project is not the whole space program.

A kind of “algae space race” developed.

The ecologists and engineers couldn’t insult each other if they tried.
The languages they spoke, their methods, and their thought processes were too different.

That Mars is inhabited by beings of some sort or other we may consider as certain as it is uncertain what those beings may be.

Human kind will not remain forever confined to Earth.
In pursuit of light and space it will, timidly at first, probe the limits of the atmosphere and later extend its control across the entire solar system.

One day we *shall* fly to Mars.

We’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas!

For NASA, space is still a high priority.

Verbosity leads to unclear, inarticulate things.

I have made good judgments in the past. I have made good judgments in the future.

I deserve respect for the things I did not do.

We are ready for any unforeseen event that may or may not occur.

The future will be better tomorrow.

Bank failures are caused by depositors who don’t deposit enough money to cover losses due to mismanagement.

The loss of life will be irreplaceable.

Every once in a while, you let a word or phrase out, and you want to catch it and bring it back. You can’t do that. It’s gone, gone forever.

[It’s] time for the human race to enter the solar system.

I stand by all the misstatements that I’ve made.

The only thing I’ve ever wanted to do in this world is play piano and sing on the radio. This isn’t work, it’s play – and I’m getting paid for it!

One good test is worth a thousand expert opinions

The fact that geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses.
They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers.
But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world!

Exit, Pursued by a Bear

This is not a book to be tossed aside lightly.
It should be thrown with great force.

As a chemist, I must exude some odor that serves as a reverse pheromone

There’s no news like bad news

The difference between genius and insanity is measured only by success

Long story short, I am never welcome in Albania ever again.

The phonograph makes it possible for a man, who has already rested long in the grave, once again to raise his voice and greet the present.

I love to think, and I don’t want to screw up the machine

We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing we discovered was the Earth.

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts

Marketing is an engineering problem

A twin engine aircraft gets you to the scene of the accident more quickly

The world’s ultimate weapon runs on water, everything else runs on fuel

There is a replica of this Model in the Museum of Traffic and Technology in Berlin.
Back then it didn’t function well, and in that regard the replica is very reliable — it also doesn’t work well.

Maybe I’m right, maybe they are, but as far as I’m concerned they’re entitled to their incorrect opinions.

The appreciation of pleasing decay is an important one because it is so often neglected.

If it never failed, there wouldn’t be any point in making it work, would there?

Danger makes life interesting, but anxiety gets tiring after a while

A computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things.
They are, in short, a perfect match.

But it clearly is the only right way.
The fact that everybody else does it some other way only means that they are wrong.

Seximal, God’s gift to man

It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

They say great science is built on the shoulders of giants.
Not here.
At Aperture, we do all our science from scratch. No hand holding.

Pillar one: Science without results is just witchcraft.
Pillar two: Get results or you’re fired.
Pillar three: if you suspect a coworker of bein’ a witch, report them immediately. I cannot stress that enough. Witchcraft will not be tolerated.

You saved science!

Peace in the world, or the world in pieces!

What is to give light must endure burning.

Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better but the frog dies in the process.

Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog.
Nobody laughs and the frog dies.

Nothing in life is certain, except Death, Taxes, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics

Yeah, well, you know, that’s just like… your opinion, man.

How, given little over half a century of work, did one man become the creative equivalent of a people?

I wisely started with a map and made the story fit… the other way about lands one in confusions and impossibilities.

If given a choice of options, always take the crazy one. Nobody ever plans for crazy.

The more you learn, the more you forget what you didn’t know

There are some who call me…. Tim?

I was tempted to jump trough a window but we were three stories off the ground, and I was not sure where I had parked my car.

I am a thespian, easily moved to tears, as for example when facing a woman who has taken off her clothes and then, overcome by conscience, puts them on again.
Or, as in the present case, facing the awful problem of making methyl iodide, my old nemesis.

I changed wives three times and sailboats six, averaging two boats per wife.
Marriage and divorce did not dent my love for women; when a boat died I loved its successor.

He plunged trough a window, shattering the glass.
Fortunately Betty’s party was on the first floor. We rushed to the window, and he was a small speck, blocks away, weaving in a mad run trough the falling snow.
Someone said, “He doesn’t have a coat.”

I was scared, as they say in the vernacular, —-less.

I recall a letter from the celebrated photochemist, Gary Griffin, a professor at Louisiana State University.
“Dear Max” it said, “Because of our desperation, we ordered 10 grams of cis-stilbene at a perfectly awful price of $35.
My graduate student on examining the bottle, found immersed therein a very large spider.
We have filtered the solution, which is fairly good cis-stilbene, obtaining 8.2 grams.
The spider has been dried and weighs 1.8 grams.
We are returning the spider by U.P.S. and ask that you replace with authentic cis-stilbene.”

Promptly the chemicals, the flask, all the apparatus on the table, the table, the room, and part of the ceiling flew in a thousand directions.
Ed had been in the doorway, holding an empty cup, which he planned to fill with coffee in an adjoining building.
He sailed in a parabolic arc, the cup tightly held. I watched him go by. He never moved a muscle of his face.
He landed in a sitting position in our one grassy area.
Our Sikh, Davinder Singh, hurried over and filled the outstretched cup, receiving an almost inaudible, “Thank you” from Hunter.

Time was running out; I was due to leave for Isreal on a consulting trip the following week.
I sent up prayers to Yahweh, patron of all those who are in trouble, and planned to invoke him again the following week from Tel Aviv, where the lines are shorter.

I saw an old geezer smoking a curved pipe and asked him how long it had been raining.
He looked at me, removed the pipe, yawned, and in excellent English said, “Forty days.”

Women. They are a complete mystery.

An SSL error has occurred and a secure connection to the server cannot be made.

Ik at geen ontbijt,
Want ik had geen honger en geen tijd
Toch nam ik nog een koekje toe
Anders werd ik weer zo moe

We watched the Apollo 11 flight on the television at TsNIImash. After the happy conclusion of the lunar expedition, Tyulin proposed stopping by the director’s office.
There, over a glass of cognac, he said: “This is all Chertok’s fault. In 1945 he came up with a scheme to snatch von Braun from the Americans and didn’t manage to pull it off.”
Chertok replied bitterly: “And it’s a very good thing that Vasya Kharchev and I failed in that undertaking.
Von Braun would have sat for some time in our country uselessly on an island, and then he would have been sent to the GDR, where as a former Nazi he wouldn’t have been cleared to work anywhere.
And so with the help of the Americans, he fulfilled not only his own dream, but also that of all mankind.”

You can’t just close this place like a macaroni factory.

A letter from the Rostov-on-Don University student physics club to Rutherford provoked quite an outburst. Having confused the English and Russian words for “nucleus” and “cannon balls,” they informed the great man that he had been elected an honorary member of their club “for having proven that atoms have balls.” Rutherford angrily demanded an explanation from Kapitsa, who happened to be in the Cambridge laboratory at that time and who calmed Rutherford down.

We’re scientists, not magicians,

Predictability has always been the sidekick I don’t talk about.

The American delegation made another informative visit, this time bringing the big guns, Dr. Edward Teller, the brilliant Hungarian theoretician and Mother of the H-bomb* […]

* Inside nuclear engineering, Dr. Teller is considered to be the mother of the H-bomb and not the father because he “took it to full term.”

I heard that [Buran] was adopted mainly due to insistence from Ustinov, who had made the following argument: if our scientists and engineers do not see any specific use of this technology now, we should not forget that the Americans are very pragmatic and very smart. Since they have invested a tremendous amount of money in such a project, they can obviously see some useful scenarios that are still unseen from Soviet eyes. The Soviet Union should develop such a technology, so that it won’t be taken by surprise in the future

The tail grants the turtle a better bass performance.

However, in the end there is a limit to more and more safety systems.
Eventually they are counterproductive in that they simply provide more ways the system could fail.

Alternative Universes tend to have more Zeppelins.

About binomial theorem I’m teeming with a lot o’news,
With many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse.

The thing about quotes on the internet is you can not confirm their validity

Ever tried.
Ever failed.
No matter.
Try again.
Fail again.
Fail better.

Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature.

Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem

Entities ought not to be multiplied except from necessity

We don’t ask that you stay within the bounds of physics, but at least follow the rules you freaking made up.

When you reach for the stars you may not quite get one, but you won’t come up with a handful of mud either.

The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.

The optimist sees opportunity in every danger; the pessimist sees danger in every opportunity.

If you enjoy what you do you’ll never work another day in your life.

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.

A goal without a plan is just a wish.

If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations—then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation—well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.

A theory has only the alternative of being right or wrong. A model has a third possibility: it may be right, but irrelevant.

Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

In skating over thin ice our safety is our speed.

The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.

The way we do find out about this proton, the first kind of experiments that we’ve been making, is to tear the electron off the atom and accelerate the proton faster and faster, and let it plow into a mass of atoms, into a piece of ordinary matter, hoping it’ll hit one of the other protons in the, say, hydrogen gas. And then see what happens, what comes out.
It would be like trying to find out what a watch is made out of and how the mechanism works by the expedient of smashing two watches together and seeing what kinds of gear wheels fly out.

It doesn’t seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil-which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama.

Life is a verb, not a noun.

When asked by a group of theologians what one could conclude as to the nature of the Creator from a study of His creation, Haldane is said to have answered, “An inordinate fondness for beetles”

True greatness is when your name is like ampere, watt, and fourier — when it’s spelled with a lower case letter.

Three minutes’ thought would suffice to find this out; but thought is irksome and three minutes is a long time.

A moment’s thought would have shown him. But a moment is a long time, and thought is a painful process.

Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

The principal applications of any sufficiently new and innovative technology always have been—and will continue to be—applications created by that technology.

Someone is going to make your product obsolete. Make sure it’s you.

a children’s story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children’s story.

Critics who treat “adult” as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adults themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man, I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

Science: (n.) The attempt by subroutines in an operating system to deduce the source code, and write the instruction manual.

Time is that great gift of nature which keeps everything from happening at once.

time is a device to prevent everything happening at once, space is a device to prevent it all happening in Cambridge

‘Tis with our judgments as our watches, none
Go just alike, yet each believes his own.

… Say what you like. Plutonium may give you grief for thousands of years, but arsenic is forever.

There’s a truism that the road to Hell is often paved with good intentions. The corollary is that evil is best known not by its motives but by its methods.

We all have a tendency to think that the world must conform to our prejudices. The opposite view involves some effort of thought, and most people would die sooner than think – in fact they do so.

All science is either physics or stamp collecting.

Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.

Do not try to live for ever. You will not succeed.

He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.

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.

Walk! Not bloody likely.

We don’t stop playing because we grow old, we grow old because we stop playing.

The power of accurate observation is frequently called cynicism by those who don’t have it.

You see things; and you say, ‘Why?’ But I dream of things that never were; and I say ‘Why not?’

Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

The cruelest lies are often told in silence.

To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour.

Big whirls have little whirls that feed on their velocity,
and little whirls have lesser whirls and so on to viscosity.

While you are asleep you are dead; and whether you stay dead an hour or a billion years the time to you is the same.

Mr. Clemens was once asked whether he feared death. He said that he did not, in view of the fact that he had been dead for billions and billions of years before he was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.

Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.

Any one who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin. For, as has been pointed out several times, there is no such thing as a random number – there are only methods to produce random numbers, and a strict arithmetic procedure of course is not such a method.

In mathematics you don’t understand things, you just get used to them.

The introduction of numbers as coordinates … is an act of violence whose only practical vindication is the special calculatory manageability of the ordinary number continuum with its four basic operations.

It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true.

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences

THE VERY BIG STUPID is a thing which breeds by eating The Future. Have you seen it? It sometimes disguises itself as a good-looking quarterly bottom line, derived by closing the R&D department.

Reality is a crutch for those who can’t cope with Science Fiction

I never fully understood [the label of ‘escapist’] till my friend Professor Tolkien asked me the very simple question, ‘What class of men would you expect to be most preoccupied with, and most hostile to, the idea of escape?’ and gave the obvious answer: jailers.

Work and play are words used to describe the same thing under differing conditions

Home is where the books are

We could have built a NERVA engine by the end of this decade.
The development was moving very well when Congress decided to cancel the program.
Incidentally, more money is annually spent on lipsticks in New York State than NERVA was costing, and any medium sized state has more annual sales of liquor than NERVA cost over it’s lifetime.
It’s nice that they don’t waste their time on frivolities like space.

Editorials aside, NERVA would have been the key to manned exploration of the solar system, and it’s reasonable to assume that somebody, someday, will use it for that.

Great people talk about ideas, average people talk about things, and small people talk about wine.

Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.

A drunk man’s words are a sober man’s thoughts.

I’ve been studying theoretical physics, although at this point I guess it’s just physics.

Someday, we’ll look back on this, laugh nervously and change the subject.

When the weight of the paperwork equals the weight of the plane, the plane will fly.

it is often wiser to choose the wrong way so as to expedite subsequent revision.

There’s always one more bug.

Any program will expand to fill available memory.

Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool will want to use it.

Anything can be made to work if you fiddle with it long enough.

It works better if you plug it in.

When all else fails, read the instructions.

If you mess with a thing long enough, it’ll break.

The solution to the problem changes the problem.

When working toward the solution of a problem, it always helps if you know the answer.

Hot glass looks exactly the same as cold glass.

He who has the gold, makes the rules.

Life is what happens while you are making other plans.

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

The limits of the possible can only be defined by going beyond them into the impossible.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

[People] will act rationally when all other possibilities have been exhausted.

Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on.

All general statements are false.

If you wait, it will go away.

Opportunity always knocks at the least opportune moment.

Things equal to nothing else are equal to each other.

In every organization there will always be one person who knows what is going on.
… This person must be fired.

The real world is a special case.

It is easier to get forgiveness than permission.

Progress does not consist of replacing a theory that is wrong with one that is right. It consists of replacing a theory that is wrong with one that is more subtly wrong.

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

Almost anything is easier to get into than out of.

What really matters is the name you succeed in imposing on the facts, not the facts themselves.

People will accept your idea much more readily if you tell them Benjamin Franklin said it first.

A verbal contract isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.

The chief cause of problems is solutions.

Everything costs more and takes longer.

The most delicate component will be dropped.

After the last of 16 mounting screws has been removed from an access cover, it will be discovered that the wrong access cover has been removed.

After an access cover has been secured by 16 hold-down screws, it will be discovered that the gasket has been omitted.

When you’re adding up committees
there’s a useful rule of thumb:
That talents make a difference,
and follies make a sum.

Snow is not neutral.

Cement is a mighty binding material. With cement we’re going to have a great building-up of the republic.
We are cement, Comrades: the working class. Let us keep that in mind. We’ve played the fool long enough; now we’ve got to start real work.

You want weapons?
We’re in a library!
Books!
The best weapons in the world!

He’s just, like, this guy, you know?

a love supreme

No, it didn’t “fix” anything. It just shifted the brokenness one space to the right.

Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.

This instrument can teach, it can illuminate, and it can inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it towards those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box.

Well, supposing at this point, that Mozart, or one of that crowd, […]

90% of what is considered “impossible” is, in fact, possible.
The other 10% will become possible with the passage of time & technology.

Looking back, I am thankful that I didn’t go into the film industry.

I won’t make games with senseless violence. There has to be a reason for it, such as war.

Ladders are boring

Ladders are boring, elevators are cool

Everyone who uses a computer frequently has had, from time to time, a mad desire to attack the precocious abacus with an axe.

It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.

Acting logically is at odds with acting human

This is my Grandfather’s ax.
This is my Grandfather’s ax.
My Father replaced the handle.
I replaced the ax-head.
This is my Grandfather’s ax.

Commenting on a complaint from a Mr. Arthur Purdey about a large gas bill, a spokesman for NorthWest Gas said “We agree it was rather high for the time of year. It’s possible Mr. Purdey has been charged for the gas used up during the explosion that destroyed his house.”

At the height of the gale, the harbourmaster radioed a coastguard on the spot and asked him to estimate the wind speed. He replied that he was sorry, but he didn’t have a gauge. However, if it was any help, the wind had just blown his Land Rover off the cliff.

A young girl who was blown out to sea on a set of inflatable teeth was rescued by a man on an inflatable lobster. A coastguard spokesman commented, “this sort of thing is all too common”

Winners don’t use drugs

No, that’s not a hand you see on the shelf below.
It’s a foot.

“That is how I want to die”
“What, muttering about meat pies?”
“No, late”

Glulx games are almost always shipped in the Blorb format.

Chemists, I observe, are thrifty and try to get as much yield as they can from a reaction, and they readily absorb food.

“We’re down to a half gallon,” [he] croaked. “All we have left is the smell.”
He handed me a hammer, which we normally use to tighten bungs, and pointed to his cranium.
I was sorely tempted to use it on my own.

People think they want technology, when what they actually want is stuff that works

Prepared for the worst, I telephoned my chemical plant in the United States.
In a surprisingly short time, the call went trough.
The plant was surviving, and business was moderately good. There had been no fires, no serious accidents, no other emergencies.
Relieved, I hung up and was strolling back to the dinner table when the telephone operator called me to the desk and apologetically presented a bill that equaled half the cost of the trip to Yugoslavia.
I developed apoplexy.
I now knew the awful truth. The reason for the cheap fares to Yugoslavia is to lure businessmen away from their plants, and the telephone system supports the country.
My distaff side told me without sympathy that this would teach me not to call home.

Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!

Code is like humor. When you have to explain it, it’s bad.

… I went from adolescence to senility, trying to bypass maturity …

[…], I’d like to humbly describe how to completely fix this forever.

A free opinion is worth what you paid for it

Free advice is worth what you paid for it

A sound chip is less like a soundcard, and more like an oscillator open to suggestions

And so He brought forth a carrot, and said: “Behold this, for it is a carrot.” and all about him knew that it was so, for it was orange with a green top.

The Pinnacle of Online Entertainment.

I didn’t “Oversleep”
I prefer the term “Involuntary resting”

The universe is, and we are.

Hope is like a bird that senses the dawn and carefully starts to sing while it’s still dark.

89% of magic tricks are not magic.
Technically, they are sorcery.

Evolution is a change from a no-howish untalkaboutable all-alikeness by continuous sticktogetherations and somethingelsifications.

No meme is an island

So, basically, saying that this game should be burned is an insult to fire.

History merely repeats itself. It has all been done before. Nothing under the sun is truly new.

It is now generally agreed among evolutionary theorists that sex is a crane

Of all the forces in the universe, the hardest to overcome is the force of habit.

I’ve played right into the hands of a dastardly villain, whom I’ve never stood a chance against.
Who is this incarnation of chaos?
Why it is none other than me.

Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action

I can shove rocket-science up your ass

PowerPoint makes us stupid

Life is tough, but it’s tougher when you’re stupid

Life is so beautiful our instinct is going to be to protect it, but our imperative, you have to remember, is to appreciate it.

Right now thousands of missiles are hidden away, literally out of sight, topped with warheads and ready to go, awaiting the right electrical signal. They are a collective death wish, barely suppressed. Every one of them is an accident waiting to happen, a potential act of mass murder. They are out there, waiting, soulless and mechanical, sustained by our denial – and they work.

The Redstone often carried a 4-megaton warhead but couldn’t fly more than 175 miles. The combination of a short range and a powerful thermonuclear weapon was unfortunate. Launched from NATO bases in West Germany, Redstone missiles would destroy a fair amount of West Germany.

No great monument has been built to honor those who served during the Cold War, who risked their lives and sometimes lost them in the name of freedom. It was ordinary men and women, not just diplomats and statesmen, who helped to avert a nuclear holocaust. Their courage and their sacrifices should be remembered.

American tanks were sent to Checkpoint Charlie as a show of strength. Soviet tanks appeared there at about five in the evening on the twenty-seventh. The British soon deployed two antitank guns to support the Americans, while all the French troops in West Berlin remained safely in their barracks.

Sergeant Paul Ramoneda, a twenty-eight-year-old baker with the Ninth Food Service Squadron, was one of the first to reach the bomber.

[…] cybersecurity was mostly an afterthought.

Anyone who has been shot in the leg and tried to walk immediately afterward was not hired as the technical consultant on this movie.

I thought I was a moral person.
I was wrong.

Life is short.

In order not to check in late,
I’ve had to lose a lot of weight,
From swimming through a fair-sized flood
And wading through the goddam mud.

I’ve lost my rubbers and my shoes
Perpetually I have the blues
My spirits tumble with a thud
Because of all this goddam mud.

It’s in my system so that when
I cut my finger now and then
Instead of bleeding just plain blood
Out pours a stream of goddam mud.

Although it is a widely held belief that human beings are mortal, the relevant statistics do not, in fact, support this theory. Of all humans ever born, one-third were prehistoric, one-third lived since history began and one-third are still alive. Consequently, mortality has only occurred in two cases out of three, a statistic that by no means suggests that it will always be true. So it appears that there is no significant evidence that any of us will ever die.

… one of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that, lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C programs.

But that, you see, my dear Kermit, would be altogether impossible.

But one of Arnold’s commanders was too cocky and nonchalant. He once removed a dummy weapon from a storage bunker in broad daylight, put it into the back of his pickup truck, covered it with a tarp, drove right past security, and disassembled it in front of his girlfriend. Arnold thought the move was stupid and irresponsible, as well as a major breach of security. Inside the bunker, the dummy weapons were stored beside the real ones.

Political satire became redundant when Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Wilkinson hath bored us several cylinders that doth not err to the thickness of an old shilling in no part.

I’m tone dumb, which is worse than being tone deaf because you know you’re singing out of tune but can’t do anything about it.

If atheism is a faith, then not playing chess is a hobby.

It was a target rich environment.

It’s now almost dawn on Mars.

Astrologers: aggressive frauds who talk crystal balls.

Mud thrown is ground lost.

VM users do it virtually all the time

“Will my programs run on the 3081?”
“Yes.”
“Oh good. They never ran on the 370.”

Time moves vertically upwards.

Mount Tumbledown has fallen.

About binomial theorem I’m teeming with a lot o’news,
With many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse.

Consistently separating words by spaces became a general custom about the tenth century A.D., and lasted until about 1957, when FORTRAN abandoned the practice.

The primary purpose of the DATA statement is to give names to constants; instead of referring to PI as 3.141592653589793 at every appearance, the variable PI can be given that value with a DATA statement and used instead of the longer form of the constant. This also simplifies modifying the program, should the value of PI change.

The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.

There are only two things wrong with C++: The initial concept and the implementation.

The last good thing written in C was Franz Schubert’s Symphony No. 9

A language that combines all the elegance and power of assembly language with all the readability and maintainability of assembly language.

BASIC is to computer languages what Roman numerals are to arithmetic

APL, in which you can write a program to simulate shuffling a deck of cards and then dealing them out to several players in four characters, none of which appear on a standard keyboard.

If you put a million monkeys at a million keyboards, one of them will eventually write a Java program. The rest of them will write Perl programs.

Quotation, n. The act of repeating erroneously the words of another. The words erroneously repeated.

The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.

If you enjoy what you do you’ll never work another day in your life.

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.

The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.

My work required an enormous amount of my time, and a lot of travel.

Photographs are monuments

Art is a jealous mistress, and if a man has a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture, or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

We used to make steel!

Since this is an exercise divorced from reality, the usual vehicle was FORTRAN.

Big shots tried to hold it back

Fools tried to wish it away

The hopeful depend on a world without end

Whatever the hopeless may say

Actually, FORTRAN was the language of choice for the same reason that three-legged races are popular.

The press must learn that misguided use of a computer is no more amazing than drunk driving of an automobile.

Many times the reading of a book has made the future of a person

The person who can read but doesn’t, isn’t better of than the person who can’t read

Our lives can change in two ways: trough the people we meet and the books we read

Everywhere I have sought peace and not found it, except in a corner with a book.

After more than forty years, we have had no third world war, and the balance of nuclear terror … may have helped to prevent one. But I am not at all sure of this; back then, in those long-gone years, the question didn’t even arise. What most troubles me now is the instability of the balance, the extreme peril of the current situation, the appalling waste of the arms race … Each of us has a responsibility to think about this in global terms, with tolerance, trust, and candor, free from ideological dogmatism, parochial interests, or national egotism.

Fortunately, the future is unpredictable and also – because of quantum effects – uncertain.

Hold up the train. Ammunition ship afire in harbour making for Pier 6 and will explode.
Guess this will be my last message. Good-bye boys.

The global importance of the Middle East is that it keeps the Far East and the Near East from encroaching on each other.

I am not part of the problem. I am a Republican.

It isn’t pollution that’s harming the environment. It’s the impurities in our air and water that are doing it.

If we don’t succeed we run the risk of failure.

If Al Gore invented the Internet, I invented spell check.

My friends, no matter how rough the road may be, we can and we will, never, never surrender to what is right.

A low voter turnout is an indication of fewer people going to the polls.

Bobby Knight told me this: ‘There is nothing that a good defense cannot beat a better offense.’ In other words a good offense wins.

People that are really very weird can get into sensitive positions and have a tremendous impact on history.

We will move forward, we will move upward, and yes, we will move onward.

It’s a question of whether we’re going to go forward into the future, or past to the back.

We’re going to have the best-educated American people in the world.

If you give a person a fish, they’ll fish for a day. But if you train a person to fish, they’ll fish for a lifetime.

It’s a very good historical book about history.

I don’t watch it, but I know enough to comment on it.

The thing is, if you control the Senate meetings, you control the gavel. And the gavel is a very important instrument… an instrument of power.
An instrument that establishes the agenda.

I want to be Robin to Bush’s Batman.

Republicans have been accused of abandoning the poor. It’s the other way around.
They never vote for us.

It shows ‘us vs. them’, and I’m on the ‘us’ side.

I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and democracy – but that could change.

They need help, and we have helped, and we are here to help. And we are helping, and we’re going to continue to help.

This President is going to lead us out of this recovery.

One word sums up probably the responsibility of any vice-president, and that one word is ‘to be prepared’.

I just don’t believe in the basic concept that someone should make their whole career in public service.

Quite frankly, teachers are the only profession that teach our children.

Illegitimacy is something we should talk about in terms of not having it.

I understand the importance of bondage between parent and child.

We will invest in our people, quality education, job opportunity, family, neighborhood, and yes, a thing we call America.

When I talked to him on the phone yesterday. I called him George rather than Mr. Vice President. But, in public, it’s Mr. Vice President, because that is who he is.

In George Bush you get experience, and with me you get – The Future!

Votes are like trees, if you are trying to build a forest. If you have more trees than you have forests, then at that point the pollsters will probably say you will win.

Great American sport. Horseshoes is a very great game. I love it.

The American people would not want to know of any misquotes that Dan Quayle may or may not make.

I couldn’t help but be impressed by the magnitude of the earthquake.

Space is almost infinite. As a matter of fact, we think it is infinite.

We should develop anti-satellite weapons because we could not have prevailed without them in ‘Red Storm Rising’.

We’re all capable of mistakes, but I do not care to enlighten you on the mistakes we may or may not have made.

What you guys want, I’m for.

You do the policy, I’ll do the politics.

We have to do more than just elect a new President if we truly want to change this country.

The President is going to benefit from me reporting directly to him when I arrive.

Tobacco exports should be expanded aggressively because Americans are smoking less.

When you make as many speeches and you talk as much as I do and you get away from the text, it’s always a possibility to get a few words tangled here and there.

Sometimes cameras and television are good to people and sometimes they aren’t. I don’t know if its the way you say it, or how you look.

I’m going to be a vice president very much like George Bush was. He proved to be a very effective vice president, perhaps the most effective we’ve had in a couple of hundred years.

Man is the only kind of varmint that sets his own trap, baits it, then steps in it.

It’s your privilege to disagree, but that doesn’t make you right and me wrong.

Finding the meaning of life is easy.
Simply get a dictionary, go to the ‘L’ section, and find the world ‘life.’

Its an old story, but it’s true –
a man can be in love with another man and survive; a man can be in love with a woman and come trough without any material injury, but when a man is in love with himself he’s in a helluva fix.

In omnibus requiem quaesivi, et nusquam inveni nisi in angulo cum libro.

(Everywhere I have sought peace and not found it, except in a corner with a book.)

A programmer is a person who fixes a problem that you don’t know you have, in a way you don’t understand

I feel like our focus has strayed from the deathtrap

The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.

Everything’s connected but nothing’s working

Early is on time

I slept longer than I had anticipated

I arrived insufficiently early

The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today.

There are small lies, big lies and then there is what is on the screen of your oscilloscope.

Functional programming combines the flexibility and power of abstract mathematics with the intuitive clarity of abstract mathematics.

A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts

You should not be afraid of someone who has a library and reads many books; you should fear someone who has only one book; and he considers it sacred, but he has never read it.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing

Are you aware of what a serious breach of security that would be? He’ll see everything! He’ll see the Big Board!

Einstein would roll over in his grave. Not only does god play dice, the dice are loaded.

I’m not a paranoid, deranged millionaire, goddammit, I’m a billionaire.

Life’s true gift is the capacity to enjoy enjoyment.

The worst mistake is to have the best ladder and the wrong wall.

It is only slightly overstating the case to say that physics is the study of symmetry

Hier moest ik van de website-bouwer een motto zetten, maar ik begrijp gewoon niet waarom.

I’ve lived all my life in this weird wonderland;
I keep buying things that I don’t understand
‘Cause they promise me miracles, magic, and hope
But, somehow, it always turns out to be soap

Are we being good ancestors?

Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Unwarranted euphoria and misplaced confidence are international phenomena

The only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation.

It’s not safe to hope for the best without preparing for the worst

‘Obvious’ is the most dangerous word in mathematics.

Fashion as King is sometimes a very stupid ruler.

Science makes no pretension to eternal truth or absolute truth

If indeed, as Hilbert asserted, mathematics is a meaningless game played with meaningless marks on paper, the only mathematical experience to which we can refer is the making of marks on paper.

I have always hated machinery, and the only machine I ever understood was a wheelbarrow, and that but imperfectly.

Time makes fools of us all.
Our only comfort is that greater shall come after us.

The mistakes and unresolved difficulties of the past in mathematics have always been the opportunities of its future.

Euclid taught me that without assumptions there is no proof.
Therefore, in any argument, examine the assumptions.

The longer mathematics lives the more abstract – and therefore, possibly also the more practical – it becomes.

The pursuit of pretty formulas and neat theorems can no doubt quickly degenerate into a silly vice, but so can the quest for austere generalities which are so very general indeed that they are incapable of application to any particular.

It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog

Not homosexuality, but extrapolation, is the most characteristic vice in which our age has imitated classic Greece.

Science seldom makes a grand attack on a whole army of difficulties; it divides and conquers.

Theory and experiment are the twin crutches by which science hobbles forward.

The first assumption amounts to a statement that all reaction rates are zero, the second to a statement that they are infinite, and both assumptions are demonstrably false.

“Like all science,” said the hook-nosed one, “our work deals with human happiness.”

It’s amazing how kids think alike…even when separated by 30 years.

Our youth love luxury. They have bad manners and contempt for their elders and love idle chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants not the servants of the household. They contradict their parents, chatter before company. gobble up their food, and tyrannize their teachers.

People like to believe they control their life in a logical and orderly fashion. Reality is that major life defining events like marriage and jobs are almost purely random events.

I predict that within 100 years, computers will be twice as powerful, ten thousand times larger, and so expensive that only the five richest kings of Europe will own them.

Good design is as little design as possible.

Why buy it, when you can slap it together yourself with duct tape and saliva?

In technical terms, it is the worst book I have ever read. In comedy terms, it is the best book I have ever read.

You can’t control things with positive thoughts.

Books are fatal: they are the curse of the human race. Nine-tenths of existing books are nonsense, and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.

Just you wait.

Having found the atomic bomb, we have used it.

Every pint bottle should contain a quart.

Half the lies our opponents tell about us are untrue.

Why should we put ourselves out of our way to do anything for posterity? For what has posterity ever done for us?

We should silence anyone who opposes the right to freedom of speech.

P.S. If you do not receive this, of course it must have been miscarried; therefore I beg you to write and let me know.

At present there are such goings-on that everything is at a standstill.

The cup of Ireland’s misery has been overflowing for centuries and is not yet half full.

Single misfortunes never come alone, and the greatest of all national calamities is generally followed by one greater.

A quart bottle should hold a quart.

It’s not unlike a long-range kebab.

Not all writing is worth reading. Just because someone can put words on a page doesn’t mean they are worth reading or add value.

One can never read too little of bad or too much of good books: bad books are intellectual poison; they destroy the mind.

Like all science, our work deal’s with human happiness

If we could have devised an arrangement for providing everyone with music in their homes, perfect in quality, unlimited in quantity, suited to every mood, and beginning and ceasing at will, we should have considered the limit of human felicity already attained and ceased to strive for further improvements.

If science fiction is exploring how technology affects people’s lives, then one of the best SF movies ever made was Singin’ in the Rain

I never fully understood [the label of ‘escapist’] till my friend Professor Tolkien asked me the very simple question, ‘What class of men would you expect to be most preoccupied with, and most hostile to, the idea of escape?’ and gave the obvious answer: jailers.

I want my money back. And my two hours. And my initial mental state

You will find that insecure societies are the most intolerant of those who are non-joiners. They are so unsure of the validity of their game rules that they say ‘Everyone. Must. Play.’

Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.

The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.

Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.

The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.

Every intelligent individual wants to know what makes him tick, and yet is at once fascinated and frustrated by the fact that oneself is the most difficult of all things to know.

If the universe is meaningless, so is the statement that it is so. If this world is a vicious trap, so is its accuser, and the pot is calling the kettle black.

I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.

Horses have four legs and still they stumble.

There is nothing more flexible than a legal parameter.
You can delineate one, but you can’t overstep one.

Strange department, this. Their motto was: “The comprehension of Infinity requires infinite time.” I did not argue with that, but then they derived an unexpected conclusion from it: Therefore work or not, it´s all the same.”
In the interests of not increasing the entropy of the universe, they did not work.

If you want to be a grocer, a general, a politician, or a judge, you will invariably become it; that is your punishment.

That’s the problem. He’s a brilliant lunatic, and you can’t tell which way he’ll jump. Like his game, he’s impossible to analyze — you can’t predict him, dissect him… which of course means he’s not a lunatic at all.

With ABC deleting dynamite gags from cartoons, do you find that your children are using explosives less frequently?

A lie can run around the world before the truth has got its boots on.

I do not talk like that! The way I communicate is much different. I do not reiterate, repeat, reinstate the same thing over and over again. I am clear, concise, to the point!

Oh dear, now we are in a pickle.

Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.

For of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: ‘It might have been!’

Like all science, our work deals with human happiness.

The first step of any project is to grossly underestimate its complexity and difficulty

If you fell down yesterday, stand up today.

Now, occasionally you’re going to get stuck. It’s nothing to get upset about. Don’t go hurling your controller at the cat, because it might throw something back, and it’ll only escalate, and then, well…

a love supreme

There is a problem with ingesting a significant amount of radium

War is when the young and stupid are tricked by the old and bitter into killing each other.

What hath God wrought

I don’t think this kind of thing [satire] has an impact on the unconverted, frankly. It’s not even preaching to the converted; it’s titillating the converted. I think the people who say we need satire often mean, ‘We need satire of them, not of us.’ I’m fond of quoting Peter Cook, who talked about the satirical Berlin cabarets of the ’30s, which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the Second World War.

You had to admire these folk singers, it takes courage to get up in a coffee house or a student auditorium and come out in favour of the things everyone else is against, like peace and justice and brotherhood, and so on.

I wish people who have trouble communicating would just shut up.

It is sobering to consider that when Mozart was my age he had already been dead for a year.

Life is like a sewer – you get out of it what you put into it.

If after hearing my songs just one human being is inspired to say something nasty to a friend or perhaps to strike a loved one it will all have been worth the while.

On my income tax 1040 it says ‘Check this box if you are blind.’ I wanted to put a check mark about three inches away.

Life is like a piano. What you get out of it depends on how you play it.

Bad weather always looks worse through a window.

I often feel like a resident of Pompeii who has been asked for some humorous comments on lava.

It was Richard Le Gallienne, I believe, who once observed with regret that so many available euphonious and charming Christian names for men and women have been wasted on diseases. For example, where a more agreeable sound than that conveyed by the name Catarrh Carter or Diabetes White. Assuredly no current nomenclature is so soothing to the ear. Erysipelas is a prettier name than Alice or Mable or Grace, surely; just as Tonsilitis is a smarter name than George or Henry or even Montgomery. Which is the more mellifluous: Clara Jones or Pneumonia Jones, Gustave Smith or Appendicitis Smith? Which is the more musical: Susan Jackson or Diphtheria Jackson, Jacob Robinson or Syphilis Robinson?

A good thing that you can say about water is that it is not sodium, […]

Nobody likes microfilm except for the fact that it’s indispensable

It’s desirable every thing printed should be preserved, for we cannot now tell how useful it may become two centuries hence.

I predict that a century hence the Canadian people will be the noblest specimens of humanity on the face of the earth

In the twenty-first century mankind will subsist entirely upon jellies.

The twenty-first century baby is destined to be rocked and cradled by electricity, warmed and coddled by electricity, perhaps fathered and mothered by electricity. Probably the only thing he will be left to do unaided will be to make love.

To-day, in the city of New York, sixty-six different tongues are spoken. A century hence, there will probably be only one.

I often think what interesting history we are making for the student of the twenty-first century.

China may be a great shoe market a decade or a century from now.

We cannot settle the problem, and I venture the prophecy that perhaps a century from now this same question may be brought before some future society and discussed very much as it is tonight.

By the twenty-first century we shall all be telepaths.

The physician of the twenty-first century… may even criticize the language of the times, and may find that some of our words have become as offensive to him as the term “lunatic” has become offensive to us.

Historians of the twenty-first century will look back with well-placed scorn on the shallow-minded days of the early twentieth century when football games and petting parties were considered the most important elements of a college education.

In the year A.D. 2014 journalists will be writing on the centenary of the great war — that is, if there has not been a greater war.

If a lion could speak, we could not understand him

Knowledge is invariably a matter of degree: you cannot put your finger upon even the simplest datum and say this we know.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don’t want, drink what you don’t like, and do what you’d rather not.

Early in the war, at least three economists were reputed to have committed suicide after trying to work out how to pay for everything.

Science fiction fans relate more to human beings than to silicon chips.

If man survives for as long as the least successful of the dinosaurs—those creatures whom we often deride as nature’s failures—then we may be certain of this: for all but a vanishingly brief instant near the dawn of history, the word ‘ship’ will mean— ‘spaceship.’

Friends Don’t Let Friends Use Reactionless Drives In Their Universes

It is strange that the years teach us patience; that the shorter our time, the greater our capacity for waiting.

It’s a hard day

The lost cannot be recovered; but let us save what remains: not by vaults and locks which fence them from the public eye and use, in consigning them to the waste of time, but by such a multiplication of copies, as shall place them beyond the reach of accident.

I have nothing to offer anybody, except my own confusion.

Oh, boy, it’s Friday!
Only two more working days until Monday.

You may delay, but time will not.

The face is like the penis.

Opinions are like ani, Watson. Everyone has one.

I’ll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there’s evidence of any thinking going on inside it.

I think perhaps the most important problem is that we are trying to understand the fundamental workings of the universe via a language devised for telling one another when the best fruit is.

Every procedure for getting a cat to take a pill works fine — once. Like the Borg, they learn…

A true beanie should have a propellor on the top.

I think that sick people in Ankh-Morpork generally go to a vet. It’s generally a better bet. There’s more pressure on a vet to get it right. People say “it was god’s will” when granny dies, but they get *angry* when they lose a cow.

Never trust any complicated cocktail that remains perfectly clear until the last ingredient goes in, and then immediately clouds.

I didn’t go to university. Didn’t even finish A-levels. But I have sympathy for those who did.

“Out of Print” is bookseller speak for “We can’t be hedgehogged”.

I save about twenty drafts — that’s ten meg of disc space — and the last one contains all the final alterations. Once it has been printed out and received by the publishers, there’s a cry here of ‘Tough shit, literary researchers of the future, try getting a proper job!’ and the rest are wiped.

Mind you, the Elizabethans had so many words for the female genitals that it is quite hard to speak a sentence of modern English without inadvertently mentioning at least three of them.

Too many people want to *have written*.

Not only did I wipe Lemmings from my hard disc, I overwrote it so I couldn’t get it back.

You can’t remember the plot of the Dr Who movie because it didn’t have one, just a lot of plot holes strung together.
It did have a lot of flashing lights, though.

You will have to look a long way before you find a bunch of scum-suckers more greedy, humorless and deserving of death than the suits in the music business.

Somewhere around the place I’ve got an unfinished short story about Schrodinger’s Dog; it was mostly moaning about all the attention the cat was getting.

I do note with interest that old women in my books become young women on the covers… this is discrimination against the chronologically gifted.

Botswana is also the only country in the world with a colour in its flag meant to represent rain (a sort of blue-grey). Not many people know this.

There are *no* inconsistencies in the Discworld books; occasionally, however, there are alternate pasts.

Any town built by filling a mud hole with sawdust and proudly having a slug as a sort of civic totem is a town, one feels, where Rincewind would feel right at home.

Experience has taught me that you feel better on a flight if you avoid chicken fat in plastic sauce.

It’s an old magical principle — it’s even filtered down into RPG systems — that magic, while taking a lot of effort, can be ‘stored’ — in a staff, for example. No doubt a wizard spends a little time each day charging up his staff, although you go blind if you do it too much, of course.

I don’t think I’ve ever been critical of the money Douglas Adams makes, especially since, as has been tactfully pointed out, I myself have had to change banks having filled the first one up.

“That’s right, we’re philosophers. We think, therefore we am.”

His philosophy was a mixture of three famous schools — the Cynics, the Stoics and the Epicureans — and summed up all three of them in his famous phrase, “You can’t trust any bugger further than you can throw him, and there’s nothing you can do about it, so let’s have a drink.”

The people who really run organizations are usually found several levels down, where it is still possible to get things done.

Si non confectus, non reficiat.

I’m a fanatical worrier only over things I have some control over.

Ad Astra Per Aspera

Per aspera ad astra

Strange how complicated we can make things just to avoid showing what we feel!

And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are. All we can say is that this is a good deed, because it helps someone or that’s an evil one because it hurts them. People are too complicated to have simple labels.

You’re a teenager. It’s all complicated.

I am a complicated person with a simple life and I am the reason for everything that ever happened to me.

Nothing in this world is complicated, only misunderstood.

I’ve yet to see any problem, however complicated, which when you looked at it the right way didn’t become still more complicated.

Every Canadian has a complicated relationship with the United States, whereas Americans think of Canada as the place where the weather comes from.

Ah—that’s the beauty of higher education, sergeant. Never use two simple words when one really complicated one will do.

If a new mining discovery or some novelty of that sort does not come to improve the actual situation, the crisis that has long been felt, will worsen

Everyone wants to save the world, they just… they disagree on how.

War. War Never Changes.

The difference between America and England is that Americans think 100 years is a long time, while the English think 100 miles is a long way.

We are more alike than we are unalike.

We guarantee that each number is random individually, but we don’t guarantee that more than one of them is random.

The solution to the problem changes the problem.

Great people talk about ideas, average people talk about things, and small people talk about wine.

You cannot argue stupidity, you just have to accept it patiently as one of those things.

Without work men are utterly undone.

Maybe we’ve been too silly to deserve a world like this.

Security was now a thing of the past though it took a conscious effort to remember it; with no enemy in all the world there was little but the force of habit in it.

You can call a sunset by a filthy name, but you do not spoil its beauty, monsieur.

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

There are some things about oneself that it’s not very nice to wake up to.

You can only do a thing for the first time once, and that goes for falling in love.

An engineer is a man who can do for ten shillings what any fool can do for a pound

I will not assert she is unsinkable, but I can say confidently that, whatever the accident, this vessel would not go down before time had been given to save any person on board. I will go a bit further. I cannot imagine any condition that would cause the Adriatic to founder. I cannot conceive of any fatal disaster happening to this ship. Modern shipbuilding has reduced that danger to a minimum

You know, dozens of people spontaneously combust each year. It’s just not really widely reported.

Death smiles at us all.
All we can do is smile back

Freeing man’s mind to shape the future.

A facility for quotation covers an absence of original thought

There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home

By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s

Every age has its temptations, its weaknesses, its dangers. Ours is in the line of the snobbish and the sordid.

Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.

We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.

Satire doesn’t stand a chance against reality anymore.

There there

Of all things, I liked books best.

The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.

One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.

Be alone, that is the secret of invention; be alone, that is when ideas are born.

I do not think you can name many great inventions that have been made by married men.

Life is and will ever remain an equation incapable of solution, but it contains certain known factors.

What one man calls God, another calls the laws of physics.

We crave for new sensations but soon become indifferent to them. The wonders of yesterday are today common occurrences

Today’s scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality.

Its not the love you make. It’s the love you give.

Most persons are so absorbed in the contemplation of the outside world that they are wholly oblivious to what is passing on within themselves.

Marconi is a good fellow. Let him continue. He is using seventeen of my patents.

Trouble rather the tiger in his lair than the sage amongst his books. For to you the Kingdoms and their armies are things mighty and enduring, but to him they are but toys of the moment, to be overturned by the flicking of a finger.

[It] Takes a Licking and keeps on Ticking

Bach is an astronomer, discovering the most marvelous stars. Beethoven challenges the universe. I only try to express the soul and the heart of man.

Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’

Everyone should keep a pile of aphorisms lying around – you never know when you’ll need one.

In any field find the strangest thing and then explore it.

When we trace the history o f psychology we are led into a labyrinth o f fanciful opinions, contradictions, and absurdities intermixed with some truths.

Psychology is a very unsatisfactory science.

And still they gaz’d and still the wonder grew,
That one small head could carry all he knew.

The function of the brain cannot be completely disconnected from the function of its basic units, the nerve cells.

The art of research [is] the art of making difficult problems soluble by devising means of getting at them.

Babylon in all its desolation is a sight not so awful as that of the human mind in ruins.

. . . I believe the best test of a model is how well can the modeller answer the questions ‘What do you know now that you did not know before?’ and ‘How can you find out if it is true?”’

Philosophy is written in that great book that lies before our gaze —I mean the universe— but we cannot under stand it if we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols in which it is written.

Through purely logical thinking we can attain no knowledge whatsoever of the empirical world.

Give me a fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections.
You can keep your sterile truths for yourself.

Prediction is difficult, especially if it concerns the future.

Our own subjective inner life, including sensory experiences, feelings, thoughts, volitional choices, is what really matters to us as human beings.

Of making many books there is no end;
and much study is weariness of the flesh.

For in the dew of little things the heart finds it’s morning and is refreshed

Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable

I’m pretty sure, I’m not a doctor, but I’m pretty sure if you die, the cancer dies at the same time.
That’s not a loss. That’s a draw.

[A] clipboard is as good as a skeleton key.

A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision.

Woodman, spare that tree!
Touch not a single bough!
In youth it sheltered me,
And I’ll protect it now.

Bookworms do not run out of books, we run out of shelf space

When the weight of the paper equals the weight of the plane, only then you can go flying

All our words are but crumbs that fall down from the feast of the mind.

Vrouwen moeten niet afvallen; vrouwen moeten aanvallen.

Every story ever told can be broken down into three distinct parts: the beginning, the middle, and the twist.

Principle is okay up to a certain point, but principle doesn’t do any good if you lose.

May our joint work in space serve for the benefit of all countries and peoples on the Earth.

History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.

You can’t cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water

A lot of tape, and a little patience, make all the difference.

Melchett: Don’t worry, my boy. If you should falter, remember that Captain Darling and I are behind you.
Captain Blackadder: About thirty-five miles behind you.

Woah, these readings are off the chart! Fortunately, I have a bigger chart.

Nothing says ‘stock market crash’ like wearing a barrel instead of clothes.

Mages who sit on thrones always mean trouble, Olive-girl. They take themselves too seriously.

A single match is always sufficient to light up a room the size of the Colosseum.

It’s no game, it’s a sport. Games are for people who don’t care enough. In sports, you compete to win.

There’s no miracle people. It just happens they got interested in this thing and they learned all this stuff.
There’s just people.

I was born not knowing and have had only a little time to change that here and there.

I couldn’t reduce it to the freshman level. That means we really don’t understand it

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

I’ve adopted a strategy of pleasantness. It turns out that one can perpetrate all manner of heinous villainy under a cloak of courtesy and good cheer. It seems a man will forfeit all sensible self-interest if he finds you affable enough to share your company over a flagon of ale.

The blast blasted blubber beyond all believable bounds.

I made parts for both the nuclear industry and the aerospace industry
a part made for the nuclear industry required a forklift to move, while a part made for the aerospace industry would fit in your hand
both required a forklift for the paperwork for the part