On networking architecture: Do you want protocols that look nice or protocols that work nice?
— Mike Padlipsky, internet architect
The spam wars are about rendering email useless for unsolicited advertising before unsolicited advertising renders email useless for communication.
— Walter Dnes & Jeff Wynn (in news.admin.net-abuse.email)
We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.
— Alan Turing (1912–1954), from his paper on the Turing test
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
— Henry Louis Mencken (1880–1956): Women as Outlaws, 1921
All of science is nothing more than the refinement of everyday thinking.
— Albert Einstein (1879–1955): Physics and Reality, Journal of the Franklin Institute, Vol. 221, Issue 3 (March 1936)
In the void is virtue, and no evil. Wisdom has existence, principle has existence, the Way has existence, spirit is nothingness.
— Miyamoto Musashi (1584–1645): Go Rin No Sho, 1645
There is a very fine line between ”hobby” and ”mental illness”.
— Dave Barry
Ground Control to Major Tom,
your circuit’s dead, is something wrong?
Can you hear me Major Tom,
Can you hear me Major Tom?
— David Bowie (1947–2016): Space Oddity
A sheet of paper crossed my desk the other day and as I read it, realization of a basic truth came over me. So simple! So obvious we couldn’t see it. John Knivlen, Chairman of Polamar Repeater Club, an amateur radio group, had discovered how IC circuits work. He says that smoke is the thing that makes ICs work because every time you let the smoke out of an IC circuit, it stops working. He claims to have verified this with thorough testing.
— Jack Banton, PCC Automotive Electrical School
Johnny had seen films of American shopping malls. They must have different sorts of people in America, he’d thought. They all looked cool, all the girls were beautiful, and the place wasn’t crowded with little kamikaze grandmothers.
— Terry Pratchett: Johnny and the Dead
Humour is the only test of gravity, and gravity of humour. For a subject which would not bear raillery is suspicious; and a jest which would not bear a serious examination is certainly false wit.
— Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713):
Sensus Communis: An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour (1709),
Part 1, Sec. 5, incorrectly attributing it to Gorgias via Aristotle.
