Quotes

The greatest crimes are not those committed for the sake of necessity but those committed for the sake of greed and excess. ONE DOES NOT BECOME A TYRANT TO MERELY AVOID EXPOSURE TO THE COLD.
- Aristotle "Politics"

"Feudalism was based on a 'ladder type' of organizational structure, similar to Amway. You started out on the bottom rung, in the position of serf. This was not an easy job, but if you worked hard, followed the rules, did not complain, and were a 'team player,' after a certain period of time you fell off the bottom rung and died."
- from page 2 of "Dave Barry's History of the Millennium (So Far)," by Dave Barry

The purpose of abstracting is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise.
- Edsger W. Dijkstra, The Humble Programmer

If people never did silly things nothing intelligent would ever get done.
- Ludwig Wittgenstein

Dave Barry has defined a sense of humor as "a measurement of the extent to which we realize that we are trapped in a world almost totally devoid of reason. Laughter is how we express the anxiety we feel at this knowledge."

Nobody should start to undertake a large project. You start with a small _trivial_ project, and you should never expect it to get large. If you do, you'll just overdesign and generally think it is more important than it likely is at that stage. Or worse, you might be scared away by the sheer size of the work you envision. So start small, and think about the details. Don't think about some big picture and fancy design. If it doesn't solve some fairly immediate need, it's almost certainly over-designed. And don't expect people to jump in and help you. That's not how these things work. You need to get something half-way _useful_ first, and then others will say "hey, that _almost_ works for me", and they'll get involved in the project.
- Linus Torvalds

Out of nothing I have created a strange new universe.
[A reference to the creation of a non-euclidean geometry.]
- Bolyai, János (1802 - 1860)