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“It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations” —Winston Churchill

Politics, Reason and Liberty

• “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” —Benjamin Franklin
• “He only employs his passion who can make no use of his reason.” —Cicero
• “I don’t give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.” —Mark Twain
• “In religion and politics, people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second hand, and without examination.” —Mark Twain
• “It is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire all schools of art.” —Oscar Wilde
• “The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.” —Plato
• “Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson
• “I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world.” —Socrates
• “I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.” —Thomas Jefferson
• “Historically, the most terrible things — war, genocide and slavery — have resulted from obedience, not disobedience,” —Howard Zinn
• ”The child learns to believe a host of things. I.e. it learns to act according to these beliefs. Bit by bit there forms a system of what is believed, and in that system some things stand unshakeably fast and some are more or less liable to shift. What stands fast does so, not because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather held fast by what lies around it.” —Ludwig Wittgenstein

Metaphysics

• “Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.” —Benjamin Franklin

Religion

• “Well, you know, Hubbard had a bunch of people sworn to commit suicide when he died. So of course he never officially died…” —Larry Wall
• “Faith means not wanting to know what is true.” —Friedrich Nietzsche

Ethics

• “When in doubt, tell the truth.” —Mark Twain
• “Judge of a man by his questions rather than by his answers.” —Voltaire

Human Nature

• “The sum of the matter is, the people drink because they wish to drink.” —Rudolph Brand

The Internet

• “Amazingly, it is easier to find information on the Web than it is to find information on the Microsoft Corporate Network. This inversion, where a public network solves a problem better than a private network, is quite stunning.” —Bill Gates (from the “Internet Memo” 1995)
• “A bar is better than a newspaper for public discussion.” —Jim Parker

Text Editing

• A previous girlfriend of mine switched to emacs. Needless to say, the relationship went nowhere. —Geoffrey Mann on vim.org.

Criticism

• “The covers of this book are too far apart.” —Ambrose Bierce
• “It was a book to kill time for those who like it better dead.” —Dame Rose Macaulay
• “From the moment I picked up your book until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.” —Groucho Marx

Traditional Media

• “I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.” —Groucho Marx
• “A few months ago I ran into a friend in a cafe. I had a copy of the New York Times, which I still occasionally buy on weekends. As I was leaving I offered it to him, as I’ve done countless times before in the same situation. But this time something new happened. I felt that sheepish feeling you get when you offer someone something worthless. “Do you, er, want a printout of yesterday’s news?” I asked. (He didn’t.)” —Paul Graham

Computing

• “There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.” —Bjarne Stroustrup
• “There are more useful systems developed in languages deemed awful than in languages praised for being beautiful–many more.” —Bjarne Stroustrup
• “Design and programming are human activities; forget that and all is lost.” —Bjarne Stroustrup

Free Software

• “Do you pine for the nice days of minix-1.1, when men were men and wrote their own device drivers? Are you without a nice project and just dying to cut your teeth on a OS you can try to modify for your needs? Are you finding it frustrating when everything works on minix? No more all- nighters to get a nifty program working? Then this post might be just for you :-)”
  —Linus Torvalds, comp.os.minix, Oct 5 1991, 4:53 pm  Oct 5 1991, 4:53 pm
• “I came for the quality, but I stayed for the freedom.” —sneakums (zork.net)
• “Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement” —Richard M Stallman

Non-free Software

• “We cannot hope to own it all, so instead we should strive to create the largest possible market and insert ourselves as a tax upon that market” —Nathan Myhrvold, former CTO Microsoft (quoted in “Barbarians Led by Bill Gates” Edstrom & Eller)

Larry Wall

Larry Wall is the creator of the Perl programming language. His Usenet and mailing list repartee is legendary. Despite the fact that most of the following quotes pertain to a programming language, I suspect that even non-programmers will find them entertaining and well worth a read. Most of the following were culled from wikiquote.org. (I’m afraid the temporal order of the quotes has been corrupted in places. Re-ordering them, to borrow one of Larry’s own quips, is left as an exercise for the reader).

• “I knew I’d hate COBOL the moment I saw they’d used ‘perform’ instead of ‘do’.”
• “If ease of use was the highest goal, we’d all be driving golf carts.”
• “Many computer scientists have fallen into the trap of trying to define languages like George Orwell’s Newspeak, in which it is impossible to think bad thoughts. What they end up doing is killing the creativity of programming.”
• “When’s the last time you used duct tape on a duct?”

From Perl Usenet postings circa 1990 - 1998:

• “It is, of course, written in Perl. Translation to C is left as an exercise for the reader.  :-)”
• “It’s all magic.  :-)”
• “It won’t be covered in the book. The source code has to be useful for something, after all…  :-)”
• “Let’s say the docs present a simplified view of reality…  :-)”
• “We all agree on the necessity of compromise. We just can’t agree on when it’s necessary to compromise.”
• “… an initial underscore already conveys strong feelings of magicalness to a C programmer”
• “Odd that we think definitions are definitive.  :-)”
• I don’t like this official/unofficial distinction. It sound, er, officious.”
• “I’d put my money where my mouth is, but my mouth keeps moving.”
• “The computer should be doing the hard work. That’s what it’s paid to do, after all.”
• “The random quantum fluctuations of my brain are historical accidents that happen to have decided that the concepts of dynamic scoping and lexical scoping are orthogonal and should remain that way.”
• “Sometimes we choose the generalization. Sometimes we don’t.”
• “I hope I’m not getting so famous that I can’t think out loud anymore.”
• “It’s getting harder and harder to think out loud. One of these days someone’s gonna go off and kill Thomas a’Becket for me…”
• “I was about to say, ‘Avoid fame like the plague,’ but you know, they can cure the plague with penicillin these days.”
• “But the possibility of abuse may be a good reason for leaving capabilities out of other computer languages, it’s not a good reason for leaving capabilities out of Perl.”
• “For the sake of argument I’ll ignore all your fighting words.”
• “Well, enough clowning around. Perl is, in intent, a cleaned up and summarized version of that wonderful semi-natural language known as… ‘Unix’”
• “Anyway, there’s plenty of room for doubt. It might seem easy enough, but computer language design is just like a stroll in the park… Jurassic Park, that is.”
• “I don’t like your I-can-use-anything-as-an-adjective attitude.”
• “No prisoner’s dilemma here. Over the long term, symbiosis is more useful than parasitism. More fun, too. Ask any mitochondria.”
• “P.S. Perl’s master plan (or what passes for one) is to take over the world like English did. Er, *as* English did…”
• “I think you didn’t get a reply because you used the terms ‘correct’ and ‘proper’, neither of which has much meaning in Perl culture.  :-)”
• “The Harvard Law states: Under controlled conditions of light, temperature, humidity, and nutrition, the organism will do as it damn well pleases.”
• “Beauty? What’s that?”
• “That’s a valid argument. I just don’t think it’s valid enough.  :-)”
• “I’m reminded of the day my daughter came in, looked over my shoulder at some Perl 4 code, and said, ‘What is that, swearing?”
• “I dunno. Perhaps you should be happy that I have a policy of refraining from grumbling about handicapped operating systems.  :-)”
• “Symmetry is overrated. Overrated is symmetry.”
• “I want to see people using Perl to glue things together creatively, not just technically but also socially.”

General Wit and Waggery

• “I am not young enough to know everything.” —Oscar Wilde
• “I drink to make other people interesting.” —George Jean Nathan
• “When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading.” —Henny Youngman
• “Everybody has to believe in something…I believe I’ll have another drink.” —W.C. Fields
• “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work… I want to achieve it through not dying.” —Woody Allen

Language, Philosophy, Psychology, Anthropology

• “The aim of philosophy is ‘Thoughts that are at peace’” —Ludwig Wittgenstein
• “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language” —Ludwig Wittgenstein
• “For remember that in general we don’t use language according to strict rules — it hasn’t been taught us by means of strict rules, either.” —Ludwig Wittgenstein
• “What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stood.” —Ludwig Wittgenstein
• “Your questions refer to words; so I have to talk about words.” —Ludwig Wittgenstein
• “The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something - because it is always before one’s eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all.” —Ludwig Wittgenstein
• “Reflection brings obscurity — which is the result of the shadow cast by the inquirer himself” —Ludwig Wittgenstein
• “But if you say: “How am I to know what he means, when I see nothing but the signs he gives?” then I say: ‘How is he to know what he means, when he has nothing but the signs either?’” —Ludwig Wittgenstein
• [In order to grasp the nature of language] “What has to be accepted, the given, is — so one could say — forms of life.” —Ludwig Wittgenstein
• “Our way of life is mirrored in language” —Ludwig Wittgenstein
• “If I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: ‘This is simply what I do’.” —Ludwig Wittgenstein
• “What I hold fast to is not one proposition but a nest of propositions.” —Ludwig Wittgenstein
• [On "putting the question marks down deep enough"] “A pupil and a teacher. The pupil will not let anything be explained to him, for he continually interrupts with doubts, for instance as to the existence of things, the meaning for words, etc. The teacher says ‘Stop interrupting me and do as I tell you. So far your doubts don’t make sense at all.’” —Ludwig Wittgenstein
• “Animals come when their names are called. Just like human beings.” —Ludwig Wittgenstein
• [On the nature of language and the paths it tends to lead us down] “I read: “philosophers are no nearer to the meaning of ‘Reality’ than Plato got,…”. What a strange situation. How extraordinary that Plato could have got even as far as he did! Or that we could not get any further! Was it because Plato was so extremely clever?” —Ludwig Wittgenstein
• [On rule-bound behaviour and 'grammatical' errors] “Philosophers often behave like little children who scribble some marks on a piece of paper at random and then ask the grown-up “What’s that?” — It happened like this: the grown-up had drawn pictures for the child several times and said “this is a man,” “this is a house,” etc. And then the child makes some marks too and asks: what’s this then?” —Ludwig Wittgenstein
• “Frazer’s account of the magical and religious views of mankind is unsatisfactory; it makes these views look like errors.”  —Ludwig Wittgenstein
• “His explanations of primitive practices are much cruder than the meaning of these practices themselves.”  —Ludwig Wittgenstein
• “When I am furious about something, I sometimes beat the ground or a tree with my walking stick. But I certainly do not believe that the ground is to blame or that my beating can help anything… And all rites are of this kind.” —Ludwig Wittgenstein
• “I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again ‘I know that that’s a tree’, pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell them: ‘This fellow isn’t insane. We are only doing philosophy’.” —Ludwig Wittgenstein

And finally…

• “After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.” —H. L. Mencken