Cute quotations

Here are some quotations from a file I've been accumulating over the past couple of decades. In many cases I think they make pithy comments on some of the possible course topics, and, mostly, they're fun.


"History will be kind to me for I intend to write it." -- Winston Churchill

"Surveillance just gives everybody the exposed life of the famous without the nice tables at restaurants." -- Brad Templeton

"I've written a commercial for Apple Computer. It goes like this: 'Macintosh - we might not get everything right, but at least we knew the century was going to end.'" -- author Douglas Adams, on the Y2K problem.

"Remember when you were a kid and afraid of the dark? As soon as you glimpsed that scary shadow in the corner, you'd start to hear noises. Y2K is like that for some people." -- Malcolm Ray

"I don't know about you, but I always assume that programs I can't have source code for are servants of an ancient evil which will destroy us all. We call it 'Microsoft'." -- Mark Hughes

"Since when do economists have to live with the consequences of their own decisions? When they kvetch that the unemployment rate is too low and that they need to take steps to provide a larger labour pool, it's not their own jobs that they want eliminated." -- Shmuel Metz

"UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things." -- Doug Gwyn

"Communications are the nervous system of the entire SAC organization, and their protection is therefore, of the greatest importance. I like to say that without communications, all I control is my desk, and that is not a very lethal weapon." -- General T.S. Power, CINCSAC, May 1959

"The superior pilot uses his superior judgement to avoid situations in which he has to demonstrate his superior skill."

"We build confusing systems. That's true in the software and true in the hardware. The number of questions that we get on our support lines imply that we together haven't done a very good job. The questions I get from my mother imply we haven't done a very good job." -- Jim Allchin, Senior Vice President, Microsoft

"The biggest crime of all that [Microsoft] commits is getting people accustomed to huge, slow, unstable software as the norm." -- Jay Maynard

"I'm sorry for the double slash." - Tim Berners-Lee in a panel discussion, WWW 7, Brisbane, 1998.

"Our greatest fear is that the Internet will become a vehicle of free distribution of information." -- Ken Wasch, president of the Software Publishers Association, Sept 1995

"I try to take one day at a time, but sometimes several days attack me at once."


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