MIME-Version: 1.0 Server: CERN/3.0 Date: Wednesday, 15-Jan-97 01:49:46 GMT Content-Type: text/html Content-Length: 6639 Last-Modified: Monday, 28-Oct-96 23:03:44 GMT Rajit Manohar: Quotes

Quotations

. . . Meanwhile, those of us who can compute can hardly be expected to keep writing papers saying 'I can do the following useless calculation in two seconds', and indeed what editor would publish them?
-- Oliver Atkin

Work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.
-- Vaclav Havel

If 50 million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.
-- Anatole France

Utility is when you have one telephone, luxury is when you have two, opulence is when you have three . . . and paradise is when you have none.
-- Doug Larson

Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue.
-- Winston Churchill

Those who can, do. Those who can't, simulate.
-- anonymous

Brilliance is typically the act of an individual, but incredible stupidity can usually be traced to an organization.
-- Jon Bentley

When you argue with a fool, chances are he is doing just the same.
-- anonymous

The problem with engineers is that they tend to cheat in order to get results.
The problem with mathematicians is that they tend to work on toy problems in order to get results.
The problem with program verifiers is that they tend to cheat at toy problems in order to get results.
-- anonymous

At first I hoped that such a technically unsound project would collapse but I soon realized it was doomed to success. Almost anything in software can be implemented, sold, and even used given enough determination. There is nothing a mere scientist can say that will stand against the flood of a hundred million dollars. But there is one quality that cannot be purchased in this way---and that is reliability. The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. It is a price which the very rich find most hard to pay.
-- C.A.R. Hoare in The Emperor's Old Clothes, Turing Award Lecture (27 October 1980)

There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.
-- C. A. R. Hoare

In science, "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent." I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.
-- Stephen Jay Gould

A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems.
-- Paul Erdös

Pray that there's intelligent life somehere out in space, because there's bugger all down here on earth.
-- Monty Python

Mathematics in general is fundamentally the science of self-evident things.
-- F. Klein

I want electricity to become so cheap that only the rich can afford candles.
-- T. Edison

Engineers think that theory approximates reality. Physicists think that reality approximates theory. Mathematicians never make the connection.
-- anonymous

Einstein was a genius: Head in the clouds, feet on the ground. But those of us who are not as tall, have to make a choice.
-- Richard Feynman

I am not interested in what today's mathematicians find interesting.
-- Richard Feynman, in a letter to John Wheeler

The man who does not read good books is at no advantage over the man that can't read them.
-- Mark Twain

Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed.
-- Mark Twain

Hello. I'm Rob's answering machine. What are you?
-- anonymous

Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons.
-- Popular Mechanics, forecasting the relentless march of science, 1949.

I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.
-- Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943.

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 editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall, 1957.

But . . . what is it good for?
-- Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968, commenting on the microchip.

There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.
-- Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977.

It is easier to port a shell than a shell script.
-- Larry Wall

Real programmers can write assembly code in any language.
-- Larry Wall

Last night as I went up the stair
I met a man who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today
I wish to God he'd go away.
-- anonymous

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come from the depths of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sands of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action;
Into that heaven of freedom, my father, let my country awake.
-- Rabindranath Tagore


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