Quotes

These are quotes that I've collected from various places. I've categorized them somewhat.

NOTE: I'm working on a web app to collect and display quotes, and allow arbitrary tagging. All these quotes will move there when that site is ready.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. -- Martin Luther King Jr.

It is your right to do anything that doesn't violate an obligation you've imposed on yourself, or doesn't create an obligation on the part of someone else. E.g. if you want to run around in traffic, that's fine, as long as you don't expect people to not hit you, and as long as your estate can clean your blood off their car.

Thus, any law which attempts to stop people from doing stupid things is by definition a reduction in freedom. We should protect the freedom of people to do stupid things, because things other people feel are stupid (like freedom of the press, or of speech, or of religion, or of assembly, or of petition) are likely things you value.

If we don't have the freedom to do stupid things, we have no freedom at all.

-- Russ Nelson (The Angry Economist)

Music is everybody's possession. It's only the publishers who think people own it. -- John Lennon

The first step of emancipation is to learn to recognize when your emotions are being manipulated for profit. -- Loren Cobb

Freedom of speech is ultra important so stupid people will make their stupid statements so we know how stupid they are. -- Ted Nugent

On August 19, 1934, 95% of the Germans who were registered to vote went to the polls and 90% (38 million) of adult German citizens voted to give Adolf Hitler complete and total authority to rule Germany as he saw fit. Only 4.25 million Germans voted against this transfer of power to a totalitarian regime. -- William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought which they avoid. -- Soren Aabye Kierkegaard

Democracy isn't Freedom. Inalienable Rights are. Democracy is only a precondition for Inalienability of Rights. -- jafc on Slashdot

Anyone showing the slightest support towards a government which has shown any tendency to suspend the people's rights in its own defense, is a traitor to the liberties of the people, and without any qualification or exception being possible. A right, then, is something to which every individual in the community is morally entitled, and for which that community is entitled to disregard or forcibly remove anything that stands in the way of even a single individual getting it. Rights belong to individuals, and no organisation has any rights not directly derived from those of its members as individuals. -- William James Sidis

The health of a nation is perilled if one man be oppressed. -- John Boyle O'Reilly

Civil liberties make countries rich. If you made a graph of GNP per capita vs. civil liberties, you'd notice a definite trend. Could civil liberties really be a cause, rather than just an effect? I think so. I think a society in which people can do and say what they want will also tend to be one in which the most efficient solutions win, rather than those sponsored by the most influential people. -- Paul Graham

I know but one freedom, and that is the freedom of the mind. -- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

DRM 'manages access' in the same way that jail 'manages freedom'. -- mrchaotica on Slashdot

Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but, unlike charity, it should end there. -- Clare Booth Luce

The state secrets privilege is sort of like kryptonite for democracy. -- Hannibal on Ars Technica

Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger. -- Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials

Freedom's just another word for "nothing left to lose". -- Janis Joplin, Me and Bobby McGee

Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally. -- Abraham Lincoln

It used to be that this country valued personal freedom and no one needed convincing to think that making their own ethical choices for themselves and leaving others to make their own choices as well was an important aspect of our society. The essence of freedom is not trying to use the law to stop others from making choices you think are mistakes, but which do not directly affect you. The right of others to make wrong choices is the most important right because someone thinks everything is wrong. -- 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF on Slashdot

If you want total security, go to prison. There you're fed, clothed, given medical care, and so on. The only thing lacking... is freedom. -- Dwight Eisenhower

The route to success is to build something valuable. -- Paul Graham

Did you hurt somebody, or did you help people? -- Linus Torvalds, on "good" versus "bad"

When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. -- Dr. Wayne Dyer

Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people. -- Admiral Hyman G. Rickover

Wise men speak because they have something to say. Fools speak because they have to say something. -- Plato

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work. -- Thomas Edison

Beauty is the ultimate defense against complexity. -- David Gelernter

Attitudes are more important than facts. -- Karl Menninger

A mind free of negatives will always produce positives. -- Norman Vincent Peale

I knocked and the door opened, but I found I'd been knocking from the inside. -- Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi

It seems that perfection is reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. -- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Terre des hommes, 1939

The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is at all comprehensible. -- Albert Einstein

The Web is the sum of all human knowledge plus porn. -- Ron Gilbert

People don't do graffiti in pencil. -- UserGoogol on Slashdot, on the problem of Wiki defacing

There is this weird sense that the Internet is broken because it lets people make easy copies. ... The Internet is a machine for making copies, and artists need to come to grips with that. -- Cory Doctorow

What was that? Rumors of Apple's imminent *survival*? I give Apple six months before Jobs shuts the place down just to spite us all. -- aengblom on Slashdot

GPL et al are not viral. What's viral is copyright law. Mixing anyone's code with yours "infects" your code because it creates a derivative work. The only way you can legally do that with any copyrighted material is if you have permission from the owner (or fall into a Fair Use category). Some open source licenses grant a blanket permission to do that without any strings attached. Many (like the GPL) do not. Few commercial licenses provide that permission, and many of those that do require some sort of royalty payments. The GPL isn't viral, it just doesn't allow you to ignore the viral nature of copyright. -- swillden on Slashdot

The open-source movement is just a faster, Internet-enabled implementation of the much older academic tradition of peer review and building on foundations laid by others. -- Paul Murphy

Open Source takes the bullshit out of software. -- MIT Technology Review

Customers get less than five cents of software development for every dollar they spend on [proprietary] software. -- Bruce Perens

GCC is as central an enabler to the free and open-source programming movements as a free press is to democracy. -- CNET News

KDE should definitely rename KMail to Kreation. Then we can have an Evolution vs. Kreation debate to go alongside GNOME vs. KDE. -- jrockway on Slashdot

Of course standing on the shoulders of giants helps. However, over time you'd wish that these giants get taller so that the gap between what open source can deliver and the user expects gets smaller. -- Kjella on Slashdot, on why the GPL is preferable to the BSD license and proprietary software

UNIX is a 'How', not a 'What'. -- unknown

Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it. -- Linus Torvalds

Please direct all flames to /dev/audio -- Michael Ducy

I wrote my own tools, and as usual (conceited bastard that I am), I named the new project after myself: "git". -- Linus Torvalds

Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly. -- Henry Spencer, 1987

That's a UNIX book. Cool. -- Garth, Wayne's World 2

Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp. -- Philip Greenspun (his Tenth Rule)

Debian is the Linux of Linux distros. -- Craig Buchek

Once you get a Mac, you spend half your time evangelising them on the Internet, making up for the time saved in not tweaking hardware / Windows. -- JulesLt on Slashdot

XML is like violence: If it doesn't solve your problem, you aren't using enough of it. -- seen on Slashdot

The good thing about reinventing the wheel is that you can get a round one. -- Douglas Crockford, on why JSON was developed when XML already existed

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use XML." Now they have two problems. -- Phillip J. Eby

When choosing between two evils I always like to take the one I've never tried before. -- Mae West

Love is the answer, but while you're waiting for the answer, sex raises some pretty good questions. -- Woody Allen

All they've actually proved, over and over again, is that research is bad for you, and that 'new studies' cause cancer in rats. -- Sheriff Fatman on Slashdot, on "scientific studies"

Behind every great woman... is a man checking out her ass.

They're like sex, except I'm having them! -- Fry, Futurama episode 2ACV15 ("The Problem with Popplers")

Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. -- Benjamin Franklin

Morality works best when chosen, not when mandated. -- Larry Wall, Perl 6 Apocalypse 1

I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own - a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms. -- Albert Einstein

Bombing for peace is like screwing for abstinence. -- Anonymous Custard on Slashdot

The church is to science what the KKK is to racial equality and posesses a record just as abhorent. -- Seumas on Slashdot

My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests. -- George Santayana

It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue. -- Voltaire

I would not dare to so dishonor my Creator God by attaching His name to that book (the Bible). Among the most detestable villains in history, you could not find one worse than Moses. Here is an order, attributed to 'God' to butcher the boys, to massacre the mothers and to debauch and rape the daughters. -- Thomas Paine

Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because if there be one he must approve of the homage of reason more than that of blindfolded fear. -- Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Peter Carr, August 10, 1787

And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hyprocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward. But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly. -- Jesus, Matthew 6:5-6

God works in mysterious, inefficient, and breathtakingly cruel ways. -- Penn and Teller's Bullshit

What would Jesus do? Jesus would go out drinking with is his friends, hang out with the dregs of society, complain about the church, and do nice things for people. -- Dave Odevich

You can safely say that you have made God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do. -- Reverend Robert Cromey

I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours. -- Stephen Roberts

The reason organized religion merits outright hostility is that, unlike belief in Russell's teapot, religion is powerful, influential, tax-exempt and systematically passed on to children too young to defend themselves. -- Richard Dawkins, A Devil's Chaplain

The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim. -- Edsger W. Dijkstra

Watching, I reflected that this was truly how democracy is extinguished. Not with guns and bombs, but from the inside by officials and politicians who deceive with guile and who no longer pretend to countenance the higher interests of the constitution. -- Henry Porter, 2006, on the UK's Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill, which allows the executive powers to also define the laws

The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. Instead of altering their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views ... which can be very uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering. -- Doctor Who, Face of Evil

I'm not nearly the threat that I'd hoped I'd be. -- Arlo Guthrie, on being searched at the airport post-9/11

You can trust the Americans to do the right thing, after they have tried every other alternative. -- Winston Churchill

Our enemies never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we. -- George W. Bush

I don't think Osama bin Laden sent those planes to attack us because he hated our freedom. I think he did it because of our support for Israel, our ties with the Saudi family and our military bases in Saudi Arabia. You know why I think that? Because that's what he fucking said! -- David Cross

For the price of Janet Jackson's 'wardrobe malfunction' during the Super Bowl, you could cause the wrongful death of an elderly patient in a nursing home and still have enough money left to create dangerous mishaps at two nuclear reactors. -- Rolling Stone article on "indecency" fines proposed by the FCC

Sometimes the measured use of force is the only thing that keeps the world from being ruled by force. -- George W. Bush

The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government. -- Thomas Jefferson

Those who cast the votes decide nothing; those who count the votes decide everything. -- Joseph Stalin

The more prohibitions there are, the poorer the people will be. -- Lao Tse

> Seriously, what other country disparages its "intellectual elite"?
The People's Republic of China (early on)
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
Nazi Germany
Facist Italy
Rawanda about 10 years ago -- TGK on Slashdot, on the decline of science in the US

I think of South Africa, where a decision to engage in out-and-out armed struggle would have led to a bloody civil war with huge casualties, most of them black. Instead, the African National Congress decided to put up with apartheid longer, but wage a long-term campaign of attrition, with strikes, sabotage, economic sanctions, and international pressure. It worked. -- Howard Zinn

I firmly believed we should not march into Baghdad ... To occupy Iraq would instantly shatter our coalition, turning the whole Arab world against us. -- George Bush, A World Transformed

It gets dug out of the ground in Africa, or someplace. Then we melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to stand around guarding it. It has no utility. Anyone watching from Mars would be scratching their head. -- Warren Buffet, on gold

"Capitalism is hard" is not a sound argument. -- ChaosDiscord on Slashdot

The Constitution wasn't written to protect us when time are good, it was written to protect us when times are bad. Sadly, most fail to grasp this simple concept. -- hsmith on Slashdot

The purpose of the office of the president is not to wield power, but to draw attention away from it. -- Douglas Adams

The War On Drugs is a war against poor people on street drugs, waged by rich people on prescription drugs. -- Roseanne Barr

Latin is not dead! It's in retirement, enjoying lucrative consulting positions in the scientific and medical communities. Other than that, it occasionally goes to church and has an interest in oral sex. -- fr2asbury on Slashdot

It seems like the future is becoming a thing of the past. -- Unknown

First they came for the verbs, and I said nothing because verbing weirds language. Then they arrival for the nouns, and I speech nothing because I no verbs. -- unknown

Why is a carrot more orange than an orange? -- The Amboy Dukes

Men occasionally stumble on the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened. -- Winston Churchill

A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing. -- Alan Perlis

I think every language should be designed simultaneously with a large application written in it, the way C was with Unix. -- Paul Graham

Ruby is an honorary P-language; just ignore the kickstand. -- Bruce Tate, on Ruby being a part of the LAMP stack

If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them. -- Isaac Asimov

Bill Gates is a Persian cat and a monocle away from being a villain in a James Bond movie. -- Dennis Miller

Never argue with a fool -- people might not be able to tell the difference.

I always wanted to buy the mailing list and phone numbers of people who subscribe to those New Age/Psychic magazines. Then I would call them out of the blue and say, "I'm a psychic and I sensed that you needed to speak to me!" -- MisanthropicProgram on Slashdot

Gay is the new black. -- Craig Buchek

All successful complex applications were once successful simple applications. -- Mike Champion

Familiarity with inefficiency is no excuse for perpetuation of inefficiency. -- Chris Gregan

The one who says it cannot be done should never interrupt the one who is doing it.

If you're careful enough, nothing bad or good will ever happen to you.

Faith is easy. Trust is the hard thing. -- Fred Alessi

Property rights are about controlling limited resources, not about controlling people. -- argoff on Slashdot, on "Intellectual Property rights" on non-scarce resources

Physics is like sex. Sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it. -- Richard Feynman

Not only did the monkeys produce nothing but five pages consisting largely of the letter S, they started by attacking the keyboard with a stone, and continued by urinating and defecating on it. -- study to see if monkeys could randomly write Shakespeare's plays

Ladies and Gentlemen, this is your Captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are doing our damnedest to get them going again. I trust you are not in too much distress. -- Captain Eric Moody, British Airways Flight 9, which glided for 12 minutes before the engines restarted

If I give you a pfennig, you will be one pfennig richer and I'll be one pfennig poorer. But if I give you an idea, you will have a new idea, but I shall still have it, too. -- Albert Einstein

On two occasions I have been asked by members of Parliament, "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. -- Charles Babbage

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. -- Karl Marx, in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Shortest sentence in the English language: I am.
Longest sentence in the English language: I do. -- Craig Buchek

It's not true that married men live longer than single men. It only seems longer.

They say that 50% of all marriages end in divorce. That's not as bad as it sounds, considering that the other 50% end in death.

It's not that I'm afraid to die, I just don't want to be there when it happens. -- Woody Allen

Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. -- Douglas Adams

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so. -- Douglas Adams

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the most discoveries, is not "Eureka!" (I found it!) but "That's funny". -- Isaac Asimov

I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous. -- Brian W. Kernighan

With enough eyeballs, you can find a real world example of any random joke. -- MarkusQ on Slashdot

Another problem with the net is that it's still 'technology', and 'technology', as the computer scientist Bran Ferren memorably defined it, is 'stuff that doesn't work yet.' We no longer think of chairs as technology, we just think of them as chairs. -- Douglas Adams

That's the stupidest thing I've ever read. And I read Slashdot on a regular basis. -- Anonymous Coward on Slashdot

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge. -- Charles Darwin

The first rule an engineer learns on the job is "the vendor is a lying bastard". -- lgw on Slashdot

That's the problem with immortality -- you have to be dead to achieve it. -- Dave Odevich

We saw some new fencing taking place; makes sense to use fencing along the border in key locations. -- President Bush, May 18, 2006

IE is still wearing a helmet and drooling on itself as it takes the short bus back to Redmond. -- binary paladin on Slashdot, on how poorly Internet Explorer 7 complies with CSS standards

Don't worry about what people think; they don't do it very often.

A person, who is nice to you, but rude to the waiter, is not a nice person.

I think people can generally trust me, but they can trust me exactly because they know they don't have to. -- Linus Torvalds

The United States treats its socialism the way a priest treats masturbation -- it does it very rarely, with a great amount of guilt, and tries very hard to ignore the amount of relief it brings. -- anonymous on Slashdot

Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice. -- pegr on Slashdot

Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people. -- George Bernard Shaw

Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much. -- Oscar Wilde

Idealism is what precedes experience; cynicism is what follows. -- David T. Wolf

Trying to make digital files uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet. -- Bruce Schneier, on DRM

It's easier to throw something away if you didn't spend a long time creating it. -- Dave Thomas (Pragmatic Programmer), explaining why you should program quickly

I write code for free. The salary is just so I'll sit through the meetings and deal with my coworkers. -- javajedi on Slashdot