They don’t think it be like this, but it do
- Oscar Gamble
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be
- Kurt Vonnegut
If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.
- Kurt Vonnegut
If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD WAS MUSIC
- Kurt Vonnegut
Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you’ve got a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies-“God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.
- Kurt Vonnegut
Julius Caesar was never a particularly cautious commander, so if he looked at whatever force Cleopatra still had and said, “we need to wait for reinforcements,” it could not, at that point, have been very substantial.
- Bret Devereaux
as a foreign queen – an intersecting triad of concepts (foreignness, monarchy and women in power) which all offended Roman sensibilities – she was effectively the perfect target for a campaign aimed at winning over the populace of Italy
- Bret Devereaux
Don’t worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
- Alan Kay
The less confident you are, the more serious you have to act.
- Paul Graham
The imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.
- Richard Feynman
The best writing is rewriting
- E. B. White
Modern invention has been a great leveller. A machine may operate far more quickly than a political or economic measure to abolish privilege and wipe out the distinctions of class or finance.
- Ivor Brown
If our goal is to write poetry, the only way we are likely to be any good is to try to be as great as the best.
- Donald Hall
Premature optimization is the root of all evil
- Donald Knuth
all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.
- Charles Kingsley
We’re even wrong about which mistakes we’re making.
- Carl Winfeld
Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
- Alan Perlis
Programmers are not to be measured by their ingenuity and their logic but by the completeness of their case analysis.
- Alan Perlis
Everyone can be taught to sculpt: Michelangelo would have had to be taught not to. So it is with great programmers.
- Alan Perlis
Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.
- Mark Twain
PowerPoint makes us stupid.
- General James N. Mattis, USMC
Don’t fear moving slowly. Fear standing still.
- Chinese proverb
Pessimists sound smart. Optimists make money.
- Nat Friedman
Being enthusiastic is worth 25 IQ points
- Kevin Kelly
People who can’t laugh at themselves will always be outwitted by people who can
- T.K. Coleman
Now, most people hate to admit they’re wrong, but it didn’t bother Bill one bit. All he cared about was what was right, not who was right. That’s what makes Bill very, very dangerous.
- Larry Ellison on Bill Gates
If you start a war, you don’t get to choose how it ends.
- Shashank Joshi
The more you are interested in others, the more interesting they find you. To be interesting, be interested.
- Kevin Kelly
Being able to listen well is a superpower
- Kevin Kelly
Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.
- Brian Eno
Show up. Keep showing up. Somebody successful said: 99% of success is just showing up.
- Kevin Kelly
You mean I’ve been texting a landline?
- Dr. Caleb Alexander, PhD
Broscience is the only true science.
- Dr. Skander Karkar, PhD
We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.
- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
I think there is no more powerful anti depressant and nothing that will give us more meaning in life than to know that we matter for others. And that means to do for others.
- Esther Perel
It is only a slight exaggeration to say that happiness is the experience of spending time with people you love and who love you.
- Daniel Kahneman
Gratitude will unlock all other virtues and is something you can get better at
- Kevin Kelly
The more you give to others, the more you’ll get.
- Kevin Kelly
Very few fights are worth starting. A fight worth starting is usually a fight worth winning.
- (unknown, I read this one on the internet a while back and it stuck with me)
If you find yourself in a fair fight, you didn't plan your mission properly.
- David Hackworth
Clever ideas to save lives by killing more people are surprisingly common and unsurprisingly rarely turn out to work.
- Bret Devereaux
It is a human instinct, when another human is doing something you don’t like... to retaliate, to punish that person.... humans are emotional beings and so the temptation to ‘punish’ rather than pursue interests in a rational way will always exist.
- Bret Devereaux
Today, less than $500 will purchase a cell phone that has as much performance as the world’s fastest computer bought in 1993 for $50 million.
- Hennessy and Patterson
Precisely because this way of battle was so damn blunt and direct, it was also reliable.
- Bret Devereaux
The traits one must cultivate in order to thrive in corporate hierarchies are precisely the opposites of those you’ll want to imbue in yourself to become an interesting writer.
- Michel O. Church
To most, criticizing a company or product implies in criticizing their buying decision and by consequence, their intellect.
- hu3 on Hacker News
Agents and groups have fundamentally different dynamics. An anthill does things no ant can conceive of. Many human organizations filled with smart, well-intentioned people do incredibly stupid things. Etc.
- walleeee on Hacker News
Hire good people and give them room to do their jobs. Sounds great when it's described that way, doesn't it? Except in practice, judging from the report of founder after founder, what this often turns out to mean is: hire professional fakers and let them drive the company into the ground.
- Paul Graham
All of which serves as another component in the thesis that war is no longer a profitable business – and yet our state strategies often continue to falsely assume that it is.
- Bret Devereaux