Quotes

"Unusual behavior tends to produce estrangement in others which tends to further the unusual behavior and thus the estrangement in self-stoking cycles"

"The cheapest, fastest, and most reliable components are those that aren't there."

"The only sin is to make a choice without knowing you are making one."

"Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what man does with what happens to him"

"Thoroughly conscious ignorance is the prelude to every real advance in science"

"Why are things always in the last place you look for them? Because you stop looking when you find them"

"It's not a problem of getting people to express themselves but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say"

"Everything in life moves through three stages: survival, social order, entertainment"

"A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work."

"Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple"

"Believe nothing no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense."

"If you're not embarrassed by your first product release, you've released too late"

"If you want to get people to think out of the box, do not create the box in the first place"

"I do always have this background program running where I'm trying to think of, 'O.K.' what's the opposite of what you're saying"

"There is nothing we can do in philosophy. Plato solved too many of the problems. We can't have any impact in this area. There are too many smart guys and too few problems left, and the problems have no solutions."

"When someone says something, don't ask yourself if it is true. Ask what it might be true of."

"That language is an instrument of human reason, and not merely a medium for the expression of thought, is a truth generally admitted."

"Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it."

"Premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming."

"We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about."

"Many who burnt heretics in the ordinary way of their business were otherwise excellent people."

"We're even wrong about which mistakes we're making."

"Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word."

"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."

"As it turned out, the obvious clearly stated, and combined with new observations, was sometimes close to revolutionary."

"He begins working calculus problems in his head as soon as he awakens. He did calculus while driving in his car, while sitting in the living room, and while lying in bed at night."

"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

"An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field."

"The population is made up of four types of people: A small number hunt witches. A large number go along with the hunt. A larger number are silent. A tiny number oppose it. The final group — as if by magic — become witches."

"Lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason, than reality, since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to hear."

"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."

"Remember that the thing that is most likely to be wrong is the thing that you heard most recently, because we’ve not had the chance to verify it yet."

"Avoid metaphors, which can introduce unneeded baggage."

"Crime does not pay as much as code."

"Intellectuals are naturally attracted by the idea of a planned society, in the belief that they will be in charge of it."

"We are built with an almost infinite capacity to believe things because the beliefs are advantageous for us to hold, rather than because they are even remotely related to the truth"

"I don't think that this age is particularly pessimistic when compared with others, but I do think it's somehow gotten better at getting in the way of progress."

"If you are looking for perfect safety, you will do well to sit on a fence and watch the birds."

"In one respect at least the Martians are a happy people; they have no lawyers"

"It is a world in which the law is so vague that businessmen have no way of knowing whether specific actions will be declared illegal until they hear the judge's verdict - after the fact"

"I would say that we lived in a world in which bits were unregulated and atoms were regulated"

"Everyone knows how to obey laws against robbery. No individual can know how to obey laws such as Sarbanes-Oxley(810 pages) or Dodd-Frank(2300 pages)"

"The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly."

"The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem."

"If it had been up to the NIH to cure polio, we'd have the best iron lungs in the world but we still wouldn't have the Salk vaccine."

"We would almost find it appropriate to call out present economic system "managementism" rather than "capitalism""

"Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black"

"Ford got enough capital to start the Ford Motor Company, of which he became vice-president, general manager, designer, master mechanic, and superintendent."

"Well, this chariot may kill me, but they will say afterward that I was going like hell when she took me over the bank."

"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the people to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea."

"You have to be run by ideas, not hierarchy"

"You've got to be careful if you don't know where you're going 'cause you might not get there"

"A world of flat organizations and tumultuous business conditions punishes fixed skills and prizes elastic ones."

"To figure out what you want, know what you'll be good at"

"That the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world . . . frightens me much more than bombs."

"The more you stumble around, the more likely you are to stumble across something valuable"

"A mathematician who argues from probabilities in geometry is not worth an ace"

"The definition of Business is problems. Success lies not in eliminating problems, but in the art of creative problem solving."

"All the wise people demonstrated conclusively that the engine could not compete with steam. They never thought that it might carve out a career for itself. That is the way with wise people—they are so wise and practical that they always know to a dot just why something cannot be done; they always know the limitations. That is why I never employ an expert in full bloom. If ever I wanted to kill opposition by unfair means I would endow the opposition with experts. They would have so much good advice that I could be sure they would do little work"

"The fish trap exists because of the fish; once you've gotten the fish you can forget the trap. The rabbit snare exists because of the rabbit; once you've gotten the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words exist because of meaning; once you've gotten the meaning, you can forget the words. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words, so I can have a word with him?"

"People have too much faith in large organizations."

"Make something people want" is the destination, but "Be relentlessly resourceful" is how you get there."

"Hapless implies passivity. To be hapless is to be battered by circumstances—to let the world have its way with you, instead of having your way with the world."

"Probably the limiting factor on the number of startups is the pool of potential founders."

"The cheapest, fastest, and most reliable components are those that aren't there."

"The only sin is to make a choice without knowing you are making one."

"Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education."

"There is no such thing as a diplomatic hand grenade"

"Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a good carpenter to build one."

"Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see"

"It is the chiefest point of happiness that a man is willing to be what he is"

"Intensity is the price of excellence"

"Everybody enjoys winning. But do you like practicing?"

"You are more likely to solve a problem by being unconventional or different. If you can’t be unconventional, be obtuse. Be deliberately obtuse(annoyingly insensitive or slow to understand), because there are 5 billion people out there thinking in train tracks, and thinking what they have been taught to think."

"You should avoid an unfamiliar word as a ship avoids a reef. "

“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”

"It's not that I'm so smart, it's that I stay with problems longer."

"A budget is the way we hold on to the illusion that we are controlling our finances"

"There are no statues of committees"

"people have an innate anti-persuasion system. A radar kicks in when they sense someone is trying to convince them. To lower this barrier, catalysts encourage people to persuade themselves."

"I was gratified to be able to answer promptly. I said I don't know."

"No one is dumb who is curious. The people who don't ask questions remain clueless throughout their lives."

"If you want to articulate your opinion, write a blog. If you want to have a conversation, set your opinions aside, at least temporarily."

"Anyone can become angry - that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way - this is not easy."

"Books need editors. Lives do too."

"People pay you for how valuable they think your product is and not how hard it is to make. Few understand this."

"The art of business was how to stay in business long enough to give yourself the best chance to get a big hit."

"There are very few who can think, but every man wants to have an opinion; and what remains but to take it ready made from others, instead of forming opinions for himself"

"There is no opinion, however absurd, which men will not readily embrace as soon as they can be brought to the conviction that it is generally adopted."

"Ordinary folk have a deep respect for professional men of any kind. They are unaware that a man who makes a profession of a thing loves it not for the thing itself, but for the money he makes by it"

"Every man prefers belief to the exercise of judgement"

"Well, the broker made money and the firm made money - and two out of three ain't bad"

"Everybody can ride a bicycle, but nobody knows how it is done"

"You don't learn, then start. You start, then learn."

“Your thoughts construct patterns like scaffolding in your mind. You are really etching chemical patterns. In most cases, people get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a record, and they never get out of them…”

“The majority of business men are incapable of original thinking because they are unable to escape from the tyranny of reason.”

"Knowledge in some fields is cumulative. In other fields it’s cyclical"

"History never repeats itself; man always does"

"Today’s youth is rotten, evil, godless and lazy. It will never be what youth used to be, and it will never be able to preserve our culture.”

"When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other"

"If you come across any special trait of meanness or stupidity… you must be careful not to let it annoy or distress you, but to look upon it merely as an addition to your knowledge—a new fact to be considered in studying the character of humanity."

“Nothing in life is as important as you think it is, while you are thinking about it.”

"When you talk to a customer about a specific problem, they will naturally “focus” on that problem — at the exclusion of other problems they (or their team/business) are facing."

"The cheapest, fastest, and most reliable components are those that aren’t there."

"The only sin is to make a choice without knowing you are making one."

"Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education."

"Modern education is like being taken to the world's greatest restaurant & being forced to eat the menu."

"It's all too common to see startups spending their runway chasing the siren song of product and engineering craftsmanship, only to crash against the jagged rocks of market irrelevance"

"Program testing can be a very effective way to show the presence of bugs, but is hopelessly inadequate for showing their absence."

"Testing by itself does not improve software quality. Test results are an indicator of quality, but in and of themselves, they don't improve it. Trying to improve software quality by increasing the amount of testing is like trying to lose weight by weighing yourself more often. What you eat before you step onto the scale determines how much you will weigh, and the software development techniques you use determine how many errors testing will find. If you want to lose weight, don't buy a new scale; change your diet. If you want to improve your software, don't test more; develop better."

"The problem with object-oriented languages is they've got all this implicit environment that they carry around with them. You wanted a banana but what you got was a gorilla holding the banana and the entire jungle."

"In programming the hard part isn't solving problems, but deciding what problems to solve."

"It is not that uncommon for the cost of an abstraction to outweigh the benefit it delivers. Kill one today!"

"Owen doesn't focus on what you're saying. He tries to figure out what you want to get by saying it. And then he tries to figure out why you think you want what you want. And then he tries to figure out what he can about the the things thay make you think you want it."

"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted—and you create a nation of law-breakers—and then you cash in on guilt."

"Do you know what it's like to feel suddenly that one can talk without the strain of trying to force some sort of understanding out of a vacuum?"

"The adversary she found herself forced to fight was not worth matching or beating; it was not a superior ability which she would have found honor in challenging; it was ineptitude—a gray spread of cotton that deemed soft and shapeless, that could offer no resistance to anything or anybody, yet managed to be a barrier in her way. She stood, disarmed, before the riddle of what made this possible. She could find no answer."

"No doctrinal system in physical science, or indeed perhaps in any science, will alter its content of its own accord... Indeed the more intelligible and comprehensive a theoretical system is the more obstinately it will resist all attempts at reconstruction or expansion. And this is because in a synthesis of thought where there is an all-round logical coherence any alteration in one part of the structure is bound to upset other parts also. For instance, the main difficulty about the acceptance of relativity theory was not merely a question of its objective merits but rather the question of how far it would upset the Newtonian structure of theoretical dynamics."

"A committee moves at the speed of its least informed member and too often is used as a way of sharing irresponsibility."

"I have come to learn that part of the business strategy is to solve the simplest, easiest, and most valuable problem... so part of the reason why you work on software and bits is that atoms[physical products] are actually very difficult."

"You always have three options. You can change it, you can accept it, or you can leave it. What is not a good option is to sit around wishing you would change it but not changing it, wishing you would leave it but not leaving it, and not accepting it. It’s that struggle, that aversion, that is responsible for most of our misery."

"If you can’t see yourself working with someone for life, don’t work with them for a day."

"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society."

"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect."

"Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist."

"Any work is creative work if done by a thinking mind."

"If more information was the answer we'd all be billionaires with perfect abs."

"Don't set out to raze all shrines - you'll frighten men. Enshrine mediocrity - and the shrines are razed."

"An agreement reached by a group of men is only a compromise on an average drawn upon many individual thoughts."

"It stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting sacrificial offerings."