John Hearn > John's Quotes

“We have to create culture, don't watch TV, don't read magazines, don't even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you're worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you're giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told 'no', we're unimportant, we're peripheral. 'Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.' And then you're a player, you don't want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.”
― Terence McKenna

“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
― Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History

“It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.”
― John Maynard Keynes

“Time is not measured
by the years that you live
But by the deeds that you do
and the joy that you give-
And each day as it comes
brings a chance to each one
To love to the fullest,
leaving nothing undone
That would brighten the life
or lighten the load
Of some weary traveler
lost on Life's Road-
So what does it matter
how long we may live
If as long as we live
we unselfishly give.”
― Helen Steiner Rice

“If it hurts, do it more frequently, and bring the pain forward.”
― Jez Humble, Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases Through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation

“Rich Hickey once said programmers know the benefits of everything and the tradeoffs of nothing...an approach that can lead a project down a path of frustra‐ ted developers and unhappy customers. But as an architect you must consider the tradeoffs of every new library, language, pattern, or approach and quickly make decisions often with incomplete information.”
― Nathaniel Schutta, Thinking Architecturally

“If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it again?”
― John Wooden

“Abandon the urge to simplify everything, to look for formulas and easy answers, and to begin to think multidimensionally, to glory in the mystery and paradoxes of life, not to be dismayed by the multitude of causes and consequences that are inherent in each experience -- to appreciate the fact that life is complex.”
― M. Scott Peck

“There are young men and women up and down the land who happily (or unhappily) tell anyone who will listen that they don’t have an academic turn of mind, or that they aren’t lucky enough to have been blessed with a good memory, and yet can recite hundreds of pop lyrics and reel off any amount of information about footballers. Why? Because they are interested in those things. They are curious. If you are hungry for food, you are prepared to hunt high and low for it. If you are hungry for information it is the same. Information is all around us, now more than ever before in human history. You barely have to stir or incommode yourself to find things out. The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care to know. They are incurious. Incuriosity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is.”
― Stephen Fry, The Fry Chronicles

“Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up.”
― G. K. Chesterton

“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.”
― H. L. Mencken