Cyrill > Cyrill's Quotes

“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”
― Mark Twain

“The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures.... Yet the program construct, unlike the poet's words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself.”
― Frederick P. Brooks Jr., [The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, Anniversary Edition (2nd Edition)] [By: Brooks Jr., Frederick P.] [August, 1995]

“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
― Edward Abbey, The Journey Home: Some Words in Defense of the American West

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum....”
― Noam Chomsky, The Common Good

“That's the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody's going to be against, and everybody's going to be for. Nobody knows what it means, because it doesn't mean anything.”
― Noam Chomsky

“The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don't know how to be submissive, and so on -- because they're dysfunctional to the institutions.”
― Noam Chomsky

“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.”
― Frank Zappa

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.”
― Alfred North Whitehead

“From the very beginning of his education, the child should experience the joy of discovery.”
― Alfred Whitehead

“Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.”
― Milton Friedman

“Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behaviour and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.”
― Terence McKenna

“Of all things, I liked books best.”
― Nikola Tesla

“I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success . . . Such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything.”
― Nikola Tesla

“If the words 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' don't include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence isn't worth the hemp it was written on.”
― Terence McKenna

“Western civilization is a loaded gun pointed at the head of this planet.”
― Terence McKenna

“Take it easy man, but take it.”
― Terence McKenna

“The urge to destroy is also a creative urge.”
― Mikhail Bakunin

“People go to church for the same reasons they go to a tavern: to stupefy themselves, to forget their misery, to imagine themselves, for a few minutes anyway, free and happy.
-- Circular Letter to My Friends in Italy”
― Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin

“Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.”
― Frank Zappa

“Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains.”
― Karl Marx

“We are seeking another basic outlook: the world as an organization. This would profoundly change categories of our thinking and influence our practical attitudes. We must envision the biosphere as a whole with mutually reinforcing or mutually destructive inter-dependencies.”
― Ludwig Von Bertalanffy, Robots, Men and Minds: Psychology in the Modern World

“(Evolution) general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must bow and which they must satisfy henceforward if they are to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light which illuminates all facts, a curve that all lines must follow.”
― Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man

“People who know little are usually great talkers, while men who know much say little.”
― Jean Jacques Rousseau

“Any social arrangements which inhibit or constrain the free creative capacity [of human beings] are fundamentally illegitimate unless they can justify themselves.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

“Talk is cheap. Show me the code.”
― Linus Torvalds

“A lot of people believe in working long days and doing dou­ble, triple, or even quadruple shifts. I'm not one of them. Neither Transmeta nor Linux has ever gotten in the way of a good night's sleep. In fact, if you want to know the honest truth, I'm a firm believer in sleep. Some people think that's just being lazy, but I want to throw my pillow at them. I have a perfectly good excuse, and I'm standing by it: You may lose a few hours of your produc­tive daytime if you sleep, oh, say, ten hours a day, but those few hours when you are awake you're alert, and your brain functions on all six cylinders. Or four, or whatever.”
― Linus Torvalds, Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary

“Grades are a problem. On the most general level, they're an explicit acknowledgment that what you're doing is insufficiently interesting or rewarding for you to do it on your own. Nobody ever gave you a grade for learning how to play, how to ride a bicycle, or how to kiss. One of the best ways to destroy love for any of these activities would be through the use of grades, and the coercion and judgment they represent. Grades are a cudgel to bludgeon the unwilling into doing what they don't want to do, an important instrument in inculcating children into a lifelong subservience to whatever authority happens to be thrust over them.”
― Derrick Jensen

“Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.”
― Frédéric Chopin