However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results. -- Winston Churchill

I think it is wise, and only honest, to warn you that my goal is immodest. It is not my purpose to "transfer knowledge" to you that, subsequently, you can forget again. My purpose is no less than to effectuate in each of you a noticeable, irreversable change. I want you to gain, for the rest of your lives, the insight that beautiful proofs are not "found" by trial anf error but are the result of a consciously applied design discipline. I want you to raise your quality standards. I mean, if 10 years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty, you suddenly visualize that I am looking over your shoulders and say to yourself "Dijkstra would not have liked this", well, that would be enough immortality for me. -- E. W. Dijkstra

I was talking recently to a friend who teaches at MIT. His field is hot now and every year he is inundated by applications from would-be graduate students. "A lot of them seem smart," he said. "What I can't tell is whether they have any kind of taste." -- Paul Graham

The most damaging phrase in the language is, It's always been done that way. -- Rear Admiral Grace Hopper

To iterate is human, to recurse divine. -- L. Peter Deutsch

The important thing is not to stop questioning. -- Albert Einstein

The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any. –Alice Walker

Either you run the day, or the day runs you. –Jim Rohn

When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left and could say, I used everything you gave me. –Erma Bombeck

Little minds are tamed and subdued by misfortune; but great minds rise above it. ~Washington Irving