A designer knows he has arrived at perfection not when there is no longuer anything to add, but when there is no longuer anything to take away. -- Antoine de St Exupery.

Never do the impossible. People will expect you to do it forever after. -- pigsandfishes.com

A society that puts equality -- in the sense of equality of outcome -- ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests. -- Milton Friedman (Thomas Sowell: A Conflict of Visions, p130)

It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC. As potential programmers, they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration. -- E. W. Dijkstra

The general principle for complexity design is this: Think locally, act locally. -- Richard P. Gabriel & Ron Goldman, Mob Software: The Erotic Life of Code

Humans aren't rational -- they rationalize. And I don't just mean "some of them" or "other people". I'm talking about everyone. We have a "logic engine" in our brains, but for the most part, it's not the one in the driver's seat -- instead it operates after the fact, generating rationalizations and excuses for our behavior. -- Paul Buchheit

The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success. ~Bruce Feirstein

I would rather die of passion than of boredom. –Vincent van Gogh

Challenges are what make life interesting and overcoming them is what makes life meaningful. –Joshua J. Marine

We become what we think about most of the time, and that’s the strangest secret. ~Earl Nightingale