A person won't become proficient at something until he or she has done it many times. In other words., if you want someone to be really good at building a software system, he or she will have to have built 10 or more systems of that type. -- Philip Greenspun

Lisp has jokingly been called "the most intelligent way to misuse a computer". I think that description is a great compliment because it transmits the full flavor of liberation: it has assisted a number of our most gifted fellow humans in thinking previously impossible thoughts. -- Edsger Dijkstra, CACM, 15:10

No art, however minor, demands less than total dedication if you want to excel in it. -- Alberti

The lesson of the story might appear to be that self-interested and ambitious people in power are often the cause of wastefulness in developing countries. But self-interested and ambitious people are in positions of power, great and small, all over the world. In many places, they are restrained by the law, the press, and democratic opposition. Cameroon's tragedy is that there is nothing to hold self-interest in check. -- Tim Harford

Simplicity and pragmatism beat complexity and theory any day. -- Dennis (blog comment)

Having large case statements in an object-oriented language is a sure sign your design is flawed. -- [Fixing architecture flaws in Rails' ORM]

Teach thy tongue to say, I do not know, and thous shalt progress. –Maimonides

If you do what you always did, you will get what you always got. ~Anonymous

Try not to become a person of success, but rather try to become a person of value. ~Albert Einstein

People rarely succeed unless they have fun in what they are doing. ~Dale Carnegie