It's like a condom; I'd rather have it and not need it than need it and not have it. -- some chick in Alien vs. Predator, when asked why she always carries a gun

If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything. -- Mark Twain

One of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that–lacking zero–they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C programs. -- Robert Firth

Well then. How could you possibly live without automated refactoring tools? How else could you coordinate the caterpillar-like motions of all Java’s identical tiny legs, its thousands of similar parts? I’ll tell you how: Ruby is a butterfly. -- Stevey, Refactoring Trilogy, Part 1.

The acts of the mind, wherein it exerts its power over simple ideas, are chiefly these three: 1. Combining several simple ideas into one compound one, and thus all complex ideas are made. 2. The second is bringing two ideas, whether simple or complex, together, and setting them by one another so as to take a view of them at once, without uniting them into one, by which it gets all its ideas of relations. 3. The third is separating them from all other ideas that accompany them in their real existence: this is called abstraction, and thus all its general ideas are made. -- John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)

If something isn’t working, you need to look back and figure out what got you excited in the first place. -- David Gorman (ImThere.com)

A truly rich man is one whose children run into his arms when his hands are empty. –Unknown

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absense of fear. ~Mark Twain

It is not what you do for your children, but what you have taught them to do for themselves, that will make them successful human beings. –Ann Landers

Thinking should become your capital asset, no matter whatever ups and downs you come across in your life. ~Dr. APJ Kalam