C and Lisp stand at opposite ends of the spectrum; they're each great at what the other one sucks at. -- Steve Yegge, Tour de Babel.

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)

A no uttered from the deepest conviction is better than a yes merely uttered to please or what is worse, to avoid trouble. -- Mahatma Gandhi

I think that a lot of programmers are ignoring an important point when people talk about reducing code repetition on large projects. Part of the idea is that large projects are intrinsically *wrong*. That you should be looking at making a number of smaller projects that are composable, even if you never end up reusing one of those smaller projects elsewhere. -- Dan Nugent

The best thing about a boolean is even if you are wrong, you are only off by a bit. -- Anonymous

Adapting old programs to fit new machines usually means adapting new machines to behave like old ones. -- Alan J. Perlis (Epigrams in programming)

14.Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do, so throw off the bowlines, sail away from safe harbor, catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore, Dream, Discover. –Mark Twain

Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can. –Arthur Ashe

There is no chance, no destiny, no fate, that can hinder or control the firm resolve of a determined soul. ~Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Education costs money. But then so does ignorance. –Sir Claus Moser