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

Remember: you are alone. Every time you can get help from someone, it is an opportunity: you should eagerly size it. But then, promptly return to normal mode: you are alone and you must be prepared to solve every problem yourself. -- Eric KEDJI

Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot. -- Eric S. Raymond

And if you go too far up, abstraction-wise, you run out of oxygen. Sometimes smart thinkers just don't know when to stop, and they create these absurd, all-encompassing, high-level pictures of the universe that are all good and fine, but don't actually mean anything at all. -- Joel Spolsky

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. -- Blaise Pascal (attributed)

We tend to seek easy, single-factor explanations of success. For most important things, though, success actually requires avoiding many separate causes of failure. -- Jared Diamond

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

I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have. ~Thomas Jefferson

The whole secret of a successful life is to find out what is one’s destiny to do, and then do it. ~Henry Ford

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