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)

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)

We now come to the decisive step of mathematical abstraction: we forget about what the symbols stand for. ...[The mathematician] need not be idle; there are many operations which he may carry out with these symbols, without ever having to look at the things they stand for. -- Hermann Weyl, The Mathematical Way of Thinking

Measure everything you can about the product, and you'll start seeing patterns. -- Max Levchin, PayPal founder, Talk at StartupSchool2007

Getting back to failing early, I've learned it's important to completely fail. Get fired. Shoot the project, then burn its corpse. Melt the CVS repository and microwave the backup CDs. When things go wrong, I've often tried to play the hero from start to finish. Guess what? Some projects are doomed no matter what. Some need skills I don't possess. And some need a fresh face. -- Reginald Braithwaite

Side projects are less masturbatory than reading RSS, often more useful than MobileMe, more educational than the comments on Reddit, and usually more fun than listening to keynotes. -- Chris Wanstrath

The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any. –Alice Walker

What’s money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do. –Bob Dylan

What’s the point of being alive if you don’t at least try to do something remarkable. ~Anonymous

If you don’t design your own life plan, chances are you’ll fall into someone else’s plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much. ~ Jim Rohn