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)

The human brain starts working the moment you are born and never stops until you stand up to speak in public. -- Anonymous

But what is it good for? -- Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, commenting on the microchip, 1968

Its a shame that the students of our generation grew up with windows and mice because that tainted our mindset not to think in terms of powerful tools. Some of us are just so tainted that we will never recover. -- Jeffrey Mark Siskind in comp.lang.lisp

Argue with idiots, and you become an idiot. If you compete with slaves you become a slave. -- Paul Graham and Norbert Weiner, respectively

If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. -- Rush (Freewill)

Take up one idea. Make that one idea your life - think of it, dream of it, live on that idea. Let the brain, muscles, nerves, every part of your body, be full of that idea, and just leave every other idea alone. This is the way to success. ~Swami Vivekananda

Success is walking from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm. ~Winston Churchill

Don’t let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do. ~John R. Wooden

Successful entrepreneurs are givers and not takers of positive energy. ~Anonymous