The trouble with the world is that the stupid are always cocksure and the intelligent are always filled with doubt. -- Bertrand Russell

You will never become a Great Programmer until you acknowledge that you will always be a Terrible Programmer. You will remain a Great Programmer for only as long as you acknowledge that you are still a Terrible Programmer. -- Marc (http://kickin-the-darkness.blogspot.com/)

No matter how much you plan you’re likely to get half wrong anyway. So don’t do the ‘paralysis through analysis’ thing. That only slows progress and saps morale. -- 37 Signal, Getting real

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

Something Confusing about "Hard": It's tempting to think that if it's hard, then it's valuable. Most valuable things are hard. Most hard things are completely useless -- (picture of someone smashing their head through concrete blocks kung-fu style). Hard DOES NOT EQUATE TO BEING valuable. Remember Friendster back in the day? You'd sign in, invite friends, have 25 friends, go to their profile, and then it'd show how you were connected to each one. That's an impressive [some geeky CS jargon] Cone traversal of a tree - 100 million string comparisons per page -- it won't scale. Used to take a minute per page to load, and Friendster died a painful death. MySpace -- not interested in solving problems They use the shortcut of "Miss Fitzpatrick is in your extended network" (i.e. even when you're not even signed up for MySpace) They didn't solve the hard problem. But they make the more relevant assumption that you want to be connected to hot women. [LOL] Shows Alexa graph showing that in early 2005 Myspace took off, and quickly bypassed Friendster and never looked back. -- Max Levchin, PayPal founder, Talk at StartupSchool2007

The lesson of the story might appear to be that self-interested and ambitious people in power are often the cause of wastefulness in developing countries. But self-interested and ambitious people are in positions of power, great and small, all over the world. In many places, they are restrained by the law, the press, and democratic opposition. Cameroon's tragedy is that there is nothing to hold self-interest in check. -- Tim Harford

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

Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living our fears. –Les Brown

If you can dream it, you can achieve it. –Zig Ziglar

Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor. ~Truman Capote