It’s hard to grasp abstractions if you don’t understand what they’re abstracting away from. -- Nathan Weizenbaum

What do Americans look for in a car? I've heard many answers when I've asked this question. The answers include excellent safety ratings, great gas mileage, handling, and cornering ability, among others. I don't believe any of these. That's because the first principle of the Culture Code is that the only effective way to understand what people truly mean is to ignore what they say. This is not to suggest that people intentionally lie or misrepresent themselves. What it means is that, when asked direct questions about their interests and preferences, people tend to give answers they believe the questioner wants to hear. Again, this is not because they intend to mislead. It is because people respond to these questions with their cortexes, the parts of their brains that control intelligence rather than emotion or instinct. They ponder a question, they process a question, and when they deliver an answer, it is the product of deliberation. They believe they are telling the truth. A lie detector would confirm this. In most cases, however, they aren't saying what they mean. -- The culture code.

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

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

Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent. -- Eleanor Roosevelt

I’d rather write programs to write programs than write programs. -- Richard Sites

A successful man is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks others have thrown at him. ~David Brinkley

Limitations live only in our minds. But if we use our imaginations, our possibilities become limitless. –Jamie Paolinetti

People rarely succeed unless they have fun in what they are doing. ~Dale Carnegie

The mind is everything. What you think you become. –Buddha