Quotes

i. “Mathematics is a tool which ideally permits mediocre minds to solve complicated problems expeditiously.” (Floyd Alburn Firestone)

ii. “Growing old’s like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven’t committed.” (Anthony Dymoke Powell)

iii. “To make a discovery is not necessarily the same as to understand a discovery.” (Abraham Pais)

iv. “People usually take for granted that the way things are is the way things must be.” (Poul William Anderson)

v. ” Space isn’t remote at all. It’s only an hour’s drive away if your car could go straight upwards.” (Fred Hoyle)

vi. “One can never pay in gratitude; one can only pay “in kind” somewhere else in life.” (Anne Morrow Lindbergh)

vii. “When a nice quote comes to mind, I always attribute it to Montesquieu, or to La Rochefoucauld. They’ve never complained.” (Indro Montanelli)

viii. “Program testing can be a very effective way to show the presence of bugs, but it is hopelessly inadequate for showing their absence.” (Edsger Wybe Dijkstra)

ix. “History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.” (Abba Eban)

x. “Scientific research is not conducted in a social vacuum.” (Robert K. Merton)

xi. “No man knows fully what has shaped his own thinking” (-ll-)

xii. “I write as clearly as I am able to. I sometimes tackle ideas and notions that are relatively complex, and it is very difficult to be sure that I am conveying them in the best way. Anyone who goes beyond cliche phrases and cliche ideas will have this trouble.” (Raphael Aloysius Lafferty)

xiii. “Change should be a friend. It should happen by plan, not by accident.” (Philip B. Crosby)

xiv. “The universe of all things that exist may be understood as a universe of systems where a system is defined as any set of related and interacting elements. This concept is primitive and powerful and has been used increasingly over the last half-century to organize knowledge in virtually all domains of interest to investigators. As human inventions and social interactions grow more complex, general conceptual frameworks that integrate knowledge among different disciplines studying those emerging systems grow more important.” (Gale Alden Swanson & James Grier Miller, Living Systems Theory)

xv. “When I die it’s not me that will be affected. It’s the ones I leave behind.” (Cameron Troy Duncan)

xvi. “I was always deeply uncertain about my own intellectual capacity; I thought I was unintelligent. And it is true that I was, and still am, rather slow. I need time to seize things because I always need to understand them fully. […] At the end of the eleventh grade, I […] came to the conclusion that rapidity doesn’t have a precise relation to intelligence. What is important is to deeply understand things and their relations to each other. This is where intelligence lies. The fact of being quick or slow isn’t really relevant. Naturally, it’s helpful to be quick, like it is to have a good memory. But it’s neither necessary nor sufficient for intellectual success.” (Laurent-Moïse Schwartz)

xvii. “A slowly moving queue does not move uniformly. Rather, waves of motion pass down the queue. The frequency and amplitude of these waves is inversely related to the speed at which the queue is served.” (Anthony Stafford Beer)

xviii. “It is terribly important to appreciate that some things remain obscure to the bitter end.” (-ll-)

xix. “Definitions, like questions and metaphors, are instruments for thinking. Their authority rests entirely on their usefulness, not their correctness. We use definitions in order to delineate problems we wish to investigate, or to further interests we wish to promote. In other words, we invent definitions and discard them as suits our purposes. […] definitions are hypotheses, and […] embedded in them is a particular philosophical, sociological, or epistemological point of view.” (Neil Postman)

xx. “There’s no system foolproof enough to defeat a sufficiently great fool.” (Edward Teller)