Some of my Favourite Quotations
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
- known as 'Hanlon's Razor'.
"You know you have reached perfection in design, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to be taken away."
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Our view of the world comes partly from the attitudes we are born with, partly from our upbringing, and partly from philosophies we adopt as adults. Or, if you prefer, from Nature, Nurture, and Nietzsche."
- from a talk I gave in c. 1994.
"Art without engineering is dreaming.
Engineering without art is calculating."
"If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?"
- Albert Einstein
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man"
- George Bernard Shaw
"Orville Wright didn't have a pilot's license"
- from 'Orbiting the Giant Hairball' by Gordon MacKenzie
"I'd always supposed ... that curiosity was simply the first derivative of knowledge."
- Paul Graham