Proverbs, aphorisms, quotations (English) | by Linux fortune |
"Absolutely nothing should be concluded from these figures except that no conclusion can be drawn from them." (By Joseph L. Brothers, Linux/PowerPC Project) | |
If you permit yourself to read meanings into (rather than drawing meanings out of) the evidence, you can draw any conclusion you like. -- Michael Keith, "The Bar-Code Beast", The Skeptical Enquirer Vol 12 No 4 p 416 | |
Clarke's Conclusion: Never let your sense of morals interfere with doing the right thing. | |
Clay's Conclusion: Creativity is great, but plagiarism is faster. | |
Hawkeye's Conclusion: It's not easy to play the clown when you've got to run the whole circus. | |
Major premise: Sixty men can do sixty times as much work as one man. Minor premise: A man can dig a posthole in sixty seconds. Conclusion: Sixty men can dig a posthole in one second. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" Secondary Conclusion: Do you realize how many holes there would be if people would just take the time to take the dirt out of them? | |
Manly's Maxim: Logic is a systematic method of coming to the wrong conclusion with confidence. | |
Matz's Law: A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking. | |
A conclusion is simply the place where someone got tired of thinking. | |
I do not remember ever having seen a sustained argument by an author which, starting from philosophical premises likely to meet with general acceptance, reached the conclusion that a praiseworthy ordering of one's life is to devote it to research in mathematics. -- Sir Edmund Whittaker, "Scientific American", Vol. 183 | |
If all the world's economists were laid end to end, we wouldn't reach a conclusion. -- William Baumol | |
Logic is a systematic method of coming to the wrong conclusion with confidence. | |
There was an old Indian belief that by making love on the hide of their favorite animal, one could guarantee the health and prosperity of the offspring conceived thereupon. And so it goes that one Indian couple made love on a buffalo hide. Nine months later, they were blessed with a healthy baby son. Yet another couple huddled together on the hide of a deer and they too were blessed with a very healthy baby son. But a third couple, whose favorite animal was a hippopotamus, were blessed with not one, but TWO very healthy baby sons at the conclusion of the nine month interval. All of which proves the old theorem that: The sons of the squaw of the hippopotamus are equal to the sons of the squaws of the other two hides. | |
Oh give me your pity! I'm on a committee, We attend and amend Which means that from morning And contend and defend to night, Without a conclusion in sight. We confer and concur, We defer and demur, We revise the agenda And reiterate all of our thoughts. With frequent addenda And consider a load of reports. We compose and propose, We suppose and oppose, But though various notions And the points of procedure are fun; Are brought up as motions, There's terribly little gets done. We resolve and absolve; But we never dissolve, Since it's out of the question for us To bring our committee To end like this ditty, Which stops with a period, thus. -- Leslie Lipson, "The Committee" | |
"Nobody will ever need more than 640k RAM!" -- Bill Gates, 1981 "Windows 95 needs at least 8 MB RAM." -- Bill Gates, 1996 "Nobody will ever need Windows 95." -- logical conclusion | |
"Since it's a foregone conclusion that Microsoft will be littering its XML with pointers to Win32-based components, the best that can be said about its adoption of XML is that it will make it easier for browsers and applications on non-Windows platforms to understand which parts of the document it must ignore." -- Nicholas Petreley, "Computerworld", 3 September, 2001 | |
Absolutely nothing should be concluded from these figures except that no conclusion can be drawn from them. -- Joseph L. Brothers, Linux/PowerPC Project) | |
... before I could come to any conclusion it occurred to me that my speech or my silence, indeed any action of mine, would be a mere futility. What did it matter what anyone knew or ignored? What did it matter who was manager? One gets sometimes such a flash of insight. The essentials of this affair lay deep under the surface, beyond my reach, and beyond my power of meddling. -- Joseph Conrad | |
XXXI: The optimum committee has no members. XXXII: Hiring consultants to conduct studies can be an excellent means of turning problems into gold -- your problems into their gold. XXXIII: Fools rush in where incumbents fear to tread. XXXIV: The process of competitively selecting contractors to perform work is based on a system of rewards and penalties, all distributed randomly. XXXV: The weaker the data available upon which to base one's conclusion, the greater the precision which should be quoted in order to give the data authenticity. -- Norman Augustine |