Proverbs, aphorisms, quotations (English) | by Linux fortune |
Delay not, Caesar. Read it instantly. -- Shakespeare, "Julius Caesar" 3,1 Here is a letter, read it at your leisure. -- Shakespeare, "Merchant of Venice" 5,1 [Quoted in "VMS Internals and Data Structures", V4.4, when referring to I/O system services.] | |
For the fashion of Minas Tirith was such that it was built on seven levels, each delved into a hill, and about each was set a wall, and in each wall was a gate. -- J.R.R. Tolkien, "The Return of the King" [Quoted in "VMS Internals and Data Structures", V4.4, when referring to system overview.] | |
For there are moments when one can neither think nor feel. And if one can neither think nor feel, she thought, where is one? -- Virginia Woolf, "To the Lighthouse" [Quoted in "VMS Internals and Data Structures", V4.4, when referring to powerfail recovery.] | |
A place for everything and everything in its place. -- Isabella Mary Beeton, "The Book of Household Management" [Quoted in "VMS Internals and Data Structures", V4.4, when referring to memory management system services.] | |
To date, the firm conclusions of Project Blue Book are: 1. no unidentified flying object reported, investigated and evaluated by the Air Force has ever given any indication of threat to our national security; 2. there has been no evidence submitted to or discovered by the Air Force that sightings categorized as UNIDENTIFIED represent technological developments or principles beyond the range of present-day scientific knowledge; and 3. there has been no evidence indicating that sightings categorized as UNIDENTIFIED are extraterrestrial vehicles. - the summary of Project Blue Book, an Air Force study of UFOs from 1950 to 1965, as quoted by James Randi in Flim-Flam! | |
Inadmissible: Not competent to be considered. Said of certain kinds of testimony which juries are supposed to be unfit to be entrusted with, and which judges, therefore, rule out, even of proceedings before themselves alone. Hearsay evidence is inadmissible because the person quoted was unsworn and is not before the court for examination; yet most momentous actions, military, political, commercial and of every other kind, are daily undertaken on hearsay evidence. There is no religion in the world that has any other basis than hearsay evidence. Revelation is hearsay evidence; that the Scriptures are the word of God we have only the testimony of men long dead whose identy is not clearly established and who are not known to have been sworn in any sense. Under the rules of evidence as they now exist in this country, no single assertion in the Bible has in its support any evidence admissible in a court of law... But as records of courts of justice are admissible, it can easily be proved that powerful and malevolent magicians once existed and were a scourge to mankind. The evidence (including confession) upon which certain women were convicted of witchcraft and executed was without a flaw; it is still unimpeachable. The judges' decisions based on it were sound in logic and in law. Nothing in any existing court was ever more thoroughly proved than the charges of witchcraft and sorcery for which so many suffered death. If there were no witches, human testimony and human reason are alike destitute of value. --Ambrose Bierce | |
[May one] doubt whether, in cheese and timber, worms are generated, or, if beetles and wasps, in cow-dung, or if butterflies, locusts, shellfish, snails, eels, and such life be procreated of putrefied matter, which is to receive the form of that creature to which it is by formative power disposed[?] To question this is to question reason, sense, and experience. If he doubts this, let him go to Egypt, and there he will find the fields swarming with mice begot of the mud of the Nylus, to the great calamity of the inhabitants. A seventeenth century opinion quoted by L. L. Woodruff, in *The Evolution of Earth and Man*, 1929 | |
All bad precedents began as justifiable measures. -- Gaius Julius Caesar, quoted in "The Conspiracy of Catiline", by Sallust | |
What you want, what you're hanging around in the world waiting for, is for something to occur to you. -- Robert Frost [Quoted in "VMS Internals and Data Structures", V4.4, when referring to AST's.] | |
Fourteen years in the professor dodge has taught me that one can argue ingeniously on behalf of any theory, applied to any piece of literature. This is rarely harmful, because normally no-one reads such essays. -- Robert Parker, quoted in "Murder Ink", ed. D. Wynn | |
My godda bless, never I see sucha people. -- Signor Piozzi, quoted by Cecilia Thrale | |
I would have you imagine, then, that there exists in the mind of man a block of wax... and that we remember and know what is imprinted as long as the image lasts; but when the image is effaced, or cannot be taken, then we forget or do not know. -- Plato, Dialogs, Theateus 191 [Quoted in "VMS Internals and Data Structures", V4.4, when referring to image activation and termination.] | |
Nuclear powered vacuuum cleaners will probably be a reality within 10 years. -- Alex Lewyt (President of the Lewyt Corporation, manufacturers of vacuum cleaners), quoted in The New York Times, June 10, 1955. | |
Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the Shadow -- T.S. Eliot, "The Hollow Man" [Quoted in "VMS Internals and Data Structures", V4.4, when referring to system service dispatching.] | |
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. -- Edgar Allan Poe, "The Raven" [Quoted in "VMS Internals and Data Structures", V4.4, when referring to hardware interrupts.] And now I see with eye serene The very pulse of the machine. -- William Wordsworth, "She Was a Phantom of Delight" [Quoted in "VMS Internals and Data Structures", V4.4, when referring to software interrupts.] | |
By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. In fact, it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent. -- R. Emerson -- Quoted from a fortune cookie program (whose author claims, "Actually, stealing IS easier.") [to which I reply, "You think it's easy for me to misconstrue all these misquotations?!?" Ed.] | |
Brief History Of Linux (#15) Too many hyphens: Traf-O-Data and Micro-soft Bill Gates and Paul Allen attended an exclusive private school in Seattle. In 1968, after raising $3,000 from a yard sale, they gained access to a timeshare computer and became addicted. After depleting their money learning BASIC and playing Solitaire, they convinced a company to give them free computer time in exchange for reporting bugs -- ironically, an early form of Open Source development! The two then founded a small company called Traf-O-Data that collected and analyzed traffic counts for municipalities using a crude device based on the Intel "Pretanium" 8008 CPU. They had some success at first, but ran into problems when they were unable to deliver their much hyped next-generation device called "TrafficX". An engineer is quoted as saying that "Traf-O-Data is the local leader in vaporware", the first documented usage of the term that has come to be synonymous with Bill Gates. Soon thereafter, the two developed their own BASIC interpreter, and sold it to MITS for their new Altair computer. April 4, 1975 is the fateful day that Micro-soft was founded in Albuquerque, NM as a language vendor. | |
It is equally bad when one speeds on the guest unwilling to go, and when he holds back one who is hastening. Rather one should befriend the guest who is there, but speed him when he wishes. -- Homer, "The Odyssey" [Quoted in "VMS Internals and Data Structures", V4.4, when referring to scheduling.] | |
Only fools are quoted. -- Anonymous | |
In "King Henry VI, Part II," Shakespeare has Dick Butcher suggest to his fellow anti-establishment rabble-rousers, "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." That action may be extreme but a similar sentiment was expressed by Thomas K. Connellan, president of The Management Group, Inc. Speaking to business executives in Chicago and quoted in Automotive News, Connellan attributed a measure of America's falling productivity to an excess of attorneys and accountants, and a dearth of production experts. Lawyers and accountants "do not make the economic pie any bigger; they only figure out how the pie gets divided. Neither profession provides any added value to product." According to Connellan, the highly productive Japanese society has 10 lawyers and 30 accountants per 100,000 population. The U.S. has 200 lawyers and 700 accountants. This suggests that "the U.S. proportion of pie-bakers and pie-dividers is way out of whack." Could Dick Butcher have been an efficiency expert? -- Motor Trend, May 1983 | |
The first rule of all intelligent tinkering is to keep all the parts. -- Aldo Leopold, quoted in Donald Wurster's "Nature's Economy" | |
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 |