Quotes

When you train your mind how to think, you inoculate yourself against those who desperately want to tell you what to think.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

When one admits that nothing is certain one must, I think, also admit that some things are much more nearly certain than others.

Bertrand Russell

I will be not just an advocate but a steward.

Tom Díaz, Lexington School Committee

"Government" is the name we give to the things we choose to do together.

Deval Patrick

Data is a precious thing and will last longer than the systems themselves.

Tim Berners-Lee

Whenever faith trumps reason, the result might not be reasonable.

me

The delusional is no longer marginal.

Bill Moyers

The reality-based community...believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality...That's not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.

Bush Aide, quoted in Ron Suskind's New York Times Magazine article Without A Doubt

Kerry asks Americans to look at the evidence. Bush asks people to believe.

Ellen Goodman

Donald Rumsfeld should not just be impeached. He should be tried as a war criminal. As for Bush, he can be dispatched by the electorate while we are still a democracy.

Robert Kuttner

As President, I will not be the last to know what is going on in my command.

John Kerry

I want to make sure (a user) can't get through ... an online experience without hitting a Microsoft ad.

Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO

Religion is the most malevolent of all mind viruses.

Arthur C. Clarke

A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.

George Bernard Shaw

If money is a form of speech, as the Supreme Court has regrettably found, rich donors will always be the loudest speakers.

Howard Dean

Power Corrupts. PowerPoint Corrupts Absolutely.

Edward Tufte or Vint Cerf

A profession that we are a nation "under God" is identical...to a profession that we are a nation "under Jesus," a nation "under Vishnu," a nation "under Zeus," or a nation "under no god," because none of these professions can be neutral with respect to religion.

Judge Alfred Goodwin, speaking for the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals

Schrödinger, a member of the human species on planet Earth, in the neighborhood of a yellow star, one star of hundreds of billions in the Milky Way Galaxy, which is just one of tens of billions of visible galaxies in the universe, can invent a musical sort of equation that in principle -- and, to a large extent, in practice -- yields upon solution all of the notes of the symphony of creation.

Schrödinger, who before his passing, got out of bed, brushed his teeth, and ate breakfast just like you and me. Now if that doesn't send shivers up your spine, you should go back to bed and forget that there's a universe at all.

Chet Raymo, The Boston Globe

That, to me, is what family values are all about.

Studs Terkel, discussing the family built by two lesbians who fell in love at a celebration of the life of the gay sperm donor they shared

I am trying to call attention to the elephant in the room that everybody is too polite - or too devout - to notice: religion, and specifically the devaluing effect that religion has on human life.

Richard Dawkins, The Guardian

Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple.

Charles Mingus

For some reason, when it's time for a bass solo, the drummer--with whom you may have just set up some incredible grooves--suddenly starts to play clickety-click on the closed hi-hat. Meanwhile, the pianist either stops playing, or he's reached the conclusion that he mustn't clutter up the lower register for you, so he plays some trebly clink-clinks. Clickety-click, clink-clink--who the heck can play a solo on top of that?

Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen, in an interview by Mikael Jansson, Bass Player Magazine, May 1996

We have lived in a world where the discoveries of physics and genetics are far more awe-inspiring, as well as infinitely more liberating, than the claims of any religion.

Christopher Hitchens, Free Inquiry, Fall 2000

But only when the separate categories of conduct are viewed, as they should be, as a single, well-coordinated course of action does the full extent of the violence that Microsoft has done to the competitive process reveal itself.

Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson

It is far better to understand the Universe as it really is than to pretend to a Universe as we might wish it to be.

Carl Sagan, Billions and Billions

My question is what non-Microsoft browsers were you concerned about in January of 1996.

David Boise, lawyer for the prosecution

What's the question?

Bill Gates

To abandon the proven instructional strategy of grouping students for instruction at a time of educational crisis in the U.S. will further damage our already poor competitive position with the rest of the world, and will renege on our promise to provide an appropriate education for all children.

National Association for Gifted Children

Microsoft is unlawfully taking advantage of its Windows monopoly to protect and to extend that monopoly and undermine consumer choice.

Janet Reno

We want to have better assurance of quality. Testing will be something that we do from now on.

Jeff Price, product manager, Microsoft Corp (Network World, March 10, 1997, p. 10)

Do not mistake temptation for opportunity.

fortune cookie

In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice, there is.

Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut (Thanks, PRT!)

Cutting education is eating our seed corn.

James Carville, We're Right, They're Wrong

It's easy to sit there and say you'd like to have more money. And I guess that's what I like about it. It's easy. Just sitting there, rocking back and forth, wanting that money.

Jack Handey

I am not a vegetarian because I love animals; I am a vegetarian because I hate plants.

A. Whitney Brown

The central struggle of parenthood is to let our hopes for our children outweigh our fears.

Ellen Goodman
Collected by Jon Dreyer

$Date: 2006/03/25 16:36:38 $