# 💬 QUOTES Remember that you are dying Anger is temporary madness "Laughter is the shortest distance between two people." - Victor Borge Dependency fosters weakness; however interconnectedness is unavoidable "Every word has consequences, every silence, too." - Sartre "Service is the rent we pay for being. It is the very purpose of life, and not something you do in your spare time." - Marian Wright Edelman “If you think technology will solve your problems, you don’t understand technology and you don’t understand your problems.” "If God didn't send Jesus into the world to condemn it, I doubt he sent you." - David Huskins "A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention." - Herbert Simon “All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.” "[It is crucial to understand that you will never outlast the fuckery. Once the fuckery starts, it’s all fuckery from then on. The only thing that outlasts the fuckery is the new fuckery.](https://bsky.app/profile/rusty.todayintabs.com/post/3mi3hzan7w22q?_bhlid=10e262f505515e8d4188d6ecad694c270193f33c)" Most arguments are not really about the argument, so most arguments can't be won by arguing. "Diplomacy frequently consists in soothingly saying 'Nice doggie' until you have a chance to pick up a rock." — Walter Trumbull Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it - Albert Camus "History is best told as a story of organized crime. It is one group creating a monopoly on resources through the use of violence over a certain territory and population." Kemp "I know very little about anything. But what I do know is that if you can live your life without an audience, you should do it." ― Bo Burnham Pain plus reflection equals progress. "AI is the asbestos we're shoveling into our civilization's walls, and our descendants will be digging it out for generations" “All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” -Blaise Pascal Taking even 15–30 minutes every morning to read uplifting and instructive information changes you "The best revenge is to not be like your enemy" — Marcus Aurelius “There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy.” — Alfred Henry Lewis “Mistakes are a bit like broken bones. If they don't get properly reset, the aftermath becomes far worse than the accident itself.” ― Michael Lynton History is a vast early warning system. — Norman Cousins You are a museum of everything you have ever loved Everybody can be great because everybody can serve. — Martin Luther King A problem well stated is a problem half-solved. — Charles F. Kettering Document intent, options, rationale without the snark or speculation "notable enough to merit a contentious Wikipedia entry" “If we don’t communicate with the outside world–to gain information for knowledge and understanding–we die out to become a non-discerning and uninteresting part of that world.” –John Boyd “I have what I call an iron prescription that helps me keep sane when I naturally drift toward preferring one ideology over another. And that is I say ‘I’m not entitled to have an opinion on this subject unless I can state the arguments against my position better than the people do who are supporting it.’ I think only when I reach that stage am I qualified to speak.” - Charlie Munger “I read once that the true mark of a pro — at anything — is that he understands, loves, and is good at even the drudgery of his profession.” - Mathematician Paul Halmos I do not pretend to start with precise questions. I do not think you can start with anything precise. You have to achieve such precision as you can, as you go along. - Bertrand Russell "The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas" — Linus Pauling He who knows not, and knows not that he knows not, is a fool. Shun him. He who knows not, and knows that he knows not, is simple. Teach him. He who knows, and knows not that he knows, is asleep. Wake him. He who knows, and knows that he knows, is wise. Follow him. "Henry Thoreau said that we don’t own things; things own us. Every new object—whether it’s a home, a car, a television, or a fancy phone like that one—is something more we must carry on our backs." — Stephen King "Wealth without work. Pleasure without conscience. Knowledge without character. Commerce without morality. Science without humanity. Religion without sacrifice. Politics without principle." — Ghandi (seven social wrongs) "Civil disobedience, as Martin Luther King Jr. wrote, should be done 'openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty,' because to be penalized for a righteous act only multiplies the act’s merit. You have to break the law proudly—not break it, then run away to another state and get caught with a fake ID in a McDonald’s" "If you never change your mind, why have one?" — Edward de Bono “All I want to know is where I’m going to die, so I’ll never go there.” — Charlie Munger “We all wish that life were simpler. Practically every unwanted emotion that we experience — fear, anxiety, depression, prejudice — reflects a reaction to the complexity by which we are surrounded.” "Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell." — Edward Abbey, author of The Monkey Wrench Gang "We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces." — Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, 1997 When man interferes with the Tao the sky becomes filthy, the earth becomes depleted, the equilibrium crumbles, creatures become extinct. — Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, 500 BCE, appx "Couldn't organize a one-car funeral" implies someone is so incompetent they cannot manage even the simplest task. It is a variation of a "two-car funeral" phrase that appeared in political commentary around the late 1960s/early 1970s. The old world is dying, the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters. — Antonio Gramsci, at the end of WWI Everyone’s living a life you know nothing about. Be kind. ​"Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who wants to live in an institution?" — Groucho Marx "You cannot save people. You can only love them." — Anaïs Nin Remember: everyone you love is on loan for a short period of time. "All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness." — Tennessee Williams “There is no love of life without despair of life” — Albert Camus "Thinking about the immortality of the crab" (Pensando en la inmortalidad del cangrejo) Cruelty is not simply the opposite of compassion, it’s often adjacent to it. Beware of those quick to show empathy, for they are often just as quick to show barbarity. "The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion." — Albert Camus “Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself.” – C.G. Jung Charlie Munger had a simple personal filter for bad ideas. If something was stupid, if it was evil, or if it made him look foolish, he preferred to stay far away from it. You can’t saw sawdust Change brings opportunity! "Cigarettes are like squirrels: They're perfectly harmless unless you put one in your mouth and set it on fire." "My friend keeps telling me to cheer up these days. He says it could be a lot worse, I could be trapped inside an underground hole filled with water. I know he means well." 'Oh, you can't help that,' said the Cat: 'we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad." 'How do you know I'm mad?' said Alice. 'You must be,' said the Cat, 'or you wouldn't have come here.' "The government are very keen on amassing statistics. They collect them, add them, raise them to the nth power, take the cube root and prepare wonderful diagrams. But you must never forget that every one of these figures comes in the first instance from the village watchman, who just puts down what he damn pleases." - Josiah Stamp Liz Lemon: Why are you wearing a tux? Jack: It's after six. What am I, a farmer? Jack: Where do you invest your money, Lemon? Liz Lemon: I. have, like, twelve grand in checking. Jack: Are you an immigrant? There is an old phrase that there are only 2 hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-1 errors. Civility is "claiming and caring for one's identity, needs and beliefs without degrading someone else's in the process" its more of a j. wellington wimpy transaction "I'd gladly come in tomorrow, if you come in for a today" if my inbox was a video game it would be a bullet hell -- overwhelming numbers of people sending overwhelming responses, often in visually impressive formations "evolutionary not revolutionary" When I was a Charmander, I spoke as a Charmander, I understood as a Charmander, I thought as a Charmander; but when I became a Charmeleon and then later a Charizard, I put away Charmander-ish things History is idiosyncratic, not formulaic "My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness." — Dalai Lama Nothing ruins your view of the world like getting your dream job "Worry never robs tomorrow of its sorrow, it only saps today of its joy." — Leo Buscaglia "If you don't know which port you are sailing to, no wind is favorable." — Seneca "It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor." — Seneca "People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf." - George Orwel "Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer; nothing is more difficult than to understand him"- Fyodor Dostoevsky "Old Jews invented guilt but Catholics perfected it" "We suffer more often in imagination than in reality." - Seneca “This era of hyper-premium content, $100 million dollar budgets on streaming shows, this era of AI, what it’s going to create is a counter market and the counter market is going to be for grass-fed organic content, where you know the names of the cows producing your milk Capitalism is amoral. Politics are where you use regulation to inject any moralism. Resistance isn’t weakness. It’s often a form of inner wisdom, a message from your psyche: “This next move requires a new version of you.” "There is a sufficiency in the world for man's need but not for man's greed” — Mahatma Gandhi “Every child is an artist; the problem is staying an artist when you grow up” – Pablo Picasso The friction with other people is what keeps us grounded A good system provides a safety net to catch people when they fall BUT a great system also offers a ladder "Endeavor to overcome by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory" — Bertrand Russell "Life is hard enough to swallow without squeezing in the bitter rind of resentment" — Samuel Johnson “One day, when it's safe, when there's no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it's too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.” ― Omar El Akkad "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." - Buckminister Fuller Re: bureaucracy "Greatest cost isn’t slow decisions or wasted resources — it’s human potential left unrealized…" — Munger "Understanding a question is half the answer" —Socrates "Life is a comedy to those who think, and a tragedy to those who feel." — Horace Walpole "Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them." - Frank Herbert Dune "Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, and waste its sweetness on the desert air," from Thomas Gray's poem "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard." "Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly." - Franz Kafka "People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls." - Carl Jung "All science, no philosophy." — Chris Knight, Real Genius “The reason you want to be better is the reason why you aren’t.” — Alan Watts "Everybody you fight is not your enemy. Everyone who helps you is not your friend" — Mike Tyson "What sort of God would put us here in this goddamned, stinking slaughterhouse of a world?" — Nightmare Alley "I can't afford to hate people. I don't have that kind of time." — Akira Kurosawa, Ikiru "Ambitious but frustrated people grow disillusioned and radicalized. Rather than integrate into institutions, they seek to undermine them." Is all the crypto and AI money in the world really worth this?” Why are you surprised by the behavior of your leaders? What else would you expect from a psyche and persona that desires to govern millions of people? ~ Travis J Wood "To the world you may only be one person, but to one person you may be the world." — Dr. Seuss Do not use good iron to make nails or good men to make soldiers - Chinese saying fat wallet and feeble mind consistency, not the intensity “It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.” - Epictetus “Not forgiving somebody is like drinking poison and hoping that the offender will get sick.” — Gary Smalley "Anger is like holding onto a hot coal that you intend to throw. You are the one who gets burned”. The people who have the least need the most compassion. The people who have the most power deserve the most blame. you cannot fix big government with bigger government or overconcentration of power with greater power concentration There are three things in the world that deserve no mercy; hypocrisy, fraud, and tyranny.” — Fredrick William Robertson People mistake their limitations for high standards "The world is changed by your example, not by your opinion" -Paulo Coelho Dance like no one's watching. Encrypt like everyone is. "The deepest form of slavery is the hunger to be understood" - Fyodor Dostoevsky "You are responsible for what you put into the world. And you are responsible for the effects those things have upon the world" - Victor Papanek It would be like me saying, "You have 50 million white blood cells. "What does that number mean to you? Average person goes, "I don't know. Good? bad? Am I going to die? I don't know." That's how we treat this number. And with a little bit more knowledge, we will be able to have a more relevant answer to the question. “Large organizations often remove us from the direct consequences of our decisions” A platitude is a placebo for the mind; an aphorism is a wake-up call. Aphorisms provoke debate; “it is important to remember that all law and government is in itself in some degree an evil, only justifiable when it prevents other and greater evils.” — Bertrand Russell AI;DR - "Why should I bother to read something someone else couldn't be bothered to write?" The practices that carry the greatest potential for transformative change are usually counter-instinctual. Some might turn to religion after a cataclysm, the pragmatist can turn to normal accident theory “The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.” — Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind "One of the most overlooked signals is sustained performance paired with declining well-being. Longitudinal studies show that people can maintain output for years after motivation erodes, but at a cost to health, creativity, and long-term employability." The great Sufi poet, Rumi, believed that before we speak, our words should pass through three gates. Is it true? Is it necessary? Is it kind? institutional cowardice, not executive cunning “. . . according to Lem's Law, 'No one reads; if someone does read, he doesn't understand; if he understands, he immediately forgets' -- owing to general lack of time, the oversupply of books, and the perfection of advertising.” ― Stanislaw Lem "examine the thorns of roses that have not flowered yet" We create more karma with our mouths than even our actions. Our words create a cosmic vibration that can permeate every corner of the world and therefore it is of utmost importance that we are especially mindful of what we say and how we say it. Adversity can strengthen you if you have the will to grind it out. The argument goes like this: Before AI can transform a company, it has to access the company’s data and be woven into existing systems—which sounds easy, provided you’re not a chief technology officer. A trade secret of most Fortune 500 companies is that they still run many critical functions on lumbering, industrial-strength mainframe computers that almost never break down and therefore can never be replaced. Mainframes are like Christopher Walken: They’ve been going nonstop since the 1960s, they’re fantastic at performing peculiar roles (processing payments, safeguarding data), and nobody alive really understands how they work. “You are too old to be poor. You don't know how.” - Arthur (1981) "I never wish to be easily defined. I’d rather float over other people’s minds as something strictly fluid and non-perceivable; more like a transparent, paradoxically iridescent creature rather than an actual person." — Franz Kafka “Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.” — Hannah Arendt Frank Drebin Jr.: You can't fight city hall. Ed Hocken Jr.: No, it's a building. Life is built on friction, not efficiency There are three types of people in this crumbling world we live in; those too foolish to understand the world is ending, those who helplessly try to fix it, and those who don’t give a fuck "Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth." - Marcus Aurelius "Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes." - Oscar Wilde “I have two kinds of problems: the urgent, and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.” - Dwight D. Eisenhower "The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence" -Jiddu Krishnamurti “The measure of a person is the congruence between their words and actions, their kindness, their confidence, and their decisiveness about who they are in the world and who they intend to remain.” Fentanyl really is garbage heroin Calcified can mean immovable. But it can also mean brittle. What you find interesting is a better predictor of success than what you're good at. Curiosity isn't random; it's a compass. "we only know how to value things that are scarce. If love doesn’t cost you anything, is it even really love?" "Policies are organizational scar tissue. Policies are codified overreactions to unlikely-to-happen-again situations. A collective punishment for the wrong-doings of a one-off. " - Jason Fried "Writing is a costly signal of caring about something. Good writing, in fact, might be a sign of pathological caring." Forget trying to decide what your life's destiny is. That's too grand. Instead, just figure out what you should do in the next 2 years. Aim to be effective, but unpredictable. The average human lifespan is absurdly, insultingly brief. Keep important phone numbers (fire department, paramedics, police, hospital, doctor, relatives, etc.) where they can be found easily in an emergency. Exposing vulnerabilities by admitting error creates intimacy and trust in relationships, and fosters forgiveness. Life isn’t that linear, but the direction is everything ballot is a means of self-defense If you love a flower, don’t pick it up. Because if you pick it up it dies and it ceases to be what you love. So if you love a flower, let it be. Love is not about possession. Love is about appreciation. Osho “Each of us is an artist,” because “everyone is involved, whether they like it or not, in the construction of their world.” - John O’Donohue “Drink the first. Sip the second slowly. Skip the third.”- Knute Rockne There are no MRIs without mineral mines People are far less likely to opt into interventions when the problems they need to avoid are rare and tend to concentrate in society’s more vulnerable sectors. To put it cynically: You can go green, or you can go to war, but you cannot do both. "When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him." “a recession is when your neighbor loses their job. A depression when you lose yours” Governing necessitates compromise "If a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves ... There's so much talk about the system. And so little understanding." — Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974) "Progressive elaboration" - beautiful phrasing A common cliché is that we are the average of the five people with whom we spend the most time. "If you put shame in a petri dish, it needs three ingredients to grow exponentially: secrecy, silence, and judgment. " "Suppose aliens invade the earth and threaten to obliterate it in a year's time unless human beings can find the Ramsey number for red five and blue five. We could marshal the world's best minds and fastest computers, and within a year we could probably calculate the value. If the aliens demanded the Ramsey number for red six and blue six, however, we would have no choice but to launch a preemptive attack." - Paul Erdos Did a particular program or spending increase help the nameless wagon pullers across our country, working hard at their job, trying to provide for their family and future? “Focus on your values” only matters if you define them in behavior. Tell the truth when it costs you. Do competent work when no one is watching. “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” — Leonard Cohen Capitalism wants you to earn the living that life has already granted you. "Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful." - David Lynch “I have few illusions,” Havel wrote. “But I feel a responsibility to work towards the things I consider good and right. I don’t know whether I’ll be able to change certain things for the better, or not at all. Both outcomes are possible. There is only one thing I will not concede: that it might be meaningless to strive in a good cause.” "Carve your name on hearts, not tombstones. A legacy is etched into the minds of others and the stories they share about you." - Shannon Alder “A soul is of more value than work or gold." — George Mellor “Music has a lot of potential to make a lot of things hurt a lot less” “The chairman of Coke told me one time that all great fortunes are made on addictive substances" "Hard to hate up close" Money Is Just a Tool "All oppressed people have the right to violence. It's like the right to pee. You have to have the right place, the right time, and this is IT." - Flo Kennedy Selling simplification is more profitable than implementing it. "Amateurs talk about tactics, but professionals study logistics." Contamination is the companion of categorization. “Never laugh at live dragons" - J.R.R. Tolkien “The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.“ - Henry David Thoreau "Nothing is so dangerous to any form of government ... as the ex parte decision, based on the advice of only one of several sides, privately spoken to the head man" "The biggest concern for any organization should be when their most passionate people become quiet." “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read,” civil rights activist James Baldwin told Life magazine in a 1963 interview. "I don’t believe there is such a thing as a “lost cause”— only those without suitably dedicated followers." ―Serena Butler A career is a pie-eating contest and the prize for winning is more pie Thinking is difficult, that's why people prefer to judge," wrote Carl Gustav Jung "You are responsible for what you put into the world. And you are responsible for the effects those things have upon the world" - Victor Papanek "I cannot believe that the purpose of life is to be happy. I think the purpose of life is to be useful, to be responsible, to be compassionate. It is, above all to matter, to count, to stand for something, to have made some difference that you lived at all." - Leo Rosten “Never do work you’re ashamed of putting your name on” Constitution does not defend itself; It’s just a piece of paper. It offers you an opportunity to build your fortifications… "The genius of Melville is that he saw that this is a country that needs a monster." — Carlos Fuentes...suggests that Herman Melville's genius lies in his portrayal of America through the lens of a "monster." Fuentes seems to be saying that Melville recognized America's potential for both greatness and destruction, and that the monster, perhaps symbolized by Moby Dick, embodies this duality “A soul is of more value than work or gold." — George Mellor “…the monstrous is that which creates this sense of vertigo, that which calls into question our…epistemological worldview, highlights its fragmentary and inadequate nature, and thereby asks us…to acknowledge the failures of our systems of categorization.” --Asa Mittman Extreme wealth is often tied to immoral and criminal practices Desire to understand ourselves can lead us to false but appealing answers. What you find interesting is a better predictor of success than what you're good at. “The measure of a person is the congruence between their words and actions, their kindness, their confidence, and their decisiveness about who they are in the world and who they intend to remain.” “You may get to the very top of the ladder, and then find it has not been leaning against the right wall.” — Allen Raine Gods made wine to compensate those who cannot afford revenge. Trauma is a news photo without a caption Sometimes in life, even though it's not your fault, it's still your problem. You are not obligated to have a strong opinion about everything. "A stupid man's report of what a clever man says is never accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something that he can understand." - Bertrand Russell "It's so confusing isn't it? So much going on, so much to say, and all of it happening so quickly. The pace of oppression outstrips our ability to understand it and that is the real trick of the imperial thought machine. It's easier to hide behind forty atrocities than a single incident." - Andor "I’ll never know and neither will you of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore." “Self-reflection is a vice best conducted in private or not at all” -Roebuck Wright "military wins battles — economies win wars" “It doesn’t take great men to do things, but it is doing things that make men great.” — Arnold Glasow "the most cost-effective way to change behavior is to make life unbearable under present behavior" Your company better be your best product since it’s the product you use to make everything else you do. — Jason Fried (@jasonfried) July 17, 2018 People often deploy the “perfect storm” metaphor incorrectly, using it to describe a surprise collision of events that catches its victims off guard. But that’s not how perfect storms really work: In Sebastian Junger’s book about a deadly Atlantic Ocean gale that popularized the term, the storm was a well-foreseen event, with serious warnings, that people saw coming and chose instead to ignore—until it was too late, and the waves overwhelmed them. “After a time, you may find that ‘having’ is not so pleasing a thing after all as ‘wanting.’ It is not logical, but it is often true.” - Spock "the seeds of Enlightenment ideas had a hard time finding purchase in the rocky soil of American xenophobia and anti-intellectualism" Don't have to agree with a man to respect him Things that aren’t your fault can still be your responsibility. "Not everything everywhere is for us" suffering is the price of admission 'How much does something have to look like us to be treated with respect?' "But what can I do, I am just one person" - said 7 billion people Incendiary locusts = embers Curiosity isn't random; it's a compass. "Curious people are often considered good listeners and conversationalists" "As beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table.” - Comte de Lautréamont “When someone is nasty, hateful, or mean toward you treat their behavior like an affliction or illness they have. That makes it easier to have empathy toward them which can soften the conflict.” "Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good." - Thomas Sowell “very high-IQ people often have limited awareness of exactly where their circle of competence ends” and “propensity to lie when it doesn’t understand something” You cannot fix government by breaking laws. Viruses mutate within human and animal bodies, each infection is like a pull of a slot machine lever We’re giving a patient with Stage 4 cancer an Advil and wondering why it doesn’t work. If you want a clear strategy for winning wars, don’t play a semantic game …. call things what they are. Forgiveness requires contrition “Chance favors the prepared mind” - Pasteur “To be Irish is to know that in the end the world will break your heart.” ― Daniel Patrick Moynihan ‘The Absence of Disaster Is Not a Major Achievement’ Nothing human is alien to me "I am human, I consider nothing human alien to me." Heauton Timorumenos (The Self-Tormentor) Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto. Publius Terentius Afer (195/185–159 BC) Buddhists say that to have a human form, is as rare as a sea urchin making its way onto shore and entering a tiny hole in a tree. That's how hard it is to get the human form, right? Most sentient beings are ants, are animals led to slaughter. They live horrible, difficult lives. But to have this form is so precious. "When Tao is lost, there is goodness. When goodness is lost, there is kindness. When kindness is lost, there is justice. When justice is lost, there is ritual. Now ritual is the husk of faith and loyalty, the beginning of confusion." - fourth sentence of Chapter 38 of the Tao Te Ching 90% of the software engineering being done today is integrating poorly documented API A with poorly documented API B. Relationships never die a natural death. They are always murdered by Attitude, Behavior, Ego, Hidden Benefits and Ignorance. – Anonymous "When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb." in In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer, USAEC Transcript of Hearing Before Personnel Security Board (1954) "looked out upon our ongoing national nightmare and perceived a marketing opportunity" “There are no absolutes in human misery and things can always get worse.” “instead of building his resume, seeking employment or further education projects his grievances on society and searches the Internet for an excuse or an explanation unrelated to his behavior or the choices he has made in life.” government is an "insurance company with an army" - The Holland Principle The former GAO chief noted that the Federal government has “too many departments” and “too many regions,” and said that many existing programs and practices “are based on the 1950s.” Bartending is basically project management with alcohol The world is a museum of other people’s passion projects. — John Collison The cause of death is birth. — David Hockney Self employment is a never-ending contest between the world’s worst manager and the world’s laziest employee. — Daniel Akst If you want new ideas, read old books. — Shane Parrish Some say that your favorite Zelda game is the one you played first "When people name cats, they usually do it in one of three categories: food, physical characteristics or mythology" 'described the ceremony as "a two-hour meat parade, a public display with contrived suspense for economic reasons." '... “Can you describe your philosophy in 25 words or less?” Avoiding Stupidity is Easier than Seeking Brilliance Reading a great book twice is more valuable than reading ten average books. Many people unintentionally choose to play on hard mode by not sleeping enough, not eating healthy food, or not investing in their most important relationships. Disasters shake us up. I’ve called them a crash course in Buddhism. You’re suddenly aware of ephemerality and interdependence, the fleetingness of all things, and the connection of all things. Retirement is still a relatively new concept. Retiring to a life of leisure is a concept that’s only been around in a big way since the post-WWII era Family. Friends. Work. Hobbies. Spirituality. This is the palette of colors you’ve been given to create the art of your life. These are all the layers that do exist, and that will ever exist. People don't like to be measured and monitored so intensely, especially when their work is knowledge-based. They aren't creating widgets. They're creating ideas. "Among the rich you will never find a really generous man even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away; they are egotistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it." - A Miscellany of Men (1912) - Gilbert Keith Chesterton “The poor have been rebels, but they have never become anarchists: they have got more interest than anyone in there being some decent government. The poor man has a stake in the country, the rich man hasn't; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.” - As quoted in Grace at the Table : Ending Hunger in God's World (1999) by David M. Beckmann abd Arthur R. Simon, p. 156 - Gilbert Keith Chesterton If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.” ― C.S. Lewis Zero introspection is not just a personal quirk or a supposed productivity hack. It’s a permission slip for zero accountability. "A person’s choice of a spouse—or if they aren’t married, their closest lifelong partner—is much more revealing than anything they say or do in public. This choice tells you about their own innermost longings, expectations, and needs. It tells you what they think of themselves, and what they think they deserve in life (or will settle for). It is, I believe, the clearest indicator of priorities and values you will ever find." Sharks eat well but live a life surrounded by sharks. Politics, academia, and social status are all zero-sum games. Positive-sum games create positive people. More dialogue, less monologue “Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life." “all hat, no cattle” Technology democratizes consumption but consolidates production An old boss once warned: “You’ll never be rich since you’re obviously smart, and someone will always offer you a job that’s just good enough.” Happiness is being satisfied with what you have. Success comes from dissatisfaction. Choose Knowledge is the best bullshit detector on earth. “The mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water.” The point of all technological progress is to reduce cost and labor; increased labor productivity were suppose to correlate to increase leisure time; however all the benefits of labor productivity from technological progress have been hoarded and have not been passed down to individuals; so when you have technological progress without social progress you only create advanced forms of oppression; and at some point that oppression and inequality turns into violence Gods provide inspiration not intervention Ours isn’t just a randomly hostile universe, it’s an actively hostile universe. Tempting to hide in small rooms built for quick answers Pain is inevitable. Suffering is a choice A computer can never be held accountable. Therefore a computer must never make a management decision. laws aren’t self-enforcing. They need someone with authority to order that the lawbreaking is going to stop. Which means that many of the biggest battles are likely to come down to the courts Deploy self-deprecating humor, our main weapon against the unpredictability of the Universe "Technological progress without social progress only creates advanced forms of oppression" "Technology isn't intrinsically good or evil; it's how it's used. Like the death ray." — Professor Farnsworth, Futurama, "That Darn Katz!" “Trust, the critical currency of a healthy society, is disintegrating.” Opioids are “an American problem" ... because... Americans rely on opioid pills not because opioids are more clinically effective but because insurance won’t pay for physical or occupational therapy. Other governments limit access to opioids. When that this body did contain a spirit, A kingdom for it was too small a bound; But now two paces of the vilest earth; Is room enough: this earth that bears thee dead; Bears not alive so stout a gentleman. – William Shakespeare Henry IV, Part 1, Act 5, Scene 4. More product, more process - What is the least we can do to get the job done in a way that is adequate to user needs?” listening is one of the last bridges we have toward understanding. Militarization of public discourse is a problem “The people who set the guillotines in motion ultimately have their necks under it, as they get into these endless battles about who’s more loyal, who’s more pure.” You’re almost unfathomably lucky to exist, in almost every conceivable way. spite “may be the last weapon of the downtrodden.” Silicon Valley’s Jared Dunn says in a moment of sad wisdom, “a name is just a sound that somebody makes when they need you.” Remind yourself that every situation is temporary. Bob Fosse said that most songs in musicals fall into two categories: the "I Want" Song and the "I Am" Song The key is not to feel burdened by your possessions. “Owning less means you are surrounding yourself with only your favourite things,” "when you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create." Theres a lid to every jar "Conflict has a purpose and the purpose is mutual understanding." Don’t punish people for trying. You teach them to not try with you. Punishing includes whining that it took them so long, that they did it badly, or that others have done it better. You have a plan. A time-traveller from 2030 appears and tells you your plan failed. Which part of your plan do you think is the one that fails? Fix that part. Cultivate a reputation for being dependable. Good reputations are valuable because they’re rare (easily destroyed and hard to rebuild). You don’t have to brew the most amazing coffee if your customers know the coffee will always be hot. Marcus thought that if people are doing wrong, what you need to do instead is to ‘teach them then, and show them without being angry.’ I’ll never know and neither will you of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore. - each person has a life and a “sister life” they’ll never know—the “ghost ship” - The Ghost Ship that Didn’t Carry Us Michael Marmot, who carried out a famous study of British civil servants in the 1980s. Marmot concluded that monotonous, boring, and soul-destroying work is the most stressful kind “Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new" - Ursula K. Le Guin One of the things we know about household purchasing power is that when you have disposable income in your hands, you’re going to move from a root- or grain-based diet and try to get animal protein. Consumers are torn between two opposing forces: neophilia, a curiosity about new things; and neophobia, a fear of anything too new. As a result, they gravitate to products that are bold, but instantly comprehensible. We can’t win the Senate by looking down at people Modern wars are won by grinding, not by genius. Losers of most major wars in modern history lost because they overestimated operational dexterity and failed to overcome the enemy’s strategic depth and capacity for endurance. Winners absorbed defeat after defeat yet kept fighting, overcoming initial surprise, terrible setbacks and the dash and daring of command ‘genius’. The government are very keen on amassing statistics. They collect them, add them, raise them to the n-th power, take the cube root and prepare wonderful diagrams. But you must never forget that every one of these figures comes in the first instance from the village watchman, who just puts down what he damn pleases. --Comment of an English judge on the subject of Indian statistics; Quoted in Sir Josiah Stamp in "Some Economic Matters in Modern Life" “A concentration camp is built like a stadium or a hotel: with contractors, estimates, bids, and no doubt a bribe or two.” - Night and Fog (1956) The crowd laughs with you always… but it will only cry with you for a day.” Disasters shake us up. I’ve called them a crash course in Buddhism. You’re suddenly aware of ephemerality and interdependence, the fleetingness of all things, and the connection of all things. “We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid.” - Benjamin Franklin I think balance is for people who don’t know why they’re here pockets, are the thinking person's mittens We’re all living on borrowed time but some people are more aware of their countdown clock than others. "You are not required to set yourself on fire to keep other people warm." —Unknown '"No animals were harmed in the making of this essay." That may seem like a trivial claim. It’s probably not even true, considering the habitat damage caused by emissions from the electricity plant whose engines power the computer I used to compile these ideas.' "The sun never sets on those who ride into it" - Shock Treatment Don’t just pay people compliments; give them living eulogies. “This country was founded on acts of vandalism and property destruction" "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe." Carl Sagan The theory of pizza cognition tells us that an individual’s first and primary source of pizza … will become the pizza against which all others are judged. We are what they grow beyond. That is the true burden of all masters. - Yoda / Last Jedi If you have run with footmen and they have tired you out, Then how can you compete with horses? If you fall down in a land of peace, How will you do in the thicket of the Jordan? - Jeremiah 12:5 "After the liminal space of the ritual of cinema, we walk out of the room discombobulated, sensitive to light and motion. We reaggregate ourselves after having become part of a different reality. We reflect upon what we saw and heard, in groups or in internal dialogue." “Human beings are immensely complicated creatures, living simultaneously in a half dozen different worlds. Each individual is unique and, in a number of respects, unlike all the other members of the species. None of our motives is unmixed, none of our actions can be traced back to a single source and, in any group we care to study, behavior patterns that are observably similar may be the result of many constellations of dissimilar causes.” Aldous Huxley on Making Sense of Ourselves and Each Other Superman does good, you do well Political will wilts like a pot plant in afternoon sun. Does she get frustrated? “I don’t get frustrated. If you work in this field, you have to have infinite patience . . . You have to help politicians realize their role.” Integrity is a choice. Kindness is a choice. Hard work is a choice. Preparation is a choice. Consistency is a choice. Your attitude is a choice. Your response is a choice. The people you hang around are a choice. Changing your trajectory is a choice. People’s taste in entertainment changes as they get older, just as people’s taste in food changes. It’s a physical change. Kids can’t taste sweetness as strongly as adults, but they taste bitterness more strongly. That’s why kids can enjoy super-sweet candy, while adults are like, “Yuck, it’s too sweet!” And adults can enjoy bitter coffee, while kids are like, “Yuck, it’s too bitter!” Nobody is right or wrong; people are just physically different. The same applies to entertainment. Kids feel emotion and conflict more strongly, so they don’t need as much of it as adults do. A little goes a long way. Kids need new things to discover: new characters, new color palettes, new songs, new enemies, new funny voices, etc. The more new and exciting stuff, the better. - Patrick McHale “When you work on something for a long time, you see all the mistakes that are in it.” —Nick Cross "I sought good judgment mostly by collecting instances of bad judgment, then pondering ways to avoid such outcomes." Is it true? Is it necessary? Is it kind? - The great Sufi poet, Rumi, believed that before we speak, our words should pass through three gates. “In America, there are two tax systems: one for the informed and one for the uninformed. Both are legal.” - Judge Learned Hand “If you have low morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about 25 cents of value. If you have high morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about $3 of value" - Brad Bird “Every person is a world to explore.” ― Thích Nhất Hạnh A foreign accent is a sign of bravery. — Amy Chua We don’t travel to move. We travel to be moved. — Pico Iyer The goal of life is living in agreement with nature." All actions carry biological consequences "You don’t win elections to bank political capital. You win elections to burn political capital and improve lives.” “Stop trying to be cool. Be nerdy and obsessive about the things you love. Enthusiasm will get you farther than indifference.” – James McCrae Facts are important, but facts don’t create learning. Stories do. A story fits into (and changes) our understanding of the world. Good teachers are storytellers, and storytellers are teachers. “You can reduce the annoyance of someone’s stupid belief by increasing your understanding of why they believe it.” “Every person you meet knows an amazing lot about something you know virtually nothing about. It won’t be obvious and your job is to discover what it is.” "The economy" means "money moving around". "A good economy" means "lots of money is moving around". That doesn't necessarily mean that any of it is moving to you. “90% of everything is crap” “trouble finding his way out of his own sentences, with new ones rising like uncertain phoenixes out of half-finished ones, and he made several unforced errors.” Forgiveness is not something we do for other; its a gift to ourselves Don't avoid conflict, fear, or anger – just know how to fight fairly and productively. “…a lawyer who specializes in trying to convince judges to give legal texts the same sort of malicious construction that ‘The Monkey’s Paw’ gives to wishes.” you can’t fight “the behavioral realities of power” Very few can eat or shelter under their ideals. a lot of poverty is structural. It has nothing to do with the virtues and vices of individuals. It’s already built into the system. Collecting things benefits you only if you display your collection prominently and share it in joy with others. The opposite of this is hoarding” “More people are defeated by blisters than by mountains” “The reason I say 45 is the turning point, or in your 40s, is because think about a career: Most careers start in early 20s and end in the mid-60s,” O’Leary says. “So, when you’re 45 years old, the game is more than half over, and you better be out of debt, because you’re going to use the rest of the innings in that game to accrue capital.” the answer to any question beginning "why don't they..." is usually "money." “How to apologize: quickly, specifically, sincerely. Don’t ruin an apology with an excuse.” "our economic system actively punishes people who do choose to have kids; our more and more individualistic societies make the upbringing more of a chore than it used to be. It takes a village, but the village is gone." “hire for aptitude and attitude and then train for skills" "Superheroes and saints never make art. Only imperfect beings can make art because art begins in what is broken." “Just because it’s not your fault doesn’t mean it’s not your responsibility." Just because you’ve been doing something for a long time doesn’t mean you’re an expert. "Rudeness is merely the expression of fear. People fear they won't get what they want. The most dreadful and unattractive person only needs to be loved, and they will open up like a flower" - Gustave in Grand Budapest 'If you have success, taste it and spit it out immediately. Because it's poison.'" —Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu Training AI requires the largest parasitical theft of intellectual property in history. The average person in the U.S. interacts with the USPS, IRS ,and TSA and not much else. Maybe SSA. All of those agencies have a reputation for making people mad. Ernest Hemingway said "Every man has two deaths, when he is buried in the ground, and the last time someone says his name. In some ways men can be immortal." “Other holidays repose upon the past; Arbor Day proposes for the future.” –J. Sterling Morton. "Politics is not about grand plans and ideologies...it’s a cynical ritual used by societies to keep on some kind of even keel, a ceremony of hypocrisy in which everyone is able to feel better about themselves by raising and then slaying the avatars of their hopes and fears. Politics, like life, drifts in and out of cycles—not in a forward sweep. Problems remain; histories consume; leaders rise and fall." “My father,” his daughter Alice remarked, “always wanted to be the corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding and the baby at every christening.” - about Teddy Roosevelt Never challenge worse, worse always wins “You’ll never see a U-Haul behind a hearse.” “In a country with no dogs, cats are forced to bark.” “No one is going to stand up at your funeral and say, ‘She had a really expensive couch and great shoes.'” “He who dies with the most toys, still dies.” Your passport is not your political beliefs. Your government is not your morality. "Life is a desire, not a meaning" - Charlie Chaplin in the movie Limelight “Caution is the path to mediocrity” by author Frank Herbert “Comparison is the thief of joy.” - Theodore Roosevelt You're only given a little spark of madness and if you lose that, you're nothing. -- Robin Williams, "A Night at the Roxy," 1978 I know very little about anything, but what I do know is that if you can live your life without an audience, you should do it. -- Bo Burnham, "Make Happy," 2016 Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist. -- George Carlin “when you don't create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create.” ― Why The Lucky Stiff passion is the result of action, not the cause of it "Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy," "You know what would make a good story? Something about a clown who makes people happy, but inside he's real sad. Also, he has severe diarrhea" - jack handy "The three minute rule: if it takes less than three minutes, do it and you will feel better. For example: making your bed, doing the dishes, etc. It makes you feel the tiniest bit better when you accomplish something small." There are two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors. - Jeff Atwood “The main value in software is not the code produced, but the knowledge accumulated by the people who produced it.” "The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now" -Chinese proverb The wise man can pick up a grain of sand and envision a whole universe. But the stupid man will just lay down on some seaweed and roll around until he’s completely draped in it. Then he’ll stand up and go, “Hey, I’m Vine Man.” "How can you trust a man who wears both a belt and suspenders, a man who can't even trust his pants?" https://youtu.be/mDUVoycDAgc?t=73 “if you kill a cockroach you are a hero, if you kill a butterfly, you are evil. morals have aesthetic criteria." Friedrich Nietzsche "When we hit our lowest point, we are open to the greatest change" - Avatar Aang, Legend of Korra "A fox who all his life sought, unsuccessfully, to be a hedgehog" Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance. - Sartre “If you are depressed, you are living in the past. If you are anxious you are living in the future.“ - Lao Tzu "The great object of life is sensation - to feel that we exist --- even though in pain" Lord Byron “Dude, suckin’ at something is the first step to being sorta good at something.” ― Jake the Dog, Adventure Time “The world will ask you who you are, and if you don't know, the world will tell you.” — Carl Jung Given that all "creative" thought is merely a matter of juxtaposing or combining previously existing information into different configurations (i.e., recycling "matter" into different forms of energy "when you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create" "What are memories but stories of time lost forever, fragments of a reality we will never experience again? And as one recalls these flights of fancy, we lose ourselves in the believing of false life, of our own creation, something we seem to remember but can’t rationally trust to be true." - Closing words of the Over The Garden Wall read-and-listen storybook https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wfj1teQk5io "You cannot change your destination overnight, but you can change your direction overnight." — Jim Rohn Under strong general there are no weak soldiers. To speak without thinking is to shoot without aiming. Ideas planted too soon, like seeds on winter ground – quickly die “I can never read all the books I want; be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.” – Sylvia Plath “A civilization flourishes when people plant trees under whose shade they will never sit.”– Greek Proverb "When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist." - Dom Hélder Câmara, Brazilian Catholic Archbishop “Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Heres Tom with the Weather.” -- Bill Hicks "If you are living for tomorrow, you will always be one day behind." - Bill Hicks “While money can’t buy happiness, it certainly lets you choose your own form of misery.” - Groucho Marx “The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy – & to deal with these we need a spiritual and cultural transformation” – Gus Speth “Debating an idiot is like trying to play chess with a pigeon — it knocks the pieces over, craps on the board, and flies back to its flock to claim victory.” Curiosity is the desire to fill gaps in knowledge Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are. — Chinese proverb If we could see the whole truth of any situation, our only response would be one of compassion.” — Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche Patience is not passive, on the contrary, it is concentrated strength. ― Bruce Lee “A comedian does funny things. A good comedian does things funny.”- Buster Keaton humor in the geometry - buster keaton tradition is just peer pressure from dead people “Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.” behind every criticism is a wish “We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones,” Stephen King There’s no such thing as an illegal strike. There are only strikes that are unsuccessful "And those people should not be listened to who keep saying the voice of the people is the voice of God, since the riotousness of the crowd is always close to insanity." - Alcuin Basquiat quote: “Art is how we decorate space; music is how we decorate time.” “There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.” ― George Orwell “If past history was all that is needed to play the game of money, the richest people would be librarians.” - Warren Buffet "I don't do drugs. I am drugs." - Salvador Dalí "courts are not engines of social change and do not meaningfully protect constitutional values, and that the Court has, throughout its many years, been regularly partisan and out of step with popular opinion" Guillermo del Toro quotes: "Lost films only stay lost if no one looks for them. Be curious. Be peculiar. What you watch is what you are." "Your taste in film is a quest. You have a palate and you must refine it to match your essence. Never settle and never follow blindly." "Film is a religious call. No one is right or wrong- During the very same mass some look at the clock while others find their Damascus road" "Wittgenstein said:'The limits of your language are the limits of your world'. The same is true of your visual language. Be curious. Want more" "Favorite movies don't have to be perfect movies. Like in any relationship, Love is what makes them stick around." "Great films- like diamonds- sometimes require mining. Some are hard work but their yield is precious. These films seldom get us at first viewing. But when repeated they become permanent loves." "If we don't defend what we love- if we let it fade- then our lives loose meaning. We must declare ourselves of what we are... What we love." “Be curious, not judgmental." – Walt Whitman/Ted Lasso “Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.” – Lao Tzu “A room without books is like a body without a soul.” ― Marcus Tullius Cicero Good music can act as a guide to good living.” — John Cage "Do not do great things" - "Do small things in a great way." “We are star stuff harvesting sunlight.” ― Carl Sagan “Always remember that to argue, and win, is to break down the reality of the person you are arguing against. It is painful to lose your reality, so be kind, even if you are right.” — Haruki Murakami Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.” — Anne Lamott An evil enemy, will burn his own nation to the ground .. to rule over the ashes - Sun Tzu all of us are the captives of environment and programming: That there is a wide range of experiment and experience that remains forever invisible to us, because it falls in a spectrum we simply cannot see. When the axe came into the Forest, the trees said "The handle is one of us" The forest was shrinking but the trees kept voting for the axe as its handle was made of wood and they thought it was one of them. “If we hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominoes should fall like a house of cards. Checkmate.” “The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning.” – Albert Camus “Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.” — Anne Lamott “Always remember that to argue, and win, is to break down the reality of the person you are arguing against. It is painful to lose your reality, so be kind, even if you are right.” — Haruki Murakami “Fortify yourself with a flock of friends! There is always at least one who will understand, inspire, and give you the lift you may need at the time.” – George M. Adams To get people to build a boat you don’t need to get them to weave canvas, forge nails, or read the sky. You need to give them a shared yearning for the sea. — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry “clarity comes from engagement, not thought." “Puritanism: the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, might be happy.” —H.L. Mencken “If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.” – John Quincy Adams “When we accept that ‘meaning’ isn’t an inherent thing, we can examine it as a concept we create, and hence have the ability to control.” “The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.” “How we spend our time is how we spend our days. How we spend our days is how our life goes. How our life goes determines whether we thought it was worth living.” — Keith Yamashita "It's not what you are, it's what you don't become that hurts." “The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, hitehich is life... and hold it fixed so that 100 years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again.” Our own life has to be our message.” – Thich Nhat Hanh "Open your mouth only if what you are going to say is more beautiful than silence" ~ Arabic Proverb. “Nothing can make our life, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness.” – Leo Tolstoy "Life is not something you get; it’s something you experience.” “You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can choose not to be reduced by them.” ~Maya Angelou The nice thing about being a bureaucrat is you never have to take the blame. It's always someone else's fault. “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” — Charles Darwin “Culture fit is really a way that power reproduces and sustains itself in an organization and silences any dissent.” Books are written almost a year before they come out. Tweets take about 24 seconds to launch. Slingerland has some reasonable guidance: Drink only in public, with other people, over a meal—or at least, he says, “under the watchful eye of your local pub’s barkeep.” There are three stages in scientific discovery. First, people deny that it is true, then they deny that it is important; finally they credit the wrong person. Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won’t come in. — Alan Alda Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot. - Buster Keaton Silence is of the gods; only monkeys chatter. - Buster Keaton A comedian does funny things. A good comedian does things funny. - Buster Keaton All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone," wrote the French philosopher Blaise Pascal. "Man produces evil as a bee produces honey." - William Golding “Sports are the reward of a functioning society.” “Never allow anyone to be humiliated in your presence.” – Elie Wiesel “Santa Claus has the right idea. Visit people once a year.” -Victor Borge “You can tell a lot about a person by the way they handle three things: a rainy day, lost luggage and tangled Christmas tree lights.” -Maya Angelou “The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.” – Elisabeth Kübler Ross “Desiring less is even more valuable than owning less.” Does it comfort you to know you fought the good fight? “Kindness multiplies and it enables possiblity. When we’re of service to people, we have the chance to make things better.” "bureaucracy is the not the nature of the public sector, bureaucracy is the nature of complexity" “A candle loses NOTHING by lighting another candle.” — James Keller A Crisis Doesn’t Change People; It Amplifies Who They Already Are Adversity seems to bring out not necessarily the worst in people, but the essence of people. —Jim Bob Fosse said there were only three types of show songs from a director's point of view: "I Am" songs – a song that explains a character/situation, "I Want" songs – desire and motivations, and New songs – A song that doesn't fit the other categories. When Groucho Marx was dying, he let out one last quip: “This is no way to live!” "It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to." – Jean-Luc Godard "eventually, all our graves go unattended" "If you know that what you’re experiencing now is more important than how you’ll be remembered when you’re gone, then you can adjust your career to pursue the activities you find personally fulfilling." "Great love, acts of kindness, exciting experiences, and personal sacrifices for the wellbeing of others contain the best of human existence. They hold intrinsic value, regardless of whether they are remembered." "People focus on role models; it is more effective to find antimodels — people you don't want to resemble when you grow up." — @nntaleb "Know your circle of competence, and stick within it. The size of that circle is not very important; knowing its boundaries, however, is vital."[4] People Are Like The Weather: Hard to Predict and Outside of Your Control “I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.” ~Albert Einstein “Remember that not getting what you want Is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.” ~Dalai Lama Now might be a good time to remind everyone that the easiest way to discriminate is to make stringent rules, then to decide when and for whom to enforce them. -Nicolas Le Roux The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. - Marcel Proust “The purpose of listening across lines of difference is not agreement or compromise. It is understanding.” — Valarie Kaur ‘I have learned that to be with those I like is enough.’ - Walt Whitman "Life is a game with many rules but no referee. One learns how to play it more by watching it than by consulting any book, including the Holy Book. Small wonder, then, that so many play dirty, that so few win, that so many lose." - Joseph Brodsky “Of all the parts of your body, be most vigilant over your index finger, for it is blame-thirsty. A pointed finger is a victim’s logo.” - Joseph Brodsky “A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.” - William James “We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.” –Joseph Campbell As Richard Feynman, the Nobel prize-winning physicist, once wrote, "If you ever hear yourself saying, 'I think I understand this,' that means you don't." Marcel Proust once said, isn’t new vistas but new eyes. And those eyes don't even have to be yours Statistics are like a bikini. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital. --Aaron Levenstein When evaluating a model, at least two broad standards are relevant. One is whether the model is consistent with the data. The other is whether the model is consistent with the 'real world.' --Kenneth A. Bollen, Structural Equations with Latent Variables ."..while a man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will do, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to. Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant. So says the statistician." ---Sherlock Holmes “You can tell a lot about a country by what it chooses to memorialize,” “When you are kind to others, it not only changes you, it changes the world” - Harold Kushner "We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children." — inspired by environmental activist Wendell Berry “It is the fate of glass to break.” https://french.stackexchange.com/questions/24854/it-is-the-fate-of-glass-to-break I don’t play songs, I play albums. And Harvest Moon is one hell of an album.” “There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.” — Marshall McLuhan “Without friends, no one would want to live, even if they had all other worldly things.” -Aristotle “We live, as we dream—alone” – Joseph Conrad respect science, respect nature, respect others For Khawaja, “the idea of personal authenticity [is] at the center of existential thought” (2016: 24), while for Webber, the existentialism of Sartre, Beauvoir, and Franz Fanon begins with “eudaimonist arguments for the virtue of authenticity” and finally affirms “a categorial moral imperative of authenticity” (2018: 19). “Nothing happens *to* you. It happens *through* you.” — Ben Ichinose He has a right to criticise, who has a heart to help.” – Abraham Lincoln “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.” - Mel Brooks When you abandon freedom to achieve security, you lose both and deserve neither. - Thomas Jefferson “The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.” - Charles Bukowski “Toxic positivity is the assumption, either by one’s self or others, that despite a person’s emotional pain or difficult situation, they should only have a positive mindset or—my pet peeve term—‘positive vibes.’” “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”— Mark Twain 'A riot is the language of the unheard.' —Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Socrates said: “ I know one thing: that I know nothing.” Most people in life are only visitors. “He is no hero who never met the dragon” - Jung “The scars you share become lighthouses for other people who are headed to the same rocks you hit.” — Jon Acuff “Criticizing others is easier than coming to know yourself.” —Bruce Lee “A budget is a moral statement,” “The resistance to the unpleasant situation is the root of suffering.”— Ram Dass no greater power than being exempt from the rules that govern everyone else “It comes down to a question of who gets this money and resources and why do they deserve it?” “How much time do you want—for your progress?” "Beware of little expenses. A small leak will sink a great ship." – Ben Franklin “To define is to kill. To suggest is to create.” ― Stéphane Mallarmé "To be oppressed means to be deprived of your ability to choose." "Behold! The field in which I grow my fucks. Lay thine eyes upon it and thou shalt see that it is barren." "This state of being envied is what constitutes glamour, and publicity is the process of manufacturing glamour" are you solution oriented about it or in the feelings stage are you in the right headspace to recieved information that could possibly hurt you “It’s only when the tide goes out,” Warren Buffett likes to say, “that you learn who’s been swimming naked.” science demands a tolerance for ambiguity and requires of us to live with the Humility of our ignorance - neil degrass tyson, cosmos It was not idealism that drove him, or big ideas, he said. It was this: Warto być przyzwoitym—“Just try to be decent.” “Wisdom is knowing I am nothing, Love is knowing I am everything, and between the two my life moves.” ― Nisargadatta Maharaj “The world belongs to the energetic” - Ralph Waldo Emerson “The supreme quality for a leader is unquestionably integrity. Without it no real success is possible.” - Dwight Eisenhower “Life is to be in relations" - Lao-Tse “leadership is a matter of intelligence, trustworthiness, humaneness, courage and discipline" - Sun Tsu, Art of War "Every battle is won or lost before it’s ever fought.” – Sun Tzu “Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.” - Voltaire “You only lose what you cling to.” - Buddha “We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more from imagination than from reality.” — Seneca "Dying is easy—comedy is hard." - Edmund Gwenn "One thing I think you should know/I ain't gonna miss you when you go." - Fleetwood Mac “If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more.” - Jane Austen "Impermanence is a blessing in disguise. And non-attachment is the only way to truly forgive and love another person." “Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new”; - Ursula K. Le Guin “I hope you find the kind of love that makes you a softer person. The kind of love that makes you want to be a better man or woman, the kind of love that believes in you and supports you, that stands by your side. I hope you find someone who quickly becomes your favourite thing — someone who makes the fall less fearful, someone you can’t help but choose every single day. I hope you find someone who shows you just how deeply you can feel, just how deeply you can love. I hope you find something real, because nothing is more beautiful than loving someone who loves you back. Nothing is more beautiful than loving someone who builds you a home in their heart.” — Bianca Sparacino "Be so wrong that they have to verify you." "impose a reductionist view that makes it difficult to see programming systems in their full complexity and, consequently, force researchers to adopt simplistic perspectives." “The greatest shortcoming of the human race,” the physicist Albert Bartlett once said, “is our inability to understand the exponential function.” “Life is best thought of as service.” — W.R. Lethaby "It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice. There are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia. Eventually within the next quarter of a century, the nostalgia cycles will be so close together that people will not be able to take a step without being nostalgic for the one they just took. At that point, everything stops. Death by Nostalgia." - Frank Zappa "Perverts are important because they make normal people look good" - Frank Zappa "People will agree with you only if they already agree with you. You don't go around changing people's minds." - Frank Zappa "Talking about music is like fishing about architecture." - Frank Zappa “Living things tend to change unrecognizably as they grow. Who would deduce the dragonfly from the larva, the iris from the bud, the lawyer from the infant? Flora or fauna, we are all shapeshifters and magical reinventors. Life is really a plural noun, a caravan of selves.” — Diane Ackerman "Tell someone you love them today, because life is short. But shout it at them in German, because life is also terrifying and confusing " "if you rest you rust" "Keep a bad drawing until by study you have found out why it is bad." - Robert Henri "There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life." - Frank Zappa All pizzas are personal if you try hard enough "The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced. " - Frank Zappa "Most rock journalism is people who can't write, interviewing people who can't talk, for people who can't read." - Frank Zappa "If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library. " - Frank Zappa "many of his ideological commitments just indigestible" "art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead." - W. H. Auden "white man is good at production but bad at distribution.” - Sitting Bull (apocryphal) “The struggle of man against power, is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” - Milan Kundera “Happiness is a butterfly, which, when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you" - Nathaniel Hawthorne “In the rush to return to normal, use this time to consider which parts of normal are worth rushing back to.” – Dave Hollis “a drug that doesn’t get us high anymore.” A bird feeder for humans Sontag: “There is no talented and rigorous asceticism that… doesn’t produce a gain (rather than a loss) in the capacity for pleasure.” “‘The way of me making change is to be as judgmental as possible about other people‘ — that’s not activism. That’s not bringing about change. If all you’re doing is casting stones, you’re probably not going to get that far.” - obama The fallout of innovation is left for the next generation to endure Ugliness is a pathway to intimacy. You can't have intimacy without trust, and you can't have trust without vulnerability. “The best way to get approval is to not need it.” “Every day is a new deal. Keep working and maybe something will turn up.” - Harvey Pekar "The helper seeks to help because he knows what it is to be helpless." - Wander “Absorb what is useful, discard what is useless and add what is specifically your own” - Bruce Lee "Every book is a children’s book If a child can read" “You become financially free when your passive income exceeds your expenses.” — T. Harv Eker Nobody cares how you learned the trick, but you’re a wizard if you perform it in front of them. “Always remember that to argue, and win, is to break down the reality of the person you are arguing against. It is painful to lose your reality, so be kind, even if you are right.” - Haruki Murakami “Advice? I don’t have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you’re writing, you’re a writer. Write like you’re a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there’s no chance for a pardon. Write like you’re clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, and you’ve got just one last thing to say, like you’re a bird flying over us and you can see everything, and please, for God’s sake, tell us something that will save us from ourselves. Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we’re not alone. Write like you have a message from the king. Or don’t. Who knows, maybe you’re one of the lucky ones who doesn’t have to.” — Alan Watts “The struggle of man against power, is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” - Milan Kundera Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.” -Søren Kierkegaard “We become what we think about all day long” -Ralph Waldo Emerson “The less effort, the faster and more powerful you will be.” -Bruce Lee “Nothing is impossible, the word itself says, “I’m possible!” -Audrey Hepburn “The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.” –William James There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life. - Frank Zappa The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced. Frank Zappa Most rock journalism is people who can't write, interviewing people who can't talk, for people who can't read. - Frank Zappa If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library. Frank Zappa It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice. There are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia. - Frank Zappa “Three hundred years from now where will you be and where shall I be?" - Thich Nhat Hanh "Death is only the end if you assume the story is about you" - Nightvale "God will not have his work made manifest by cowards" - Ralph Waldo Emerson "it is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness; that is life." - Captain Picard to Lt Commander Data, Star Trek Next Generation "Ships don't sink because of the water around them, ships sink because of the water that gets in them. Don't let what's happening around you get inside you, and weigh you down." - Unknown “Religion is for people who fear hell, spirituality is for people who have been there.” - David Bowie " The best teacher are those who show you where to look, but don't tell you what to see." Alexandra K.Trenfor “I don’t have fuck-you money, I’ve got strongly-worded-email money.” ‘Art is never finished, only abandoned’ - Leonardo da Vinci “I did not come to play with you hoes,” she says with an ominous laugh. “I came to slay, bitch. Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world - albert einstiein The purpose of a political party is to acquire power. Alright? Without power, nothing matters. one in five adults is unable to pay the current month’s bills in full one in three households is classified as “financially fragile.” When I was a Republican, I used to count on the Democrats being, in the words of the GOP consultant Rick Wilson, “holistically bad at politics.” “Don't talk unless you can improve the silence.” ― Jorge Luis Borges “Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.” ― Jorge Luis Borges Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. -Jorge Luis Borges “You are under no obligation to be the same person you were five minutes ago.” —Alan Watts “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” - Aristotle "...would be like saying your mirror ruined your prom night" “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t–you’re right.” - Henry Ford “Isn't it funny that day by day nothing changes, but when you look back, everything is different.” ― probably C.S. Lewis "You cannot strengthen one by weakening another; and you cannot add to the stature of a dwarf by cutting off the leg of a giant" - Benjamin Franklin Fairless "a life story, a set of tastes, a bundle of hopes and fears, some talents and lacunas, a certain degree of wittiness, some other degree of absent-mindedness and on and on" - douglas hof. "Between every two pine trees there is a door leading to a new way of life." -- John Muir. “Some people will try to sink the whole ship just because they can’t be the captain” “The present is theirs; the future, for which I really worked, is mine.” - tesla "Wherever books burn, human beings will also burn." – Heinrich Heine “nothing is ours, except time.” - Seneca "Understanding is a three edged sword: your side, their side, and the truth." ― J. Michael Straczynski “An entire sea of water can’t sink a ship unless it gets inside the ship. Similarly, the negativity of the world can’t put you down unless you allow it to get inside you.” – Goi Nasu It has come full circle and opioids have become the ‘opium of the people.’ The only things I owe people are straightforwardness and kindness. "the cure for anything is saltwater - sweat, tears, or the sea" "A belief is only a thought I keep thinking." society creates drugs users ours sorrows have echos in others I want to thank all of the enemies that I had to destroy to achieve this great honor. Every book is a children’s book If a child can read “You become financially free when your passive income exceeds your expenses.” — T. Harv Eker “trouble finding his way out of his own sentences, with new ones rising like uncertain phoenixes out of half-finished ones, and he made several unforced errors.” “The best way to find out if you can trust someone is to trust them.” — Ernest Hemingway “thin simplifications” of complex systems Abraham Lincoln once said, “Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the first four sharpening the ax.” The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity. — Dorothy Parker You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body. — C.S. Lewis I decided to spend my time trying to create the things we need as opposed to preventing what threatens us. — Bill Joy "There are no second acts in American lives." - F. Scott Fitzgerald “When something goes wrong, look deep into yourself — not in an emotional way, to blame yourself or indulge your feelings of guilt, but to make sure that you start your next campaign with a firmer step and greater vision.” “In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy’s country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good.” - Sun Tzu “What does not move is dead.” - Robert Greene People complain not because something sucks. People complain because they’re looking for empathy and to feel connected with those around them. The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. “There are souls in this world who have the gift of finding joy everywhere, and leaving it behind them when they go.” — Frederick William Faber “People who are brutally honest generally enjoy the brutality more than the honesty." - Richard Needham “There are souls in this world who have the gift of finding joy everywhere, and leaving it behind them when they go.” — Frederick William Faber “The majority is always wrong. The minority is rarely right.” — Henrik Ibsen “Most geniuses—especially those who lead others—prosper not by deconstructing intricate complexities but by exploiting unrecognized simplicities.” — Andy Benoit “Laughter is the sound of comprehension.” — Tom Stoppard Channel your frustration into motivation. “Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it.” ― Bertolt Brecht “It is when you deal with someone who does not perform in a ‘professional’ manner that you learn to appreciate those who do.” - Heclo writes in “On Thinking Institutionally" "Love is a friendship set to music." - Joseph Campbell "Help Is Other People" "If you want to see what a society really believes in, look at what the biggest buildings on the horizon are dedicated to." -Joseph Campbell “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” - Winston Churchill “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,” - John Muir “What can be studied is always a relationship or an infinite regress of relationships. Never a ‘thing.’ ” -- Gregory Bateson “Sound is when you mow your lawn, noise is when your neighbor mows their lawn, and music is when your neighbor mows your lawn,” says Arjun Shankar, an acoustic consultant. "The historical unity of the ruling class is realized in the state." “The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person who is doing it.” - Chinese Proverb “Be afraid of the calmest person in the room.” — Bruce Lee Technology is too important to be left to technologists “The public wants to understand and learn in a single day, a single minute, what the artist has spent years learning.” – Paul Gauguin “There is someone that I love even though I don’t approve of what he does. There is someone I accept though some of his thoughts and actions revolt me. There is someone I forgive though he hurts the people I love the most. That person is …… me.” – C. S. Lewis “Courage does not always roar. Sometimes it is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, I will try again tomorrow.” – Mary Anne Radmacher “I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything that I don’t know the other side’s argument better than they do.” - Charlie Munger “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” — Alvin Toffler "Only losers look stuff up while the rest of us are carpin all those diems." - Summer Smith “80 or 90 important models will carry about 90% of the freight in making you a worldly‑wise person.” - Charlie Munger “A lot of people don’t do well simply because they major in minor things.” - Jim Rohn “most people are caught in the thick of thin things” “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” "No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.” “It’s a moral issue, and not a political one." “Staff trashing each other just looks like you can’t manage your own staff.” “What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.” – Dwight Eisenhower “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” - Mike Tyson “I can’t begin to tell you the things I discovered while I was looking for something else.” - Shelby Foote "Happiness is synthetic—you either create it, or you don’t. Happiness that lasts is earned through your habits. Supremely happy people have honed habits that maintain their happiness day in, day out." "we carry all of our fears in our luggage" "It's a pandemic of over-communication that's led to an absence of intimacy." "Never ruin an apology with an excuse." —Benjamin Franklin. "No amount of evidence will ever persuade an idiot." -- Mark Twain "You are not required to set yourself on fire to keep other people warm." —Unknown “What does not move is dead.” - Robert Greene “In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy’s country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good.” - Sun Tzu The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity. — Dorothy Parker You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body. — C.S. Lewis I decided to spend my time trying to create the things we need as opposed to preventing what threatens us. — Bill Joy “Never wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.” - George Bernard Shaw “Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.” Marcus Aurelius "I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious." -Albert Einstein. Figures don’t lie, but liars figure.” " An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke." - F. Scott Fitzgerald “tyranny of the urgent” “Never explain — your friends do not need it, and your enemies will not believe you anyway.” –Elbert Hubbard “If you are lonely when you're alone, you are in bad company.” Jean-Paul Sartre “What is life but an unpleasant interruption to a peaceful nonexistence.” Jean-Paul Sartre “Only the guy who isn't rowing has time to rock the boat.” Jean-Paul Sartre "The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence." — Jiddu Krishnamurti, Indian Philosopher “I have forgotten the books I have read, and so I have the dinners I have eaten; but they both helped to make me.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson “The ultimate purpose of life, mind, and human striving: to deploy energy and information to fight back the tide of entropy and carve out refuges of beneficial order.” - Steven Pinker the Intimate silliness of being a human being "Real leadership is about producing other leaders" Leaders tend to get isolated, become surrounded by sycophants and succumb easily to the human tendency to self-rationalize "Always communicate in a way that you would like them to mirror." "Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes". - Dijkstra knife-fight innovation children playing in a funeral home botanically active Economical with the truth Watching what people do as opposed to what they say is important. Talk is cheap and often false. Action is real. “The origins were very progressive, but what might have been progressive in one era can become inequitable in another,” ”This story has no heroes, just more and less complicated villains” ”The woke world is a world of snitches, informants, rats.” “Choose your love; love your choice.” You don’t marry to make yourself happy, you marry to make someone else happy. "Diversity is being asked to the party; inclusion is being asked to dance; justice is letting someone else throw a party" https://slides.com/tatianamac/how-privilege-defines-performance#/ "Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?" - TS Eliot – The Rock "We can either have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both." — Louis D. Brandeis (1856-1941), U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Louisville, KY “The best way to sabotage a process is by wholeheartedly participating in it,” “A person’s success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have.” — Tim Ferriss “You cannot overestimate the unimportance of practically everything.” — Greg McKeown “If you have more than three priorities, then you don’t have any.” — Jim Collins “‘civility’ is an excuse used to silence the marginalized and their defenders. ”We are dangerous when we are not conscious of our responsibility for how we behave, think, and feel,”―Marshall B. Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication Roman philosopher Seneca once said, “There is no great genius without a tincture of madness.” “Maps don’t just show the world — they change the world,” says the geographer Mark Graham. “They affect how we interact with the world and understand the world. In doing so, they shape the world itself.” “The distance that an annual reflection gives provides helpful perspective" Accidents are never the result of one thing or one person. They lie at the end of a long chain of events. By asking someone for their opinion–whether it’s about work or what they’d like for dinner–you imply that you care about it, and create an expectation that you’ll do something based on what they have to say. Albert Hirschman in 1970 in a book titled Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, which reasons that workers can do one of two things when faced with an unsatisfactory employment situation: exit the relationship (quit), or voice their concerns and try to work through their problems. "Humans have an incredible ability to imagine things that aren’t real" "Are any of us capable of doing good work without longing to be recognized or rewarded for it?" "I would define power as the ability to make other people do what you want; freedom is the ability to do what you want. Like gravity and acceleration, these are two forces that appear to be different but are in fact one. Freedom is the defensive, or pre-emptive, form of power: the power that’s necessary to resist all the power the world attempts to exert over us from day one" People regularly vote against their own interests, are ignorant of the issues, and even when they are well-informed, they are easily swayed by group identities and emotion. "Dumpster, dumpster, burning bright / Data back-ups not alright?" Andrea celebrates this, saying “unhappy is the land that breeds no hero.” Galileo corrects him: “Unhappy is the land that needs a hero.” One of the reasons Machiavelli advised against using mercenaries is that it’s a no-win situation: Either they’re not competent, or if they are, they’ll substitute their own judgment and goals for their leader’s. "These aren’t simple jerks or someone having a bad day; these are folks with deep-seated problems. Serious interpersonal dysfunction. Lack of social awareness. And, perhaps most notably, an inability to change." “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” — John Muir "On the scale from 1 to Nessie, I'd rate it as Yeti" A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.” - Franz Kafka ”I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.” - Franz Kafka "Is four a lot? Depends on the context. Four Dollars? No. Four murders? Yes." "The miserable have no other medicine but only hope." “How gracefully you let go of things not meant for you.” — Buddha "You can’t fix a problem you don’t really understand" “People want to be recognized. It reminds them they exist. Never take that away from anyone.” "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." - H.P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu" "blur the lines between actually believing in Nazism and laughing about it" Meredith Broussard calls “technochauvinism”—the idea that a little technology can solve anything. There are four boxes to be used in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury and ammo. Please use in that order "There are three and only three ways to reform our Congressional legislation, familiarly called, the ballot box, the jury box and the cartridge box" "The asphalt should set speed limits" "What the cinnamon toast fuck is this?" Dante Douglas writes for Paste, “without critiquing the world that they situate themselves in, can be read as an endorsement of the horrors that would build such a world.” "There will always be someone who can't see your worth; don't let it be you" "What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water. Only There is shadow under this red rock, (Come in under the shadow of this red rock), And I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust." --T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land "Holy crow" "Hotter than a two dollar pistol" “Life is about the management of energy, where you place your attention, is where you place your energy.” — Dr. Joe Dispenz very small stage in a vast cosmic arena become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe ”The price of greatness is responsibility” Winston Churchill ”How strange it is to be anything at all” - Neutral Milk Hotel Conversation about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative - Oscar Wilde people who blame others for their mistakes learn less, lose respect, and rarely achieve their potential ”Blame is the water in which many dreams and relationships drown” - Steve Maraboli ”Most conversations are simply monologues delivered with a witness” - Margaret Miller “Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.” ― Jean-Paul Sartre An odd moment in the afternoon. “Most people overestimate what they can do in a day, but underestimate what they can do in a year.” “There’s a quote I remember—I don’t remember who says it, but it’s like, ‘the unexamined opinion has no value,’” Heins said. (He may have been thinking of Socrates.) “If you’re just saying it because that’s what you’ve been told to say, then you’re a parrot.” there is no synonym for cinnamon “If everything is a priority, then nothing is a priority.” “Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.” –Winston Churchill going to be issues when living gods can mingle with fragile newborns. “One who persists is a person of purpose.” - Tao "Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes". "know the words but not the music" “There are truths to be discovered,” in the words of the political scientist Harry Clor, “but truths complex and many-sided.” John Buchan, who in his autobiography, Pilgrim’s Way, wrote, “While I believed in party government and in party loyalty, I never attained to the happy partisan zeal of many of my friends, being painfully aware of my own and my party’s defects, and uneasily conscious of the merits of my opponent.” Finley Peter Dunne, “You trust your mother, but you still cut the cards.” “Addictions embody repetition without progress. They produce incapacity as a payoff.”  — Steven Pressfield “In a fight between a bear and an alligator, it is the terrain which determines who wins.” – Jim Barksdale “This idea that unless you are suffering, grinding, working every hour of every day, you’re not working hard enough … this is one of the most toxic, dangerous things in tech right now,” - hustle porn “The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality for the team.” - Max Depree "Comfort is a beautiful garden but nothing grows there" “All great things must first wear terrifying and monstrous masks in order to inscribe themselves on the hearts of humanity.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche “Government cannot trim fat. It can only hack off limbs.” “Life punishes the vague wish and rewards the specific ask.” “Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence wins championships.” - michael jordan “Sometimes we go back and repeat an old mistake just so that we can remember why we moved forward.” – Yung Pueblo “If you’re going to have an argument with someone, the best way to do it is to assume they can teach you something.” – Celeste Headlee Anyone can interpret the world, but if you feel that the point is to change it, then you have to grapple with it as it really is. "Chasing happiness is an amateur move" Criticism is part of the price of being human. Human yearning is a game of choices and sacrifices and compromise. ‘The rent we pay on earth is our service to others.’ “Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.” ; "pain is physical, suffering is mental" “Gratitude is about lifting other people,” “anger. is often grief that has been silent for too long.” — Nayyirah Waheed “Time is what we want most, but what we use worst.”—William Penn “The root of suffering is attachment.” ~The Buddha Criticism is part of the price of being human. Human yearning is a game of choices and sacrifices and compromise. "Like dying stars, star employees slowly lose their fire for their jobs" “Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject.”—Thomas Mann "The rent we pay on earth is our service to others." "Money is a tool that helps us live the life we want" "Only 2 ways to get rich: Make more, or desire less" "Money is something you trade your life energy for. Think about it. You work to earn money." The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do; essence of execution is not doing “Policymakers don’t read the scientific literature,” warned Lipton, “but they do read the clickbait that goes around.” "the ability to throw around big words and to wow non-technical people with complex-seeming things signifies neither intelligence nor skill. Whereas the ability to take the real-world technical problems one has worked on in a professional capacity and explain them in terms so simple a five-year-old could grasp them, that can mostly only be done by someone who is very smart and has a great understanding of their subject matter" Trust is about “character” and “competence” time spent sharpening your axe is never wasted avoid thin simplifications of complex systems "Like a plane crash, poverty is rarely caused by one thing going wrong. Usually, it is a series of misfortunes—a job loss, then a car accident, then an eviction—that interact and compound." “If you were a type of sandwich what sort of sandwich would you be and why?” "Good listeners are like good editors" “this letter is long only because I had not the leisure to write a shorter one.” - pascal "Unfortunately there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is." “Man is the highest product of his own history. The discoverer finds nothing so grand or tall as himself, nothing so valuable to him. The greatest star is at the small end of the telescope, the star that is looking, not looked after nor looked at.” "Compassion is almost an objective form of empathy, where you have enough space between your feelings and the other person’s feelings when you’re in a position to help them, and ultimately alleviate their suffering if that’s what’s required." - Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn "many Americans reflexively distrust anyone who demonstrates expertise or excellence in analytical intelligence" "Disorder, sludge, idiocy, randomness, and inertia will win out" “Silence guarantees nothing will change” — Alan Eustace Success is when I add value to myself. Significance is when I add value to others” — John Maxwell “The land shall belong to the sea or to those coming from the sea” "People drank the kool-aid mostly because it was green and made of paper" They always say it’s the hope that kills you Like Iceland in the game of Risk, X Won’t Go Down so easily "You cannot strengthen one by weakening another; and you cannot add to the stature of a dwarf by cutting off the leg of a giant" “Either we all live in a decent world, or nobody does.” ― George Orwell Crab mentality or crabs in a bucket "Weed is a lazy word"; it just implies everything you don’t know "he so far has been the anti Teddy Roosevelt by speaking loudly but carrying a small stick" "The secret of managing is keeping the people who hate you away from the ones who haven’t made up their minds." - Casey Stengel "not so much genuine concern for social justice as the preening display of cultural superiority" "Blockchain Is a Semantic Wasteland" “Your relationship with yourself sets the tone for every other relationship you have.” "All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness." - Tennessee Williams "All of us are guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress." - Tennessee Williams "We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call; no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it." - Tennessee Williams "Mendacity is a system that we live in. Liquor is one way out and death's the other." Tennessee Williams "In a democracy, it is difficult to win fellow citizens over to your own side, or to build public support to remedy injustices that remain all too real, when you fundamentally misunderstand how they see the world." As a biographer said of a period of Ernest Hemingway’s unbelief, “he missed the ghostly comforts of institutionalized religion as a man who is cold and wet misses the consolations of good whiskey.” John F. Kennedy once said that “the time to fix the roof is when the sun is shining.” “We learn nothing because we remember nothing,” - gore vidal “Success isn’t owned. It is leased, and rent is due everyday.” – J.J. Watt you can’t fire your way to excellence "One of the greatest gifts you can give anybody is the gift of your honest self. I also believe that kids can spot a phony a mile away." - Mr Rogers “If you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.” ― Toni Morrison qui tacet consentire videtur "he who is silent is taken to agree" "One always dies too soon or too late." - Jean-Paul Sartre I thinkr it was [philosopher Arthur] Schopenhauer who said the first 40 years provide the text and the next 30 provide the commentary “busy is what happens when you’re at the mercy of someone else’s schedule.” Someone who “sucks up and shits down” “The arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” “Don’t waste any time in mourning. Organize.” - Joe Hill "NYC is so fucking competitive. You can't even be depressed anymore without someone trying to one up you by being even more depressed." “Science has become something of an honorific term, and all sorts of disciplines that are quite unlike physics or chemistry are eager to call themselves ‘sciences‘. A good rule of thumb to keep in mind is that anything that calls itself a science probably isn’t.” –see [1,2] Gore Vidal once remarked, “Half of the U.S. population reads a newspaper. Half of the U.S. population votes. Let’s hope it is the same half.”is "if you can live your life without an audience, you should do it" - Bo Burnham "The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you're worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered..." - Terence McKenna "I think the saddest people always try their hardest to make people happy because they know what it’s like to feel absolutely worthless and they don’t want anyone else to feel like that." - Robin Williams “Less a person than a collection of terrible traits” It's essentially the PHP of government systems. Dominant, but broken. Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" “We are constantly trying to hold it all together. If you really want to see why you do things, then don’t do them and see what happens.” ― Michael A. Singer "Marry and with luck it may go well. But when a marriage fails those who marry live at home in hell.           —Euripides, 408 B.C." "All the suffering in the world comes from wanting happiness for one’s self. All the happiness in the world comes from wanting happiness for others." – Shantideva “We do not “come into” this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean “waves,” the universe “peoples.”” – Alan Watts "I just want you to enjoy a point of view that I enjoy." - alan watts Camus said there is only really one serious philosophical question, which is whether or not to commit suicide. I have never seen anyone die for the ontological argument. "Oceans rise, empires fall, and technology is reinvented over and over again." “Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.” – Alan Watts "nothing recedes like progress" - E. E. Cummings "Progress is a Comfortable Disease" -- E. E. Cummings "great men burn bridges before they come to them" - E. E. Cummings "an intelligent person fights for lost causes, realizing that others are merely effects" - E. E. Cummings "Yours is the light by which my spirit's born: - you are my sun, my moon, and all my stars." - E. E. Cummings "The three saddest things are the ill wanting to be well, the poor wanting to be rich, and the constant traveler saying 'anywhere but here'" - E. E. Cummings “We must consult our means rather than our wishes.” —George Washington Becoming poor is not an event. It is a process. At its core, listening is really just taking time instead to experience what we’re hearing in the moment. “Immigrants are the perfect scapegoat for all manner of angst, both economic and cultural, and very easy fertile ground for the populists" “The point of earth magic is to allow yourself to be entertained by pretending that it's real. Just. Like. Love"-Marco Marco: "Leave her alone, man, she going through some stuff!" Jorby: "We all are! Everyone is in a constant state of falling apart!!" "Existential war cry!" "there is only one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide" - Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus. "Statisticians can not tell you 'what you want to know', they can only tell you how to ask a question" "To consult the statistician after an experiment is finished is often merely to ask him to conduct a post mortem examination. He can perhaps say what the experiment died of." - Ronald Fisher "Being a statistician means never having to say you are certain." "I'm against picketing, but I don't know how to show it." —Mitch Hedberg "An escalator cannot break. It can only become stairs" —Mitch Hedberg I don't belong to an organized political party. I'm a Democrat." —Will Rogers I've had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn't it." —Groucho Marx "Quotes are for dumb people who can't think of something intelligent to say on their own."- Bo Burnham "Your real life is hard enough to maintain, let alone some weird, curated version of yourself." - Bo Burnham "You deserve better than a shout-out from your idol."- Bo Burnham As They Say in the Stagecoach Business: Remove the padding from the seats and you get a bumpy ride. “What you think is a function of the ideas you consume.” – Faris "every pirate wants to be an admiral" "practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty" "no law can ever protect you as effectively as a good technical implementation." "Most of you are familiar with the virtues of a programmer. There are three, of course: laziness, impatience, and hubris." - Larry Wall Every time you change the software there is a risk that bugs are introduced All beginnings are hard. Starting is easy, persistence is an art, setting the mood of the episode. “Share your knowledge. It is a way to achieve immortality.” - His Holiness the Dalai Lama "some temporary solutions are more temporary than others" Ochs took on the identity of John Butler Train. He told people that Train had murdered Ochs, and that he, John Butler Train, had replaced him. Train was convinced that someone was trying to kill him, so he carried a weapon at all times: a hammer, a knife, or a lead pipe. Analytics Theatre - Creating dramatic swings in numbers for the sake of drama, but not because they help us make our products or services better. coined ~ Kate Rutter Until you have backups, you don’t have a database. What you have is a prolonged period of optimism. — Laurie Voss “Avoid drama. Walk away in silence from anything that doesn’t improve your life. Calmness amongst chaos is a sign of emotional maturity.” – Vex King “Progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and reimagined if it is to survive.” – Zadie Smith “Immigrants are the perfect scapegoat for all manner of angst, both economic and cultural, and very easy fertile ground for the populists" “If you can change one thing about yourself then please be kinder and change how you end things because it matters way more than how you begin them.”– Sartaj Anand "Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself." - Leo Tolstoy Creativity is shaped by constraints “Information: the negative reciprocal value of probability.” — Claude Shannon “Short memory is a privilege of the oppressor.” - Magicians "If you even dream of beating me you'd better wake up and apologize." - Muhammad Ali, "Jerky is just a term non-jerks use to bad mouth innocent jerks" - Stan Pines "Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance." - Jean-Paul Sartre "Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them." - Jean-Paul Sartre "I hate victims who respect their executioners." - Jean-Paul Sartre Proposal: rename 'staging' to 'theory'. "It works in theory, not on production." —Najaf Ali “We are all just stories” "Ethics is knowing the difference between what you have a right to do and what is right to do." - Potter Stewart “We must all either wear out or rust out, every one of us. My choice is to wear out.” —Theodore Roosevelt “Never interrupt an enemy making a mistake.” - Napoleon “A long dispute means that both parties are wrong.” - Voltaire “The best revenge is not to be like that.” —Marcus Aurelius “If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.” —Nicholas Nassim Taleb “This is not your responsibility but it is your problem.” —Cheryl Strayed “Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are.” —Jose Ortega y Gasset “You are only entitled to the action, never to its fruits.” —Bhagavad Gita In life, it’s a fact that: You will be unappreciated. You will be sabotaged. You will experience surprising failures. Your expectations will not be met. You will lose. You will fail. “The world was not big enough for Alexander the Great, but a coffin was.” —Juvenal we are all equals in death "Get there first with the most" - American General "salavage defeat from the jaws of victory" "snatch defeat from the jaws of victory" Boy Scout Rule, that one should always leave the campground cleaner than one found it. Phil Karlton - “There are only two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation and naming things.” “Friendship - Somebody to talk to, someone to depend on, and someone to enjoy.” "I will take every perceived slight or offense and put it through my mental shredder before I go to sleep each night" In Mastery by Robert Greene, I read that Leonardo’s motto was ostinato rigore, which translates as “stubborn rigor” or “tenacious application.” “The intelligent investor is a realist who sells to optimists and buys from pessimists.” “The hillbilly is a mountaineer without mountains, and the gullies of erosion in his spirit and soul are as evident as are the gaping wounds in the hills around him. The visible parallel of simultaneous destruction of hill and human being is shattering.” - Stinking Creek, John Fetterman, E.P. Dutton and Co. Inc., 1967. “Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson “Great civilizations are not murdered. They commit suicide.” These words are credited to the famed historian Arnold Toynbee, who wrote about the rise and fall of 26 civilizations. You can never learn less, you can only learn more. R. Buckminster Fuller “Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” ~Carl Jung There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly. R. Buckminster Fuller "Any improvement that is not made at the bottleneck is superfluous.” "Here's a cheap, easy way to let someone know you care: Don't look at your phone when you're with them." ~Karen Salmansohn "A’s hire A’s. B’s hire C’s." — Steve Jobs “Integrity is the essence of everything successful.” – R. Buckminster Fuller “They tried to bury us, but they didn’t know that we were seeds.” – Mexican Proverb “You probably can’t fix these things” and that the best you can do is “put your thumb on the scale a little for the people at the margins.” “Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin.” “When your system gets large enough, most critical failures are caused by your failsafes”. “Lasting change is a series of compromises. And compromise is all right, as long as your values don't change." - Jane Goodall, British primatologist (1934–) “I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it." - Pablo Picasso “A metric is just a surrogate for what you really want to know.” “There is no shortage of ideas. There is a shortage of commitment to making them happen.” “Management is 5 percent instruction and 95 percent communication.” “Tsundoku” is the condition of acquiring reading materials but letting them pile up in one’s home without reading them. “Research is addictive, because it rewards us with the false impression of making progress. Finding something interesting isn’t the same as knowing something and being able to work with it." "Tech Won't Fix What Is Broken Inside Of You" "Norwegians are like coconuts. Americans are like peaches." "If you want to seek truth, you must at least at one point in your life doubt all things, as far as possible."" —RENE DESCARTES "A picture is worth a thousand words. An interface is worth a thousand pictures." - Ben Shneiderman "The purpose of visualization is insight, not pictures" - Ben Shneiderman "Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand." - Ben Shneiderman's Visual Information-Seeking Mantra "You can't use your learning ears if you are using your talking mouth" - Kill them All "Tools tend to force premature convergence on a process, and then make it ridiculously inconvenient to change that process." https://hackernoon.com/trello-jira-sucks-and-tool-dysfunction-e80c8000a431 "concentrate on the high-order bits" "A wise man can see more from the bottom of a well than a fool can from a mountaintop." "occasional failures are the inevitable byproduct of a successful strategy. If you always win, then you’re probably doing something wrong." “If you try too hard to reduce the probability of a negative outcome, your positive outcomes will be of smaller magnitude — and your expected outcome can actually be worse.” “People will use all kinds of coping mechanisms, and cutting their hair and changing their look is one way to show or feel that they are doing something over which they have control.” “I don’t think we can pass a law that fixes stupid.” "The touchstones of an organization's workplace culture include its treatment of employees, the credibility of its leaders, selection criteria for hiring and promotional decisions, and the nexus between its mission statement and employee performance." “Purposes are deduced from behavior, not from rhetoric or stated goals.” ― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer “I assume every man who wears a bow tie day-to-day is into a kind of sex I’ve never even heard of.” - Josh Gondelman “The palest ink is better than the best memory.” - Chinese Proverb “Can you repeat the part of the stuff where you said all about the things?” - Homer Simpson "Creativity is the combination of ideas across disciplines and thought patterns" "If a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves. . . . There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding." —Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance "when you hear hoofbeats, think horses not zebras" "Don’t compare your insides to other people’s outsides." "All Great Choices Come Down To What Variety Of Suffering We'd Prefer." "We Reserve A Special Place In Our Hearts For Those Who Can't See The Point Of Us." "To Think Well Of Oneself: A Privilege Reserved For Those Who Have Not Begun To Understand Themselves." "Progress Through Life Is A Constant Process Of Replacing One Anxiety With Another." "There are no mistakes, only opportunities." “We’re the author of our stories,” she said, “and we can change how we’re telling them. Your life isn’t just a list of events.” “There's always choices. There is no framework available in which there's not harm somehow. You have to pay the piper somewhere." "Any idiot can face a crisis. It is this day-to-day living that wears us out" "Cynics are just idealists with incredibly high standards" "Don’t let today’s disappointments cast a shadow on tomorrow’s dreams" "You are the product owner of your life" "I can't afford to hate people. I don't have that kind of time. " - ikiru “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” — Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting Hope is not an emotion: It’s a cognitive process—a thought process made up of what researcher C. R. Snyder called the trilogy of “goals, pathways, and agency.” “If you want to build a ship, dont drum up the people to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast endless sea.” – Antoine De Saint-Exupery “Minimalism is not the lack of something. It is simply the perfect amount of something.” — Najahyia Chinchilla "I am the sea and nobody owns me" ― Pippi Longstocking "In a battle of bureaucracy, the victor will be the the one who can leverage the existing arcane bureaucracy most effectively." "Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules." - Alinsky's fourth rule “Nobody exists on purpose, nobody belongs anywhere, everybody’s gonna die” "expecting poorer people not to buy luxuries is class warfare" “You have to think about the generation of data as a strategic imperative.” “You cannot judge the quality of the analytics if you don’t have a very clear idea of where the data came from.” "life is a cigarette, smoke it in a hurry or savour it" "Many people don't try to date the people they're most attracted to. They try to date the people they think would impress their friends." "Every time I think America has hit bottom, it finds a shovel." "The future is certain; it is the past that is unpredictable." "The secret of managing is keeping the people who hate you away from the ones who haven’t made up their minds." —CASEY STENGEL "The courtroom is a crucible. In it we burn away irrelevancies until we are left with a pure product, the truth. For all time." - Captain Picard “A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.” - Greek Proverb "Culture eats strategy for breakfast." - Peter Drucker "No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another." - Charles Dickens “If someone can steal your peace, you are the loser.” - Bikram Choudhury “Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don’t.” – Bill Nye "Mistakes are the portals of discovery." —James Joyce "Cupcakes are muffins that believe in miracles" A thank-you note is a love letter, not a delivery confirmation receipt "He who pays the piper calls the tune." "Who takes the king's shilling sings the king's song." Fuck Know-it-alls - “I try to get rid of people who always confidently answer questions about which they don’t have any real knowledge.” “There's always choices. There is no framework available in which there's not harm somehow. You have to pay the piper somewhere." Mann blasted Republicans for "going after scientists simply because you don't like their publications of their research—not because the science is bad, but because you find the research inconvenient to the special interests who fund your campaigns." He added, "I would hope we could all agree that is completely inappropriate." “There are two motives for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.”— Bertrand Russell “Just because it didn’t find an audience, that doesn’t mean it’s bad work.” "No technology is 100 percent secure for every user, and there are always trade-offs among security, usability, and other considerations." "Sometimes if you wanna see the light at the end of tunnel, you have to build the fucking tunnel."" "Government lawyers don’t understand the Internet. That’s a problem." "You will regret whatever you choose" - Søren Kierkegaard “The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.” ~Ursula K. Le Guin “In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.” -Mortimer J. Adler, in How to Read a Book “unemployment is an endless misery that has got to be constantly palliated.” - Orwell “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” – George Bernard Shaw “The more you know about the past, the better prepared you are for the future.” - Theodore Roosevelt "Mistakes are the portals of discovery" – James Joyce Without data you’re just another person with an opinion. —William Edwards Deming “Loneliness does not come from being alone, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important.” – Carl Jung “If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you.” - George Bernard Shaw “Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.” ― George Bernard Shaw “Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast.” That quote is credited to the father of modern management, Peter Drucker. “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.” - Lewis Carroll, Adapted from Alice in Wonderland “Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day whispering, ‘I will try again tomorrow.’” — Mary Anne Radmacher "Trolling was always about the distance between people who care and people who don’t. The people who cared always lost." “I guess I have as much in common with a gay or lesbian person as I have with anybody whose civil rights are under attack and up for debate, ” Gavin Grimm said “I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything that I don't know the other side's argument better than they do.” — Charlie Munger “You’re not entitled to take a view, unless and until you can argue better against that view than the smartest guy who holds that opposite view. If you can argue better than the smartest person who holds the opposite view, that is when you are entitled to hold a certain view.” — Charlie Munger "Creativity is a combinatorial force — it rests on our ability to fuse, usually unconsciously, existing concepts, memories, bits of information, pieces of knowledge, and fragmentary impression into novel ideas that we call our own." - Maria Popova "Every day brings a choice: to practice stress or to practice peace." ~Joan Borysenko "It's okay to not be ok all the time" Francis Bacon once remarked “some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.” Thought is action in rehearsal ~Sigmund Freud “Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.” ― Alan W. Watts "Don’t panic over bullshit." “Knowing what you don’t know is more useful than being brilliant.” -Charlie Munger “Acknowledging what you don’t know is the dawning of wisdom.” -Charlie Munger "Avoiding stupidity is easier than seeking brilliance." -Charlie Munger “People are trying to be smart—all I am trying to do is not to be idiotic, but it’s harder than most people think.” -Charlie Munger “Mimicking the herd, invites regression to the mean.” -Charlie Munger Seneca said “Time discovers truth.” "The less connected you are, the less you have to lose, which makes it far easier to say shocking or hurtful things." ‘Kindly let me help you or you’ll drown.’ said the monkey, while putting the fish safely up a tree. ~ Alan Watts "The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right." - Learned Hand "Words are not pebbles in alien juxtaposition." - Learned Hand “Those who are not aware they are walking in darkness will never seek the light.” ~ Bruce Lee "Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." -- Martin Luther King Jr. “Activism is my rent for living on the planet.” ― Alice Walker "you only are what you believe" - phil ochs "To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life." —W. Somerset Maugham Not to mention, many developers aren’t exactly a fan of MongoDB (which has the reputation of being the “Snapchat of Databases”) "I do not enlighten those who are not eager to learn, nor arouse those who are not anxious to give an explanation themselves. If I have presented one corner of the square and they cannot come back to me with the other three, I should not go over the points again." - Confucius "Pain is weakness leaving the body." If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea. – Antoine de Saint-Exupery “The electric light did not come from the continuous improvement of candles.” - Oren Harari “Tyranny does not begin with violence; it begins with the first gesture of collaboration. Its most enduring crime is drawing decent men and women into its siege of truth.” – Evan Osnos, When Tyranny Takes Hold "If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights." "Data is only as valuable as the decisions it enables" “Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.” - Sartre “Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it.” - mark twain “my 80 percent friend is not my 20 percent enemy,” - Ronald Reagan "a hack is a clever or unexpectedly efficient means of getting something done. A good hack should feel like cheating because the value created by the hack feels completely disproportionate from the work done" - On hacks "What appears on the news is not 'The conscientious person’s portfolio of concerns'. What appears is whatever sells, and what sells is fear, and contempt for other groups of people. Curate your own portfolio." - On news “warmth is the conduit of influence.” "we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and what a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization." ‘I shall meet with meddling, ungrateful, violent, treacherous, envious, and unsociable people’ "You are forever responsible for what you have become attached to" "Doctrines have the tendency to harden into dogmas, and dogmatism has the tendency to create folks with “man with a hammer syndrome” – it causes people to keep trying to apply that same old mental model even if it’s no longer applicable to the changing environment" “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” - John Muir “Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet.” - General James Mattis’s advice to Marines "Life is too short to build something nobody wants." - Ash Maurya And I have a philosophy that I live by. Everybody that works with me knows this; it’s on the wall: “If stupid enters the room, you have a morales duty to shoot it, no matter who’s escorting it.” —what Andrus, Beautiful Teams (Chapter 6)Ruth “Separate emotion from outcome” “A problem that is never articulated is unlikely to be solved” --- Excerpt From: Karen Dillon. “HBR Guide to Office Politics.” “To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.” – Winston Churchill “No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft.” – HG Wells “LEADERS SHOULD LEAD AS FAR AS THEY CAN AND THEN VANISH. THEIR ASHES SHOULD NOT CHOKE THE FIRE THEY HAVE LIT.” -- H. G. WELLS “HUMAN HISTORY BECOMES MORE AND MORE A RACE BETWEEN EDUCATION AND CATASTROPHE.” - - H. G. WELLS “I don't like that man. I must get to know him better.” ― Abraham Lincoln “The beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms.” ― Socrates “Unless both sides win, no agreement can be permanent.” – Jimmy Carter “In every difficult situation is potential value. Believe this, then begin looking for it.” – Norman Vincent Peale “No man ever listened himself out of a job.” – Calvin Coolidge "speaking of animals, would you like to see the rat's ass that I give? And I thought, oh, that's my problem. I inform people against their will."" Episode 326, Act II https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/326/transcript "Illegitimi non carborundum" "beneficial when people who share the same vocabulary to discuss their work and make each other better" "If we can really understand the problem, the answer will come out of it, because the answer is not separate from the problem." ― Jiddu Krishnamurti "Worse, authority for the enforcement of the Act was re-extended to the Office of Management and Budget, despite its glaring lack of success and history of incompetence."" "If I were given one hour to save the planet, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute resolving it." You can discover more about a person from an hour of play than in a year of conversation - Plato While IT and many organizations are in the midst of an unprecedented explosion in data-gathering, a new study finds that only 15 percent of all stored data contains business-critical information. The remaining 85 percent is either dark, meaning its value is unknown, redundant, obsolete or trivial. The reason, according to the study: The data hoarding culture and an indifferent attitude to retention policy. "Understanding and acknowledging that a data hoarding culture exists is a first step in addressing the problem," said Ben Gibson, CMO o - See more at: http://www.cioinsight.com/it-strategy/storage/slideshows/does-data-collection-waste-time-and-resources.html#sthash.MBsWzZAF.dpuf The translation of political goals into the means of achieving them through interacting with the world entails policy design (Howlett, 2004 & 2009), sometimes called “statecraft” (Anderson, 1977). "Think of putting a cat in a box of packing peanuts." https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/titan-saturn-solar-system-sand “policies and government services are largely the result of political compromise” (Fountain, 2001 p62). This all leads to the conclusion that the assumption implicit but pervasive in much discussion of e-government, digital government, and ICT-enabled public sector innovation — that public bodies are like autonomous service businesses and their managers have the power to change what they do and how they do it in order to meet the needs of their clients — is false (Linder and Peters, 1989b; Fountain, 2001). "they wallow in a seemingly impenetrable terminological fog" “The image that concerns most people is the reflection they see in other people’s minds.” – Edward de Bono "The only inexcusable offense in a commanding officer is to be surprised" - General Matthew Ridgway “Many mickles make a muckle.” - George Washington’s favorite sayings was the Scottish adage “I have no sympathy with anyone, whatever his station, who will not brook criticism. We are here to get the best possible results.” - Dwight D. Eisenhower "no ego, only results" “System in all things is the soul of business.” - George Washington "just Randy Johnsons that fucker right out of the sky." “There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy.” - Alfred Henry Lewis, 1906 "If lightning is the anger of the gods, they care mostly about trees" “Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.” - Voltaire “The term ‘criminal justice system’ is a misnomer; criminal justice is, at best, a set of systems, and at worst it is a swirling mess of somewhat antagonistic agencies.” “Life punishes the vague wish and rewards the specific ask.” “Worrying is like paying a debt you don’t owe” - Mark Twain When a statisticians hear, "Successful people start their day at 4 a.m.", they think: 1. Waking early makes you successful? 2. Something about success makes it hard to sleep at night? 3. Success is lethal; Only early risers survive? 4. You did your survey at 4am. IF YOU AREN'T POLITICAL YOUR PERSONAL LIFE SHOULD BE EXEMPLARY Jenny Holzer: Truisms https://mfx.dasburo.com/art/truisms.html https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~field/holzer/truisms.txt Trust me: There is no “them”. Hatred is a curse that does not affect the hated. It only poisons the hater. Release a grudge as if it was a poison. Before you are old, attend as many funerals as you can bear, and listen. Nobody talks about the departed’s achievements. The only thing people will remember is what kind of person you were while you were achieving. You are what you do. Not what you say, not what you believe, not how you vote, but what you spend your time on. How to apologize: Quickly, specifically, sincerely. When someone is nasty, rude, hateful, or mean with you, pretend they have a disease. That makes it easier to have empathy toward them which can soften the conflict. You really don’t want to be famous. Read the biography of any famous person. "Portis hates humanity but loves humans. He indicts the world but treats his characters gently, a reminder that even the most gullible, the dumbest, and the most opportunistic are people simply seeking answers. " "motherfucker with the meticulousness of Miles Davis. Swamp Dogg is one of those deities. Who else could write a line like “Friendship is like acid, it burns as it slides away?” “pornography incarnates male supremacy. It is the DNA of male dominance.” - Andrea Dworkin “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?” "Religion shouldn't be a license to allow for complete freedom of choice irrespective to consequences to others" While burnout is never solely your responsibility to fix, mindfulness can help us navigate the individual and systemic solutions. "Problem of labeling"..."genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity"..."but in any event, what does it matter for those people. What we call it. They're dead. They've been massacred in appalling circumstances. Where it's a war crime, a crime against humanity, or genocide. I'm less interested in. It's wrong. It should not happened and it needs ot be punished." “People who labor all their lives but have no purpose to direct every thought and impulse toward are wasting their time—even when hard at work.” - Marcus Aurelius "The Problem with Early Warnings - People don't like to leave a party unless the house is actually on fire. Even then, if the flames are far enough away to be pretty, they'll finish their drink, take one more pass at the hors d'oeuvres. How things happen has always been unclear. Hurricanes begin in a place where no one lives. Agents of the government start to wear masks. Fascism is a word my neighbors won't use yet. They are following the law, they say, and the sirens are coming for someone else." - CHARLES RAFFERTY "Down to Gehenna or up to the Throne, He travels the fastest who travels alone."" “...being an editor of a political magazine, you're able to be in politics without really being in politics. It's like being the vice president.” - Kennedy Jr., Editor-in-Chief, George Magazine "There is no real direction here, neither lines of power nor cooperation. Decisions are never really made – at best they manage to emerge, from a chaos of peeves, whims, hallucinations and all around assholery." - Thomas Pynchon. "The practices that carry the greatest potential for transformative change are usually counter-instinctual." Amateurs think they are good at everything. Professionals understand their circles of competence. My two cent opinion accrues no compound interest "The wrong people always have money." "Ninety percent of everything is crap." - Sturgeon’s law “Strong opinions, loosely held. -- extreme opinions, with low conviction. "Intent isn't magic." Remember, every time you do ketamine a horse goes into surgery awake "I love movies. All I need is movies. I don't need anything else or anyone else." - Aubrey Plaza