Fortune Quote #1155

Personally, I don't often talk about social good because when I hear other
people talk about social good, that's when I reach for my revolver.
-- Eric Raymond

Fortune Quote #1154

Eric Raymond: I want to live in a world where software doesn't suck.
Richard Stallman: Any software that isn't free sucks. Linus Torvalds: I'm
interested in free beer. Richard Stallman: That's okay, as long as I don't
have to drink it. I don't like beer. --
LinuxWorld Expo panel, 4 March 1999

Fortune Quote #1153

Mere nonexistence is a feeble excuse for declaring a thing unseeable. You
*can* see dragons. You just have to look in the right direction.
-- John Hasler

Fortune Quote #1152

"Bruce McKinney, author of of Hardcore Visual Basic, has announced that
he's fed up with VB and won't be writing a 3rd edition of his book. The
best quote is at the end: 'I don't need a language designed by a focus
group'."

Fortune Quote #1151

"I wonder if this is the first constitution in the history of mankind
where you have to calculate a square root to determine if a motion
passes. :-)" -- Seen on Slashdot

Fortune Quote #1150

In mathematics one must beware of the "red herring principle" according to
which a "red herring" need be neither red, nor a herring.

Fortune Quote #1149

In mathematics it happens quite often that a green apple is not an apple,
and it could be not green: it's a green-apple. -- Igor Belegradek
(on manifolds with boundaries)

Fortune Quote #1148

The creation of a word or a notation for a class of ideas may be, and
often is, a scientific fact of very great importance, because it means
connecting these ideas together in our subsequent thought. --
Hadamard

Fortune Quote #1147

"The real art of conversation is not only to say the right thing at the
right time, but also to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting
moment."

Fortune Quote #1146

"If logic prevailed, men would ride sidesaddle."

Fortune Quote #1145

"Once you open a can of worms, the only way to recan them is to use a
larger can."

Fortune Quote #1144

"People who love sausage and respect the law should never watch either one
being made."

Fortune Quote #1143

"A miracle is not the suspension of natural law, but the operation of a
higher law."

Fortune Quote #1142

Word would leak out like... like electrons quantum-tunneling through any
potential barrier I can raise. -- Poul Anderson, "Harvest of Stars"

Fortune Quote #1141

In each case the middle identity follows from the inductive hypothesis.
Proofs like these we call "one-line proofs" even when the "line" is too
long for our page. -- John H. Conway

Fortune Quote #1140

Short words are best, and old words, when short, are best of all.
-- Winston Churchill

Fortune Quote #1139

Science is built up with facts, as a house is with stones. But a
collection of facts is no more science than a heap of stones is a
house. -- J. H. Poincare

Fortune Quote #1138

If a man can group his ideas, then he is a writer. -- Robert Louis
Stevenson

Fortune Quote #1137

But in science the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to
the man to whom the idea first occurs. -- Sir Francis Darwin

Fortune Quote #1136

It is true that the mathematician who is not somewhat of a poet, will
never be a perfect mathematician. -- Karl Theodor Weierstrass

Fortune Quote #1135

We do not listen with best regard to the verses of a man who is only a
poet, nor to his problems if he is only an algebraist; but if a man is at
once acquainted with the geometric foundation of things and with their
festal splendor, his poetry is exact and his arithmetic musical. --
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Fortune Quote #1134

The good Christian should beware of mathematicians and all those who make
empty prophecies. The danger already exists that the mathematicians have
made a covenant with the Devil to darken the spirit and to confine man in
the bonds of Hell. -- St. Augustine

Fortune Quote #1133

No more fiction for us: we calculate; but that we may calculate, we had to
make fiction first. -- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Fortune Quote #1132

We admit, in geometry, not only infinite magnitudes, that is to say,
magnitudes greater than any assignable magnitude, but infinite magnitudes
infinitely greater, the one than other. This astonishes our dimension of
brains, which is only about 6 inches long, 5 broad and 6 inches in depth in
the largest heads. -- Voltaire

Fortune Quote #1131

There is no smallest among the small and no largest among the large; but
always something still smaller and something still larger. --
Anaxagoras

Fortune Quote #1130

The advancement and perfection of mathematics are intimately connected
with the prosperity of the State. -- Napoleon

Fortune Quote #1129

One cannot escape the feeling that these mathematical formulae have an
independent existence and an intelligence of their own, that they are wiser
than we are, wiser even than their discoverers, that we get more out of
them than was originally put into them. -- Heinrich Hertz

Fortune Quote #1128

It is the embarrassment of metaphysics that it is able to accomplish so
little with the many things that mathematics offers her. --
Immanuel Kant

Fortune Quote #1127

Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate
into their own language and forthwith it is something entirely
different. -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Fortune Quote #1126

...the Symboles serve only to make men go faster about, as greater Winde
to a Winde-mill. -- Thomas Hobbes