Avoid people with no sense of humour. They have bad heads, bad hearts, or both.
To set sail somewhere is more important than life itself.
Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.
The intellectual content of an activity is inversely proportional to the number of people watching it.
It is never too late to be what you might have been.
If I had my life to live over, I’d dare to make more mistakes next time. I’d relax. I would limber up. I would be sillier than I’ve been this trip. I would take fewer things seriously. I would take more chances. I would take more trips, climb more mountains, and swim more rivers. I would eat more ice cream and less beans. I would have more actual troubles but fewer imaginary ones.
You see, I’m one of those people who live sensibly and sanely hour after hour, day after day. Oh, I’ve had my moments and, if I had it to do over again, I’d have more of them. In fact, I’d try to have nothing else. Just moments, one after the other, instead of living so many years ahead of each day.
I’ve been one of those persons who never goes anywhere without a thermometer, a hot water bottle, a raincoat and a parachute. If I had it to do over again, I would travel lighter than I have.
If I had my life to live over, I would start barefoot earlier in the spring and stay that way later in the fall. I would go to more dances. I would ride more merry-go-rounds. I would pick more daisies.
Make everything as simple as possible ... but no simpler.
The cheapest, fastest, and most reliable components of a computer system are those that aren’t there.
GOOD
FAST
CHEAP
... pick any two
Have you ever thought ... about whatever man builds, that all of man’s industrial efforts, all his calculations and computations, all the nights spent over working draughts and blueprints, invariably culminate in the production of a thing whose sole and guiding principle is the ultimate principle of simplicity?
In any thing at all, perfection is finally attained, not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away.
The best book on programming for the layman is "Alice in Wonderland", but that’s because it’s the best book on anything for the layman.
Why, of course, the people don’t want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece?
Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship.
[Gilbert: "There is one difference. In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars."]
Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.
There are only three things in life that matter: binding up the wounds, to avoid wounding, and to improve the view from the window.
The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.
A perfectly healthy sentence is extremely rare.
Writers take words seriously—perhaps the last professional class that does—and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader.
No one who has once taken the language under his care can ever again be really happy.
There is only one basic plot: things aren’t what they seem.
The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries, but between authoritarians and libertarians.
"Science" is hard to define, but if the word appears in the name, it probably isn’t.
Science deals in disprovable assertions. If something can not, in theory at least, be disproved by experiment and/or observation, then it is not in the domain of science.
Corollary: nothing can be proven in science, only supported or suggested. However, every good scientific theory suggests situations that would be impossible if the theory were valid, and hence provides a means to disprove itself.
Science is what we have learned about how not to fool ourselves.
To make God laugh, tell him your plans.
Down the Yangtze the awful prediction has been fulfilled. You expect this river trip to be an experience of the past — and it is. But it is also a glimpse of the future. In a hundred years or so, under a cold uncolonized moon, what we call the civilized world will all look like China, muddy and senile and old-fangled: no trees, no birds, and shortages of fuel and metal and meat; but plenty of pushcarts, cobblestones, ditch-diggers, and wooden inventions. Nine hundred million farmers splashing through puddles and the rest of the population growing weak and blind working the crashing looms in black factories.
Forget rocket-ships, super-technology, moving sidewalks and all the rubbishy hope in science fiction. No one will ever go to Mars and live. A religion has evolved from the belief that we have a future in outer space; but it is a half-baked religion — it is a little like Mormonism or the Cargo Cult. Our future is this mildly poisoned earth and its smoky air. We are in for hunger and hard work, the highest stage of poverty — no starvation, but crudeness everywhere, clumsy art, simple language, bad books, brutal laws, plain vegetables, and clothes of one colour. It will be damp and dull, like this. It will be monochrome and crowded — how could it be different? There will be no star wars or galactic empires and no more money to waste on the loony nationalism in space programmes. Our grandchildren will probably live in a version of China. On the dark brown banks of the Yangtze the future has already arrived.
God doesn’t know the difference between physics and chemistry.
On The Dunes
If there is any life when death is over,
These tawny beaches will know much of me,
I shall come back, as constant and as changeful
As the unchanging, many-colored sea.
If life was small, if it has made me scornful,
Forgive me; I shall straighten like a flame
In the great calm of death, and if you want me
Stand on the sea-ward dunes and call my name.
Eppur si muove. [translation: It moves all the same.]
I am too skeptical to believe in the impossibility of anything.
They copied all they could follow,
But they couldn’t copy my mind,
And I left them sweating and stealing,
A year and a half behind.
Houses are but badly built boats so firmly aground that you cannot think of moving them. They are definitely inferior things, belonging to the vegetable, not the animal world, rooted and stationary, incapable of transition. The desire to build a house is the tired wish of a man content thenceforward with a single anchorage. The desire to build a boat is the desire of youth, unwilling yet to accept the idea of a final resting place.
Everybody needs money; that’s why they call it “money”.
The Interpreter
We only see,
From pictures in the mind,
And they are always,
Interpretations.
Interpretations,
From a biased interpreter.
Computers are useless. They only give answers.
Entropy requires no maintenance.
I cannot conceive of a god who rewards and punishes his creatures or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves. Neither can I — nor would I want to — conceive of an individual that survives his physical death. Let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egotism, cherish such thoughts. I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and a glimpse of the marvelous structure of the existing world, together with the devoted striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the Reason that manifests itself in nature.
The factory of the future will have only two employees: a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment.
As Canadian as possible under the circumstances.