SOME SAYINGS AND WRITINGS TO PONDER

"The key to knowledge is ... to recognize the limitations of one's own vision and, further, to 
recognize that the full truth may not be discoverable in a world that places no value on it."
Unknown

"Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know"
Michel del Montaigne

"The essence of management is to make knowledge productive.  Management, in other words, is 
a social function.  And in its practice management is truly a liberal art."
Peter Drucker - Atlantic Monthly.   November, 1994



Success comes through hard work, optimism, openness, a passion to learn, a willingness to 
change and a conviction that there are no free rides.
The Economist Magazine  10/30/93

""I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his 
dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with success unexpected in 
common hours. ...you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they 
should be.  Now put the foundations under them."
Thoreau,   Walden



"The secret to success is honesty and fair dealing.  If you can fake those, you've got it made."
Groucho Marx(?)



"Life is what happens while you're making other plans"
John Lennon

"All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware."
Martin Buber

"If you don't know where you're going, you'll wind up somewhere else."
Yogi Berra



"Everyone gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense."
Gertrude Stein

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot 
be fooled"
Richard Feynman

"A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history -- with the possible
exceptions of handguns and tequila"
Mitch Ratcliffe, Technology Review,   April, 1992



"The programmer, who needs clarity, who must talk all day to a machine
that demands declarations, hunkers down into a low-grade annoyance.  It is here
that the stereotype of the programmer, sitting in a dim room, growling from behind
Coke cans, has its origins.  The disorder of the desk, the floor;  the yellow Post-It notes
everywhere;  the whiteboards covered with scrawl:  all this is the outward manifestation
of the messiness of human thought.  The messiness cannot go into the program;  it piles
up around the programmer.  
     "Soon the programmer has no choice but to retreat into some private interior space,
closer to the machine, where things can be accomplished. The machine begins to seem
friendlier than the analysts, the users, the managers.  The real-world reflection of the
program -- who cares anymore? Guide an X-ray machine or target a missile;  print a
budget or a dossier; run a city subway or a disk-drive read/write arm:  it all begins to blur.
The system has crossed the membrane -- the great filter of logic, instruction by instruction
 -- where it has been cleansed of its linkages to actual human life.
     "The goal now is not whatever all the analysts set out to do;  the goal becomes the
creation of the system itself.  Any ethics or morals or second thoughts, any questions or
muddles or exceptions, all dissolve into a junky Nike-mind:  Just do it.  If I just sit here
and code, you think, I can make something run.  When the humans come back to talk
changes, I can just run the program.  Show them:  Here.  Look at this.  See?  This is not
just talk. This runs.  Whatever you might say, whatever the consequences, all you have
are words and what I have is this, this thing I've built, this operational system.  Talk all you
want, but this thing here:  it works."
       Ellen Ullman, "Close To The Machine:  Technophilia And Its Discontents," City Lights 1997




"The offices the girl rode between were electronically coterminous -- in effect, a single 
desktop, the map of distances obliterated by the seamless and instantaneous nature of 
communication.  Yet this very seamlessness, which had rendered physical mail an 
expensive novelty, might easily be viewed as porosity, and as such created the need for 
the service the girl provided.  Physically transporting bits of information about a grid that 
consisted of little else, she provided a degree of absolute security in the fluid universe of 
data.  With your memo in the girls bag, you knew precisely where it was; otherwise, 
your memo was nowhere, perhaps everywhere, in that instant of transit."

                                     William Gibson - Virtual Light





"Common sense is genius dressed in his working clothes." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Common Sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age 18." - Albert Einstein

"He who asks is a fool for 5 minutes, but he who does not ask remains a fool forever." - Chinese proverb



There is no finality in failure and no end to success.
Unkown

"Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent."
Isaac Asimov,  Foundation

"The man who strikes first admits that his ideas have given out"
Chinese Proverb

The Chinese ideogram for crisis is a combination of the symbols for danger and opportunity.

"A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is braver five minutes longer."
Ralph Waldo Emerson 



"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the 
truth."
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle



"Hey, if you can't take people's money and then screw `em, then you've got no business being in 
the business."
Willie Brown quoted in The Economist Magazine - August 31, 1996


"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence clamorous to be
led to safety - by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
H. L. Menken




THE FOLLOWING ARE ANONYMOUS APHORISMS TAKEN FROM AN OFFICE CALENDAR

"Progress does not consist of replacing a theory that is wrong with one that is right.  It consists of 
replacing a theory that is wrong with one that is more subtly wrong."
"Society is a mule, not a car...If pressed to hard, it will kick and throw off its rider.
Middle age occurs when the chest and stomach start occupying the same part of the body.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.  Hanlon's Razor
If you mess with a thing long enough, it'll break.  Schmidt's Law 
Negaitve expectations yield negative results.
Positive expectations yield negative results.  Non-Reciprocal Laws of Expectations 
"Unbreakable" means that it breaks in a way you never expected.  T. Smith's Definition 
Error is often more earnest than truth.  Disraeli's Dictum  
Before ordering a test decide what you will do if it is (1) positive, or (2) negative.  If both 
answers are the same, don't do the test.  Cochrane's Aphorism
When it is not necessary to make a decision, it is necessary not to make a decision.  Lord 
Falkland's Rule 
Under the most rigourously controlled conditions of pressure, temperature, volume, humidity, and 
other variables, the organism will do as it damn well pleases.  Harvard Law 
Time spent consuming a meal is in inverse proportion to time spent preparing it.  Hammond's 
Fourth Law of the Kitchen 
If, when completion of a design is imminent, field dimensions are finally supplied as they actually 
are -- instead of as they were meant to be -- it is always simpler to start all over.  Third Law of 
Revision 
Changing things is central to leadership, and changing them before anyone else does is creativity.  
Jay's First Law of Leadership 
A document discarded as worthless will become vital shortly after the trash is collected.  Law of 
Information Retrieval  
Auditors always reject any expense account with a total divisible by 5 or 10.  O'Brien's Principle 
(The $357.73 Theory)  
In any given set of circumstances, the proper course of action is determined by subsequent events.  
McDonald's Corollary to Murphy's Law  
The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple.  Wilde's Comments - November 12, 
1996  
Any change looks terrible at first  Principle of Design Inertia




"The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat." - Lili Tomlin

"Competition brings out the best in products and the worst in people." - David Sarnoff 



Additional colloquialisms in English - from The Economist  6/21/97

Batmobiling:  To put up emotional shields from the retracting armour featured on this vehicle; as in, "She 
started talking marriage and he started batmobiling".
Betamaxed:  To be overtaken by an inferior but better-presented competitor.
Elvis year:  The peak year of popularity, as in "1993 was Barney the dinosaur's Elvis Year".
Generica:  Fast-food joints, strip malls and subdivisions, as in "We were so lost in generica that I couldn't 
remember which city it was."
Going postal:  To be totally stressed out, as in the case of the postal employees who have gone on on shooting 
rampages.
Irritainment:  Something annoying that you can't help watching, such as the OJ Simpson trial.
Prairie-dogging:  In offices with worker-cubicles, the moment when something happens and everyone pops up to 
look.
Umfriend:  A sexual relationship, as in "This is Dale, my . um . friend."



PERSISTENCE

Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence.
Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with
	talent.
Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb.
Education will not; the world is full of educated derilicts.
Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.

Calvin Coolidge      


"The most remarkable of all things is when a man never gives up."
Theodore Herzl

"It matters if you just don't give up."
Stephen Hawking