Quotes Of The Week -- Summary

2023 Quotes

CW 1

"We do these things not because they are easy, but because we thought they were going to be easy."
― The Programmers' Credo 

2022 Quotes

CW 52

"We do these things not because they are easy, but because we thought they were going to be easy."
― Maurice Switzer

CW 51

"Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept."
― Jon Postel (Postel's Law)

CW 50

"What I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people."
― Josef Weizenbaum

CW 49

"A user interface is like a joke. If you have to explain it, it’s not that good."
― Martin LeBlanc

CW 48

"Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce systems which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations."
― Melvin Conway (Conway's Law)

CW 47

"Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later."
― Fred Brooks (Brooks's Law)

CW 46

"I’m often wrong, but never in doubt."
― Ivy Baker Priest

CW 45

"Anything lost can be found again, except time wasted."
― Kevin Gates

CW 44

"Trust, engagement, and happiness are outcomes. If you treat them like your inputs, you'll never get them."
― Leandro Herrero

CW 43

"Sometimes you change the subject, and sometimes the subject changes you."
― Timothy Snyder

CW 42

"Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible."
― Frank Zappa

CW 41

"I quote others only in order the better to express myself."
― Michel de Montaigne

CW 40 (2nd Quote)

"Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent."

― Steve Jobs 

CW 40

"Gratitude is letting the power of knowing what you have, overpower thinking about what you don't."

― John Maeda

CW 39

"Agile now means, we do half of Scrum poorly and use Jira."

― Andy Hunt 

CW 38

"You can’t have privacy without security, but you can have security without privacy."

― Unknown  

CW 37

"Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it."

― André Gide (sometimes attributed to Voltaire) 

CW 36

"You are never one feature away from success and you never will be."
― Teresa Torres

CW 35

"If you expect others to agree with you, why aren’t you trying more often to agree with them?"
― Olivier Sibony

CW 34

"Dashboards are astrology for execs."
― Taylor Murphy

CW 33

"With great responsibility comes no power."
― Product Manager's Motto according to Dan Olsen

CW 32

"A goal without a method is cruel."
― W.E. Deming

CW 31

"The customer rarely buys what the business thinks it sells him."
― Peter Drucker

CW 30

"Discovery is seeing what everybody else has seen, and thinking what nobody else has thought."
― Albert Szent-Györgyi

CW 29

"I’m not young enough to know everything."

― James Matthew Barrie (sometimes attributed to Oscar Wilde)

CW 28

"Proximity does breed creativity within a group of people."
― Kara Swisher

CW 27

"By far the greatest flow of newness is not innovation at all. Rather, it is imitation."
― Theodore Levitt

CW 26

"The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than is needed to produce it."
― Brandolini's Law (aka Bullshit Asymmetry Principle)

CW 25 (2nd Quote)

"Creativity is a spiritual experience, not a mental experience."
― Deepak Chopra

CW 25

"Listen, everyone is entitled to my opinion."
― Madonna

CW 24

"You can’t copy your way to the top."
― Steven B. Sample (The Contrarian’s Guide to Leadership)

CW 23

"To catch up, you have to run faster than the leader."
― Mark Akers

CW 22

"It is a lot better to walk alone than with a crowd going in the wrong direction."
― A @ProfFeynman tweet

CW 21

"Intelligence is what you use when you don't know what to do."

― Jean Piaget

CW 20

"All actual life is encounter."

― Martin Buber (I and Thou)

CW 19

"They lie to us, we know they're lying, they know we know they're lying, but they keep lying to us, and we keep pretending to believe them."

― Elena Gorokhova (A Mountain of Crumbs)

CW 18

"Don’t tell people what to do; tell them what you need accomplished, and you’ll be amazed at the results."

― George S. Patton

CW 17

"Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken."
― misattributed to Oscar Wilde

CW 16

"There is no truth, only belief."
― Unknown

CW 15

"Good artists copy. Great artists steal."
― Misattributed to Pablo Picasso

CW 14

"Many are stubborn in pursuit of the path they have chosen,  few in pursuit of the goal."
― Friedrich Nietzsche

CW 13

"The truth is rarely pure and never simple."
― Oscar Wilde

CW 12

"There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all."
― Peter Drucker

CW 11

"Optimism is just lack of information."
― Heiner Müller

CW 10

"You are not lost unless you think you are lost."
― Thomas F. Freeman

CW 9

"Worrying does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow; it empties today of its strength."
― Corrie ten Boom

CW 8

"50% of the work is done by the square root of the total number of people who participate in the work."
― Price's Square Root Law (adapted)

CW 7

"Which is more important," asked Big Panda, "the journey or the destination?"
"The company," said Tiny Dragon.
― James Norbury (Big Panda & Tiny Dragon)

CW 6

"Give me questions I can't answer not answers I can't question."
― A @ProfFeynman tweet

CW 5

"Man is a deterministic device thrown into a probabilistic universe. In this match, surprises are expected."
― Amos Tversky

CW 4

"No one ever made a decision because of a number. They need a story."
― Daniel Kahneman

CW 3

"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is man’s inability to understand the exponential function."
― Albert A. Bartlett

CW 2

"You shall know a word by the company it keeps."
― J. R. Firth

CW 1

"As you start to walk on the way, the way appears."
― Dschalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī (Rumi)

2021 Quotes

CW 52

"It's your road, and yours alone. Others may walk it with you, but no one can walk it for you."
― Dschalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī (Rumi)

CW 51

"Knowledge is having the right answers.

Intelligence is asking the right questions.

Wisdom is knowing when to ask the right questions."
― A @ProfFeynman tweet

CW 50

"All complex systems that work, evolved from simpler systems that worked."

― Gall's Law

CW 49

"Be alone, that is the secret of invention; be alone, that is when ideas are born."

― Nikola Tesla

CW 48

"A real friendship ought to introduce each person to unexpected weirdness in the other."

― Jaron Lanier

CW 47

"After a while you learn that privacy is something you can sell, but you can't buy it back."

― Bob Dylan

CW 46

"If you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there."

― Lewis Carroll

CW 45

"I’m smart enough to know that I’m dumb."
― Richard Feynman

CW 44

"Continuous is more often than you think."
― Mike Roberts

CW 43

"Even the future used to be better in the past."

― Karl Valentin

CW 42

"Precision is vanity, recall is sanity."

― Martin White

CW 41

"Speech was given to man to conceal his thoughts."

― Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord

CW 40

"The gurney is the reward."

― Malapropism

CW 39

"It is by logic that we prove, but by intuition that we discover.“

― Henri Poincaré

CW 38

"When the moon reaches fullness, it begins to wane."

― Sima Qian

CW 37

"Man can embody truth but he cannot know it."
― William Butler Yeats

CW 36

"It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future."
― Danish proverb

CW 35

"Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills."
― Arthur Schopenhauer

CW 34

"What's not worth doing is not worth doing well."

― Abraham Maslow

CW 33

"The perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary."

― Michel Foucault

CW 32

"It is so easy to be wrong—and to persist in being wrong—when the costs of being wrong are paid by others."

― Thomas Sowell

CW 31

"Only dead fish go with the flow."

― Proverb

CW 30

"One cannot not communicate."

― Paul Watzlawick

CW 29

"Software doesn’t age like fine wine; it ages like milk. Software goes bad over time."
― Josh Corman

CW 28

"All perceptions are real, at least to those who own them."
― Joe Folkman

CW 27

"If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change."
― Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (The Leopard / Il Gattopardo)

CW 26

"Measuring software productivity by lines of code is like measuring progress on an airplane by how much it weighs."
― Bill Gates

CW 25

"Innovation is the successful exploitation of new ideas."
― UK Department of Trade & Industry (DTI)

CW 24

"Realize that you are simultaneously everything and nothing."
― Ray Dalio

CW 23

"Correlation does not imply causation."
― Any savvy statistician

CW 22/2

"Everyone is conservative about what he knows best."
― Robert Conquest

CW 22/1

"But don't ask me what I think of you,
  I might not give the answer that you want me to."
― Peter Green (Fleetwood Mac), Song Lyrics "Oh Well, Part 1"

CW 21

"Don't talk unless you can improve the silence."
― Jorge Luis Borges

CW 20

"... there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know. ..."
― Donald Rumsfeld

CW 19

.

CW 18

"Doubt grows with knowledge."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

CW 17

"The better we get at getting better, the faster we will get better."
― Doug Engelbart

CW 16

"Plans are worthless, but planning is everything."

― Cited by Dwight D. Eisenhower

CW 15

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

― Benjamin Brewster

CW 14

"There is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong."

― H. L. Mencken

CW 13

"If you want people to think, give them intent, not instruction."

― David Marquet

CW 12/2

"Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice."

― Grey's Law

CW 12/1

"In Danger and Deep Distress, the Middle Way Spells Certain Death."

― Friedrich Freiherr von Logau

CW 11

"If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter."

― Blaise Pascal

CW 10

"No one comes out of a day full of Twitter celebrating humanity."

― Cal Newport (Computer Scientist and Writer)

CW 9

"What you seek is seeking you."

― Dschalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī (Rumi)

CW 8

"I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail."

― Abraham Maslow

CW 7

"Vision without execution is just hallucination."

― Henry Ford

CW 6

.

CW 5

"Victory has a hundred fathers but defeat is an orphan."

―  Cited by John F. Kennedy 

CW 4

"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

―  misattributed to Albert Einstein

CW 3

"You can go anywhere but you are where you came from."

― John Andrew Hull, Manchester Orchestra, “The Silence” (Song Lyrics)

CW 2

.

CW 1

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

― Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire

2020 Quotes

"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge."

― Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man 

"Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it."

― Jonathan Swift

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

― Goodhart's Law

"The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place."

― attributed to George Bernard Shaw

"Never let your skill exceed your virtue."

― Old Korean saying

"If we have data, let’s look at data. If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine."

― Jim Barksdale 

"The only true infinite thing is our ignorance."

― Carlo Rovelli

"When you're dealing with exponential growth, the time to act is when it feels too early."

― Paul Graham

"A healthy society speaks with more than one voice."

― Li Wenliang (who died in February 2020) 

"All models are wrong, but some models are useful."

― George Box

"Looked at in one way, everyone knows what intelligence is; looked at in another way, no one does."

― Robert J. Sternberg

"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."

― Arthur C. Clarke (Clarke's 1st Law)

Earlier Quotes

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