awesome-awesomeness/html/itquotes.html

<h1 id="awesome-it-quotes-awesome">Awesome IT Quotes <a
href="https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome"><img
src="https://cdn.rawgit.com/sindresorhus/awesome/d7305f38d29fed78fa85652e3a63e154dd8e8829/media/badge.svg"
alt="Awesome" /></a></h1>
<p>This is a list of awesome IT quotes. The aim is to collect all
relevant quotes said over the history of IT.</p>
<h2 id="contents">Contents</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="#alan-kay">Alan Kay</a></li>
<li><a href="#alan-turing">Alan Turing</a></li>
<li><a href="#albert-einstein">Albert Einstein</a></li>
<li><a href="#arthur-c-clarke">Arthur C. Clarke</a></li>
<li><a href="#bill-gates">Bill Gates</a></li>
<li><a href="#bjarne-stroustrup">Bjarne Stroustrup</a></li>
<li><a href="#bruce-schneier">Bruce Schneier</a></li>
<li><a href="#don-delillo">Don DeLillo</a></li>
<li><a href="#don-norman">Don Norman</a></li>
<li><a href="#douglas-adams">Douglas Adams</a></li>
<li><a href="#edsger-dijkstra">Edsger Dijkstra</a></li>
<li><a href="#edward-v-berard">Edward V. Berard</a></li>
<li><a href="#elbert-hubbard">Elbert Hubbard</a></li>
<li><a href="#elon-musk">Elon Musk</a></li>
<li><a href="#grace_hopper">Grace Hopper</a></li>
<li><a href="#harold-abelson">Harold Abelson</a></li>
<li><a href="#jeff-pesis">Jeff Pesis</a></li>
<li><a href="#john-cleese">John Cleese</a></li>
<li><a href="#kathy-sierra">Kathy Sierra</a></li>
<li><a href="#keith-bostic">Keith Bostic</a></li>
<li><a href="#ken-thompson">Ken Thompson</a></li>
<li><a href="#larry-wall">Larry Wall</a></li>
<li><a href="#linus-torvalds">Linus Torvalds</a></li>
<li><a href="#mark-minasi">Mark Minasi</a></li>
<li><a href="#martin-fowler">Martin Fowler</a></li>
<li><a href="#omar-bradley">Omar Bradley</a></li>
<li><a href="#pablo-picasso">Pablo Picasso</a></li>
<li><a href="#peter-deutsch">Peter Deutsch</a></li>
<li><a href="#peter-wegner">Peter Wegner</a></li>
<li><a href="#richard-stallman">Richard Stallman</a></li>
<li><a href="#rick-cook">Rick Cook</a></li>
<li><a href="#steve-jobs">Steve Jobs</a></li>
<li><a href="#steve-mcconnell">Steve McConnell</a></li>
<li><a href="#sydney-harris">Sydney Harris</a></li>
<li><a href="#tony-hoare">Tony Hoare</a></li>
<li><a href="#vidiu-platon">Vidiu Platon</a></li>
</ul>
<h2 id="contribution-guidelines">Contribution Guidelines</h2>
<p>Contribution guidelines can be found <a
href="CONTRIBUTING.md">here</a></p>
<h2 id="quotes">Quotes</h2>
<table>
<colgroup>
<col style="width: 50%" />
<col style="width: 50%" />
</colgroup>
<thead>
<tr class="header">
<th style="text-align: center;">Quote</th>
<th style="text-align: center;">Author</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr class="odd">
<td style="text-align: center;">“Most software today is very much like
an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other,
with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands
of slaves.” <br><br> “Technology is anything that wasn’t around when you
were born.”</td>
<td style="text-align: center;"></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td style="text-align: center;">“A computer would deserve to be called
intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was
human.” <br><br> “Machines take me by surprise with great frequency.”
<br><br> “We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty
there that needs to be done.” <br><br> “Those who can imagine anything,
can create the impossible.” <br><br> “If a machine is expected to be
infallible, it cannot also be intelligent.” <br><br> “Sometimes it is
the people who no one imagined anything of who do the things that no one
can imagine”</td>
<td style="text-align: center;"></td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td style="text-align: center;">“It has become appallingly obvious that
our technology has exceeded our humanity.” <br><br> “There are only two
ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other
is as though everything is a miracle.” <br><br> “If you can’t explain it
to a six year old, you don’t understand it yourself.” <br><br> “Logic
will get you from A to Z; imagination will get you everywhere.” <br><br>
“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep
moving.” <br><br> “Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried
anything new.”</td>
<td style="text-align: center;"></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td style="text-align: center;">“Any sufficiently advanced technology is
equivalent to magic.”</td>
<td style="text-align: center;"></td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td style="text-align: center;">“Measuring programming progress by lines
of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.”
<br><br> “The advance of technology is based on making it fit in so that
you don’t really even notice it, so it’s part of everyday life.”
<br><br> “Success today requires the agility and drive to constantly
rethink, reinvigorate, react, and reinvent” <br><br> “The Internet is
becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow.” <br><br>
”Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”
<br><br> ”The best way to prepare [to be a programmer] is to write
programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In
my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and
fished out listings of their operating system.”</td>
<td style="text-align: center;"></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td style="text-align: center;">“I have always wished for my computer to
be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true because I can
no longer figure out how to use my telephone.” <br> <br>“C makes it easy
to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it
blows your whole leg off.”<br><br> “Clearly, I reject the view that
there is one way that is right for everyone and for every
problem.”<br><br> “A program that has not been tested does not
work.”</td>
<td style="text-align: center;"></td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td style="text-align: center;">“Privacy is an inherent human right, and
a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and
respect.” <br><br> “It is poor civic hygiene to install technologies
that could someday facilitate a police state.” <br><br> “Anyone, from
the most clueless amateur to the best cryptographer, can create an
algorithm that he himself can’t break.”</td>
<td style="text-align: center;"></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td style="text-align: center;">“This is the whole point of technology.
It creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens
universal extinction on the other. Technology is lust removed from
nature.”</td>
<td style="text-align: center;"></td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td style="text-align: center;">“It’s not enough that we build products
that function, that are understandable and usable, we also need to build
products that bring joy and excitement, pleasure and fun, and yes,
beauty to people’s lives.” <br><br> “A brilliant solution to the wrong
problem can be worse than no solution at all: solve the correct
problem.”</td>
<td style="text-align: center;"></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td style="text-align: center;">“First we thought the PC was a
calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with
ASCII — and we thought it was a typewriter. Then we discovered graphics,
and we thought it was a television. With the World Wide Web, we’ve
realized it’s a brochure.” <br><br> “A common mistake that people make
when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate
the ingenuity of complete fools.”</td>
<td style="text-align: center;"></td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td style="text-align: center;">“Raise your quality standards as high as
you can live with, avoid wasting your time on routine problems, and
always try to work as closely as possible at the boundary of your
abilities. Do this, because it is the only way of discovering how that
boundary should be moved foward.”</td>
<td style="text-align: center;"></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td style="text-align: center;">“Walking on water and developing
software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.”</td>
<td style="text-align: center;"></td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td style="text-align: center;">“One machine can do the work of fifty
ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.”</td>
<td style="text-align: center;"></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td style="text-align: center;">“Failure is an option here. If things
are not failing, you are not innovating enough.” <br><br> “When
something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in
your favor.” <br><br> “If you get up in the morning and think the future
is going to be better, it is a bright day. Otherwise, it’s not.”
<br><br> “Persistence is very important. You should not give up unless
you are forced to give up.” <br><br> “I could either watch it happen or
be a part of it.”</td>
<td style="text-align: center;"></td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td style="text-align: center;">“If it’s a good idea, go ahead and do
it. It’s much easier to apologize than it is to get permission.”</td>
<td style="text-align: center;"></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td style="text-align: center;">“Programs must be written for people to
read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.”</td>
<td style="text-align: center;"></td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td style="text-align: center;">“A brand for a company is like a
reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things
well.” <br><br> “If you do build a great experience, customers tell each
other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.”</td>
<td style="text-align: center;"></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td style="text-align: center;">“Hardware: the parts of a computer that
can be kicked.”</td>
<td style="text-align: center;"></td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td style="text-align: center;">“Technology frightens me to death. It’s
designed by engineers to impress other engineers. And they always come
with instruction booklets that are written by engineers for other
engineers — which is why almost no technology ever works.”</td>
<td style="text-align: center;"></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td style="text-align: center;">“It doesn’t matter what you know, what
matters is when you know”</td>
<td style="text-align: center;"></td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td style="text-align: center;">“Perl – The only language that looks the
same before and after RSA encryption.”</td>
<td style="text-align: center;"></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td style="text-align: center;">“One of my most productive days was
throwing away 1000 lines of code.”</td>
<td style="text-align: center;"></td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td style="text-align: center;">“It is easier to port a shell than a
shell script.” <br><br> “Most of you are familiar with the virtues of a
programmer. There are three, of course: laziness, impatience, and
hubris.”</td>
<td style="text-align: center;"></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td style="text-align: center;">“Most good programmers do programming
not because they expect to get paid or get adulation by the public, but
because it is fun to program.” <br><br> “Software is like sex; it’s
better when it’s free.” <br><br> “Artists usually don’t make all that
much money, and they often keep their artistic hobby despite the money
rather than due to it.” <br><br> “I often compare open source to
science. To where science took this whole notion of developing ideas in
the open and improving on other peoples’ ideas and making it into what
science is today and the incredible advances that we have had. And I
compare that to witchcraft and alchemy, where openness was something you
didn’t do.” <br><br> “Talk is cheap. Show me the code.” <br><br> “Don’t
hurry your code. Make sure it works well and is well designed. Don’t
worry about timing” <br><br> “Programmers are in the enviable position
of not only getting to do what they want to, but because the end result
is so important they get paid to do it. There are other professions like
that, but not that many” <br><br> “In many cases the user interface to a
program is the most important part for a commercial company: whether the
programs works correctly or not seems to be secondary”</td>
<td style="text-align: center;"></td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td style="text-align: center;">“If McDonalds were run like a software
company, one out of every hundred Big Macs would give you food
poisoning, and the response would be, ‘We’re sorry, here’s a coupon for
two more.’”</td>
<td style="text-align: center;"></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td style="text-align: center;">“Always code as if the guy who ends up
maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you
live.”</td>
<td style="text-align: center;"></td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td style="text-align: center;">“If we continue to develop our
technology without wisdom or prudence, our servant may prove to be our
executioner.”</td>
<td style="text-align: center;"></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td style="text-align: center;">“Computers are useless. They can only
give you answers.”</td>
<td style="text-align: center;"></td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td style="text-align: center;">“To iterate is human, to recurse
divine.”</td>
<td style="text-align: center;"></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td style="text-align: center;">“It is impossible to fully specify or
test an interactive system designed to respond to external inputs.”</td>
<td style="text-align: center;"></td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td style="text-align: center;">“People said I should accept the
world.<br>Bullshit! I don’t accept the world.“</td>
<td style="text-align: center;"></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td style="text-align: center;">“Programming today is a race between
software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof
programs, and the universe trying to build bigger and better idiots. So
far, the universe is winning.”</td>
<td style="text-align: center;"></td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td style="text-align: center;">“Great things in business are never done
by one person. They’re done by a team of people.” <br><br> “Innovation
distinguishes between a leader and a follower.” <br><br> “Technology is
nothing. What’s important is that you have a faith in people, that
they’re basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they’ll do
wonderful things with them.” <br><br> ”Design is not just what it looks
like and feels like. Design is how it works.”</td>
<td style="text-align: center;"></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td style="text-align: center;">“Good code is its own best
documentation. As you’re about to add a comment, ask yourself, ‘How can
I improve the code so that this comment isn’t needed?’”</td>
<td style="text-align: center;"></td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td style="text-align: center;">“The real danger is not that computers
will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like
computers.”</td>
<td style="text-align: center;"></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td style="text-align: center;">“There are two ways of constructing a
software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are
obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so
complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is
far more difficult.”</td>
<td style="text-align: center;"></td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td style="text-align: center;">“I don’t care if it works on your
machine! We are not shipping your machine!”</td>
<td style="text-align: center;"></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
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</a> <br /> To the extent possible under law, <a rel="dct:publisher"
     href="https://github.com/victorlaerte/awesome-it-quotes"> <span
property="dct:title">Victor Laerte de Oliveira</span></a> has waived all
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property="dct:title">Awesome IT Quotes</span>. This work is published
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