General Quotes
==============

Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.

You do not have to see the whole staircase to take the first step.
    - Martin Luther King Jr.

Believe as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
    - Lewis Caroll

There's nothing that will change someone's moral outlook quicker than cash in
large sums.
    - Larry Flynt

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without
accepting it.
    - Aristotle

People think that I must be a very strange person. This is not correct. I have
the heart of a small boy. It is in a glass jar on my desk.
    - Stephen King

In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice,
there is.
    - Jan L.A. van de Snepscheut

The difference between 'involvement' and 'commitment' is like an eggs-and-ham
breakfast: the chicken was 'involved' - the pig was 'committed'.
    - unknown

Women might be able to fake orgasms. But men can fake a whole relationship.
    - Sharon Stone

God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.
    - Voltaire

Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy
evidence of the fact.
    - George Eliot

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is
nothing left to take away.
    - Antoine de Saint Exupery

Argue for your limitations, and sure enough they're yours.
    - Richard Bach

Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.
    - Bertrand Russell

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.
    - Goethe

You can get more with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone
    - Al Capone

Everything that can be invented has been invented.
    - Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899

The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.
    - Tom Clancy

It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the
dog.
    - Mark Twain

God gave men both a penis and a brain, but unfortunately not enough blood supply
to run both at the same time.
    - Robin Williams, commenting on the Clinton/Lewinsky affair

Now, now my good man, this is no time for making enemies.
    - Voltaire (1694-1778) on his deathbed in response to a priest asking that he
   renounce Satan

Always go to other people's funerals, otherwise they won't come to yours.
    - Yogi Berra

When a man says he approves of something in principle, it means he hasn't the
slightest intention of carrying it out in practice.
    - Bismarck

The need to be right all the time is the biggest bar to new ideas. It is better
to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong than to be always right by
having no ideas at all.
    - Edward de Bono

We must act as if it were impossible to fail.
    - D. Broude

Those who will not reason, are bigots, those who cannot, are fools, and those
who dare not, are slaves.
    - Lord Byron

It was previously a question of finding out whether or not life had to have a
meaning to be lived. It now becomes clear, on the contrary, that it will be
lived all the better if it has no meaning.

Religion has always been the most dedicated servant of facism.

There is but one freedom, to put oneself right with death. After that everything
is possible. I cannot force you to believe in God. Believing in God amounts to
coming to terms with death. When you have accepted death, the problem of God
will be solved--and not the reverse.
    - Albert Camus

To historians is granted a talent that even the gods are denied : To alter what
has already happened!

Give me a museum and I’ll fill it.
    - Picasso

Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think that you are facing a
contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.
    - Ayn Rand

A doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his clients to
plant vines.
    - Frank Lloyd Wright

Religion hinges upon faith, politics hinges upon who can tell the most
convincing lies or maybe just shout the loudest, but science hinges upon whether
its conclusions resemble what actually happens.
    - Ian Stewart

Science is the record of dead religions.
    - Oscar Wilde

Faith: not wanting to know what is true.
    - Friedrich Nietzsche

The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.
    - Thomas Jefferson

A great many people think they are thinking when they are acutally rearranging
their prejudices.
    - William James

The right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins.
    - Oliver Wendell Holmes

NEW YORK, NY. A man was knocked down by a car and got up uninjured, but lay back
down in front of the car when a bystander told him to feign injury in order to
collect insurance money. The car rolled forward and crushed him to death.
    - Associated Press, 1977

I don’t know anything about music. In my line you don’t have to.
    - Elvis Presley

The only stupid question is the question you don't ask.

Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are good is like expecting
the bull not to charge because you are a vegetarian.
    - Dennis Wholey

Why don’t you write books people can read?
    - Nora Joyce [to her husband James Joyce]

In order to keep a true perspective of one’s importance, everyone should have a
dog that will worship him and a cat that will ignore him.
    - Dereke Bruce

Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.
    - T. S. Eliot

If you want to build a ship, don't herd people together to collect wood and
don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless
immensity of the sea.
    - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.
    - Edward Abbey

When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail.
    - Abraham Maslow

A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.
    - Joseph Stalin

It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.
    - Niccolo Machiavelli

After I’m dead I’d rather have people ask why I have no monument than why I have
one.
    - Cato the Elder

I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don’t need.
    - Rodin, when asked how he managed to make his remarkable statues

I have only one superstition. I touch all the bases when I hit a home run.
    - Babe Ruth

Sometimes you gotta create what you want to be a part of.
    - Geri Weitzman

Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.
    - Malcolm S. Forbes

What does not kill me makes me stronger.
    - Goethe

The best way to succeed in life is to act on the advice we give to others.

There are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish something.
    - Thomas Edison

No man's knowledge here can go beyond his experience.
    - John Locke

Cogito ergo sum. (I think, therefore I am).
    - Rene Descartes

I disapprove of what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it.
    - Voltaire

A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.
    - Lao Tzu

He's so ugly they ought to donate his face to the world wildlife fund.
    - Muhammad Ali on Joe Frazier

Everyone is entitled to be stupid, but some abuse the privilege.

War doesn't determine who's right. War determines who's left.

Love is like pi - natural, irrational, and very important.

Anytime four New Yorkers get into a cab together without arguing, a bank robbery
has just taken place.

Power, n.: The only narcotic regulated by the SEC instead of the FDA.

The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that carries any reward.
    - John Maynard Keynes (Attributed)

Nature does nothing uselessly.
    - Aristotle

A lost battle is a battle one thinks one has lost.
    - Sartre

The irony about the evolution vs creationism debate is that the very people who
whine about not being kin to a monkey are the ones who are the least evolved
    - Anonymous

No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced
that it says what he means.
    - George Bernard Shaw

We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one
another.
    - Jonathan Swift

An Inuit hunter asked the local missionary priest: "If I did not know about God
and sin, would I go to hell?" "No," said the priest, "not if you did not know."
"Then why," asked the Inuit earnestly, "did you tell me?"
    - Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

If it turns out that there is a God, I don't think that he's evil. But the worst
that you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever. -- Woody
Allen

Creationists make it sound as though a 'theory' is something you dreamt up after
being drunk all night.
    - Isaac Asimov

Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.
-Isaac Asimov

It's hard to be religious when so many people are not struck down by lightning.
-Calvin, "Calvin and Hobbes"

A faith that cannot survive a collision with the truth is not worth many
regrets.
    - Arthur C. Clarke

Beliefs are what divide people. Doubt unites them.
    - Peter Ustinov

The church is near, but the road is icy. The bar is far, but we will walk
carefully.
    - Russian Proverb

Hell must be a pretty swell spot, because the guys that invented religion have
sure been trying hard to keep everybody else out.
    - Al Capone

Non scholae, sed vitae discimus. (Not school, but life teaches us.)

Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark
to read
    - Groucho Marx

There is a pleasure in being mad which none but madmen know.
    - John Dryden

Dream as if you'll live forever. Live as if you'll die today.
    - James Dean

You will never find time for anything. If you want time you must make it.
    - Charles Buxton

Many people take no care of their money till they come nearly to the end of it,
and others do just the same with their time.
    - Johann von Goethe

We're fools whether we dance or not, so we might as well dance.
    - Japanese Proverb

Life is a sexually transmitted disease.
    - R. D. Liang

Those who never took a chance, never had a chance.
    - unknown

Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.
    - Soren Kierkegaard

I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms Lewinsky
    - Bill Clinton

Cogito ergo sum.
    - Rene Descartes

It is easier to fight for one's priciples than to live up to them.
    - Alfred Adler

First you forget names. Then you forget faces. Next you forget to pull your
zipper up. And finally you forget to pull it down.
    - George Burns

Don't be afraid to take a big step if one is indicated. You can't cross a chasm
in 2 small jumps.
    - David LLoyd George

An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.
    - Victor Hugo

A man once criticized Picasso for creating unrealistic art. Picasso asked him:
"Can you show me some realistic art?" The man showed him a photograph of his
wife. Picasso observed: "So your wife is two inches tall, two-dimensional, with
no arms and no legs, and no color but only shades of gray?"

Obviously crime pays, or there'd be no crime.
    - G. Gordon Liddy

'Strategy' is buying a bottle of fine wine when you take a lady out for dinner.
'Tactics' is getting her to drink it.
    - Frank Muir

If an infinite number of rednecks, driving an infinite number of pickup trucks,
fire an infinite number of shotgun rounds at an infinite number of highway
signs, they will eventually re-produce all the world's great literary works, in
Braille. Omni Magazine

All you touch and all you see, Is all your life will ever be.
    - Pink Floyd, 'Breathe.'

Fear is that little darkroom where negatives are developed.
    - Michael Pritchard

The universe is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our wits to grow
sharper.
    - Eden Phillpotts.

When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realized
the Lord doesn't work that way. So I stole one and asked Him to forgive me.
    - Emo Philips

Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.
    - Jean-Paul Sartre

The right to do something, does not mean that doing it is right.
    - William Safire

God is a comedian playing to an audience who is afraid to laugh.
    - Voltaire.

The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil
men.
    - Plato

"Of all the things I've lost, I miss my mind the most."
    - Mark Twain

"No matter how good you are, there's always a billion other people better than
you."
    - Homer Simpson

When you shoot an arrow of truth dip its point in honey. Arab proverb

The mind is like a parachute: it doesn't work unless it's open.
    - Frank Zappa

"Some Scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic
building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity
than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe."
    - Frank Zappa

"Not to sound crass, but instead of complaining about stupid people why don't we
remove all the warning labels and let the problem solve itself?"
    - Anonymous internet hero

"You don't appreciate a lot of stuff in school until you get older. Little
things like being spanked every day by a middle aged woman: Stuff you pay good
money for in later life." -Emo Philips

The French don’t even have a word for ‘entrepreneur’
    - Attributed to George Bush by a British newspaper

If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, then it’s good enough for me!
    - A former Texas Governor (not George Bush)

I don't remember the names of all the clubs to which we went."
    - Shaquille O'Neil, when he was asked if he visited Parthenon in Athens

Fashion is just another form of uglyness. And it is so ugly, it has to be
changed every 6 months.
    - Oscar Wilde

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes but in having
new eyes.
    - Proust

There'll be two dates on your tombstone, And all your friends will read 'em; But
all that's gonna matter Is that little dash between 'em.

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living
in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?
    - Kurt Vonnegut

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class
is running the country.
    - Kurt Vonnegut

The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.
    - Kurt Vonnegut

People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working
order so they'll have good voice boxes in case there's ever anything really
meaningful to say.
    - Kurt Vonnegut

I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you
different.
    - Kurt Vonnegut

When you talk to God its called prayer, When god talks to you its Catatonic
Schizophrenia Fox MULDER

God Himself, sir, does not propose to judge a man until his life is over. Why
should you and I?
    - Samuel Johnson

"Le talent, c'est d'avoir envie." To have a talent for something is merely to
have an itch to do it.

So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked what is the
root of all money?
    - Ayn Rand.

we shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to
arrive where we started and know the place for the first time
    - T.S. Eliot

Never knock on Death's door; ring the bell and run, He hates that.

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the
experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to
do so.
    - Douglas Adams

The greatest weakness of a person or an organization is its greatest strength
taken to an extreme.

We don't need no education, We don't need no thought control!
    - Pink Floyd (The Wall)

I love the idea that he used to just sit and stare at an empty canvas for as
long as 12 hours straight. If you keep staring at the canvas, the hope is that
something or someone will come to mind. That's a romantic notion in itself.
    - Al Pachino on Picasso

20 years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do
than the things you did. So throw off the bow lines. Sail away from the safe
harbour. Explore. Dream.
    - Mark Twain

Mobius strippers never show you their back side.

If the human body's obscene, complain to the manufacturer, not me.
    - Larry Flynt

People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought which they
avoid.
    - Soren Aabye Kierkegaard

Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one
    - Henry Louis Mencken

If you really want to hurt your parents and you don't have nerve enough to be
homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts.
    - Kurt Vonnegut

The only difference between myself and a madman is that I am not mad.
    - Salvador Dali

I am always doing what I cannot do yet, in order to learn how to do it
    - Van Gogh

Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the
ideal never goes unpunished.
    - Goethe

God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant, and
the cat. He has no real style. He just keeps on trying other things.
    - Pablo Piccaso

Until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the
hunter.
    - African Proverb

To dare to live alone is the rarest courage; since there are many who had rather
meet their bitterest enemy in the field, than their own hearts in their closet.
    - Charles Caleb Colton

Most of all, perhaps, we need an intimate knowlege of the past. Not that the
past has anything magical about it, but we cannot study the future.
    - C. S. Lewis

Different isn't always better, but better is always different.
    - Unknown

Simpilico: You need to walk before you can run Salvati: No, you need something
to run towards!
    - From Lockhart's laments

A great many people think they are thinking when they are acutally rearranging
their prejudices.
    - William James

The right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins.
    - Oliver Wendell Holmes

Just because a field sprinkles numbers around doesn't make it a hard science.
By that definition, marketing research is a hard science.
    - Unknown

The power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy except in those happy 
dispositions where it is almost superfluous.
    – Gibbon

Computer Quotes
===============

Computer science is as much about computers as astronomy is about telescopes.
    - E. W. Dijkstra

You are not expected to understand this.
    - A Comment From The Source Of Unix 6th Ed, Unix/Slp.C, Line 438

A thorough software professional is one who when his wife yells at him "goto
hell" , worries more about the goto statement than what his wife is upset about.
    - weirdo -

Contrary to popular belief, Unix is user friendly. It just happens to be very
selective about who it decides to make friends with.
    - Anonymous

Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
    - Donald Knuth

They have computers, and they may have other weapons of mass destruction.
    - Janet Reno, Us Attorney General, 02-27-98

There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't
believe this to be a coincidence.
    - Jeremy S. Anderson

Lisp isn't a language, it's a building material.
    - Alan Kay.

Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both
are frozen.
    - Edward V Berard

They don't make bugs like Bunny anymore.
    - Olav Mjelde.

A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the
irrelevant.
    - Alan J. Perlis.

I think Microsoft named .Net so it wouldn’t show up in a Unix directory listing.
    - Oktal

The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should therefore be regarded as
a criminal offense.
    - E. W. Dijkstra

In the one and only true way. The object-oriented version of 'Spaghetti code'
is, of course, 'Lasagna code'. (Too many layers).
    - Roberto Waltman.

When someone says: 'I want a programming language in which I need only say what
I wish done', give him a lollipop.
    - Alan J. Perlis

Talk is cheap. Show me the code.
    - Linus Torvalds

Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.
    - Keith Bostic

It is easier to port a shell than a shell script.
    - Larry Wall

I invented the term 'Object-Oriented', and I can tell you I did not have C++ in
mind.
    - Alan Kay

Sometimes it pays to stay in bed on Monday, rather than spending the rest of the
week debugging Monday's code.
    - Christopher Thompson

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if
you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart
enough to debug it.
    - Brian W. Kernighan.

Most of you are familiar with the virtues of a programmer. There are three, of
course: laziness, impatience, and hubris.
    - Larry Wall

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.
    - Alan Kay

To iterate is human, to recurse divine.
    - L. Peter Deutsch

On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament]: 'Pray, Mr.
Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come
out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that
could provoke such a question.
- Charles Babbage

Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent
psychopath who knows where you live.
    - Martin Golding

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.
    - C.A.R. Hoare

As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn't as
easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I
can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from
then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs.
    - Maurice Wilkes (designer of EDSAC, on programming, 1949)

Virtual memory is like a game you can't win; However, without VM there's truly
nothing to lose...
    - Unknown

Premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in
programming.
    - Donald Knuth

Interesting - I use a Mac to help me design the next Cray.
    - Seymoure Cray (1925-1996) when he was told that Apple Inc. had recently
   bought a Cray supercomputer to help them design the next Mac.

The computing scientist’s main challenge is not to get confused by the
complexities of his own making. 
    — E. W. Dijkstra

One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code. 
    — Ken
Thompson

When in doubt, use brute force. 
    — Ken Thompson

Deleted code is debugged code. 
    — Jeff Sickel

Beauty is more important in computing than anywhere else in technology because
software is so complicated. Beauty is the ultimate defence against complexity. 
    — David Gelernter

A program that produces incorrect results twice as fast is infinitely slower. 
    — John Osterhout

XML is like violence: if it doesn’t solve your problem, you aren’t using enough
of it. 
    — Heard from someone working at Microsoft

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. 
    — Alan Kay

If you want to go somewhere, goto is the best way to get there. 
    — ken

Einstein argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because
God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software
engineer. 
    — Fred Brooks

A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn’t even
know existed can render your own computer unusable. 
    — Leslie Lamport

Testing by itself does not improve software quality. Test results are an
indicator of quality, but in and of themselves, they don’t improve it. Trying to
improve software quality by increasing the amount of testing is like trying to
lose weight by weighing yourself more often. What you eat before you step onto
the scale determines how much you will weigh, and the software development
techniques you use determine how many errors testing will find. If you want to
lose weight, don’t buy a new scale; change your diet. If you want to improve
your software, don’t test more; develop better. 
    — Steve McConnell (Code
Complete)

There’s no sense being exact about something if you don’t even know what you’re
talking about. 
    — John von Neumann

The problem with object-oriented languages is they’ve got all this implicit
environment that they carry around with them. You wanted a banana but what you
got was a gorilla holding the banana and the entire jungle. 
    — Joe Armstrong

The trick is to fix the problem you have, rather than the problem you want. 
    — Bram Cohen

640K ought to be enough for anybody.
    - Bill Gates in 1981

The primary purpose of the DATA statement is to give names to constants; 
instead of referring to pi as 3.141592653589793 at every appearance, the
variable PI can be given that value with a DATA statement and used instead of
the longer form of the constant. This also simplifies modifying the program, 
should the value of pi change.
    — Early FORTRAN manual for Xerox Computers (Attributed to David H. Owens)

The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance.
    — Robert R. Coveyou


Chess Quotes
============

On the chessboard lies and hypocrisy do not survive long. The creative
combination lays bare the presumption of lies; the merciless fact, culminating
in checkmate, contradicts the hypocrite.
    - Emanuel Lasker

Victory goes to the player who makes the next-to-last mistake.
    - Savielly Grigorievitch Tartakower

The chessboard is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the Universe, the
rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature and the player on the
other side is hidden from us.
    - Alexander Alekhine

Strategy requires thought, tactics require observation.
    - Max Euwe

Of chess it has been said that life is not long enough for it, but that is the
fault of life, not chess.
    - William Napier

Chess is war over the board. The object is to crush the opponents mind.
    - Bobby Fischer

 Chess is like life.
    - Boris Spassky

Chess is life.
    - Bobby Fischer

For those given to reflection, chess offers a mirror to self-understanding. Can
you follow through when you have made a plan? How do you hold up under pressure?
Are you impatient? Are you mentally lazy? Can you manage time? Do you play to
win or to draw? Does fear of making mistakes prevent you trying something
creative? Do you attend to details? Are you a gracious winner, or a sore loser?
As well as teaching you about your own strengths and weaknesses, chess can
develop your ability to understand others. To succeed at chess, you must learn
to. Think like your opponent, even if your opponent’s style of thinking is very
different from your own. ‘Life is like a game of chess: we draw up a plan; this
plan, however, is conditional on what — in chess, our opponent, in life, our
fate — will choose to do.‘
    - Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, 1851.

No chess grandmaster is normal; they only differ in the extent of their madness
    - Victor Korchnoi

The hardest game to win is a won game
    - Emanuel Lasker

Winning isn't everything; but losing is nothing
    - Mednis (on the importance of fighting for a draw)

I don’t believe in psychology. I believe in good moves
    - Bobby Fischer

Modern Chess is too much concerned with things like pawn structure. Forget it,
checkmate ends the game
    - Nigel Short

Even the laziest King flees wildly in the face of a double check!
    - Aron Nimzowitsch

Only the player with the initiative has the right to attack
    - Wilhelm Steinitz

I have added these principles to the law: get the Knights into action before
both Bishops are developed
    - Emanuel Lasker

Its just you and your opponent at the board and you’re trying to prove something
    - Bobby Fischer

It is the aim of the modern school, not to treat every position according to one
general law, but according to the principle inherent in the position
    - Richard Reti

The Pawns are the soul of the game, they alone form the attack and defense
    - Francois Andre Danican Philidor

In order to improve your game, you must study the endgame before everything
else, for whereas the endings can be studied and mastered by themselves, the
middle game and the opening must be studied in relation to the endgame
    - Jose Raul Capablanca

Some part of a mistake is always correct
    - Savielly Tartakover

I like the moment when I break a man’s ego
    - Bobby Fischer

The mistakes are there, waiting to be made
    - Savielly Tartakower

Before the endgame, the Gods have placed the middle game
    - Siegbert Tarrasch

Chess was Capablanca’s mother tongue
    - Richard Reti

The defensive power of a pinned piece is only imaginary
    - Aron Nimzowitsch

When the Chess game is over, the Pawn and the King go back to the same box
    - Irish saying

The most powerful weapon in Chess is to have the next move
    - David Bronstein

Why must I lose to this idiot?
    - Aron Nimzowitsch

Help your pieces so they can help you
    - Paul Morphy

It is not enough to be a good player... you must also play well
    - Siegbert Tarrasc

A sacrifice is best refuted by accepting it
    - Wilhelm Steinitz

Later, I began to succeed in decisive games. Perhaps because I realized a very
simple truth: not only was I worried, but also my opponent
    - Mikhail Tal

There are two types of sacrifices: correct ones and mine
    - Mikhail Tal

Best by test: 1. e4
    - Bobby Fischer

A bad plan is better than none at all
    - Frank Marshall

Chess books should be used as we use glasses: to assist the sight, although some
players make use of them as if they thought they conferred sight
    - Jose Raul Capablanca

The passed Pawn is a criminal, who should be kept under lock and key. Mild
measures, such as police surveillance, are not sufficient
    - Aron Nimzowitsch

Chess is a terrible game. If you have no center, your opponent has a freer
position. If you do have a center, then you really have something to worry
about!
    - Siegbert Tarrasch

We don’t really know how the game was invented, though there are suspicions. As
soon as we discover the culprits, we’ll let you know
    - Bruce Pandolfini

Chess is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing
something very clever when they are only wasting their time
    - George Bernard Shaw

You must take your opponent into a deep dark forest where 2+2=5, and the path
leading out is only wide enough for one
    - Mikhail Tal

When your house is on fire, you cant be bothered with the neighbors. Or, as we
say in Chess, if your King is under attack you don’t worry about losing a Pawn
on the Queen’s side
    - Gary Kasparov

What is the object of playing a gambit opening?... To acquire a reputation of
being a dashing player at the cost of losing a game
    - Siegbert Tarrasch

The tactician must know what to do whenever something needs doing; the
strategist must know what to do when nothing needs doing
    - Savielly Tartakover

You may learn much more from a game you lose than from a game you win. You will
have to lose hundreds of games before becoming a good player
    - Jose Raul Capablanca

The isolated Pawn casts gloom over the entire chessboard
    - Aron Nimzowitsch

Chess is a cold bath for the mind
    - Sir John Simon

Capture of the adverse King is the ultimate  but not the first object of the
game
- William Steinitz

Every Pawn is a potential Queen
    - James Mason

Place the contents of the Chess box in a hat, shake them up vigorously, pour
them on the board from a height of two feet, and you get the style of Steinitz
    - H. E. Bird

Pawns are born free, yet they are everywhere in chains
    - Rick Kennedy

One of these modest little moves may be more embarrassing to your opponent than
the biggest threat
    - Siegbert Tarrasch

You need not play well - just help your opponent to play badly
    - Genrikh Chepukaitis

It is difficult to play against Einstein’s theory - on his first loss to Fischer
    - Mikhail Tal

Bobby just drops the pieces and they fall on the right squares
    - Miguel Najdorf (on Bobby Fischer)

Do you realize Fischer almost never has any bad pieces? He exchanges them, and
the bad pieces remain with his opponents
    - Yuri Balashov

Checkers is for tramps
    - Paul Morphy

When you play Bobby, it is not a question if you win or lose. It is a question
if you survive
    - Boris Spassky

We like to think
    - Gary Kasparov

It was clear to me that the vulnerable point of the American Grandmaster (Bobby
Fischer) was in double-edged, hanging, irrational positions, where he often
failed to find a win even in a won position
    - Efim Geller

In Fischer’s hands, a slight theoretical advantage is as good a being a Queen
ahead
    - Isaac Kashdan

When I asked Fischer why he had not played a certain move in our game, he
replied: ‘Well, you laughed when I wrote it down!’
    - Mikhail Tal

Suddenly it was obvious to me in my analysis I had missed what Fischer had found
with the greatest of ease at the board
    - Mikhail Botvinnik (on game with Bobby Fischer in Varna Olympiad)

The King is a fighting piece. Use it!
    - Wilhelm Steinitz

The laws of Chess do not permit a free choice: you have to move whether you like
it or not
    - Emanuel Lasker

Up to this point White has been following well-known analysis. But now he makes
a fatal error: he begins to use his own head
    - Siegbert Tarrasch

Scientific Quotes
=================

You are not thinking. You are merely being logical.
    - Niels Bohr to Albert Einstien

Your Highness, I have no need of this hypothesis.
    - Pierre Laplace (1749-1827), to Napoleon on why his works on celestial
   mechanics make no mention of God.

God created integers. All the rest is the work of Man.
    - Kronecker

Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits, is, of
course, in a state of sin.
    - John von Neumann

It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you
are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.
    - Richard Feynman

It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated
immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.
    - Watson and Crick

God runs electromagnetics by wave theory on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and
the Devil runs them by quantum theory on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday.
    - William Bragg

If a 'religion' is defined to be a system of ideas that contains unprovable
statements, then Godel taught us that mathematics is not only a religion, it is
the only religion that can prove itself to be one.
    - John Barrow

This question of trying to figure out whether a book is good or bad by looking
at it carefully or by taking the reports of a lot of people who looked at it
carelessly is like this famous old problem: Nobody was permitted to see the
Emperor of China, and the question was, "What is the length of the Emperor of
China’s nose?" To find out, you go all over the country asking people what they
think the length of the Emperor of China’s nose is, and you average it. And that
would be very “accurate” because you averaged so many people. But it’s no way to
find anything out; when you have a very wide range of people who contribute
without looking carefully at it. You don’t improve your knowledge of the
situation by averaging.
    - Richard Feynman

It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is.
Physics concerns what we can say about nature.
    - Neils Bohr

The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position 
among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory
of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations - then so much the
worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation
- well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory
is found to be against the Second Law of Thermodynamics I can give you no hope;
there is nothing for it to collapse in deepest humiliation.
	― Arthur Eddington (New Pathways in Science)

What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of
questioning.
	- Werner Heisenberg

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest
person to fool. 
	- Richard P. Feynman

Suppose aliens invade the earth and threaten to obliterate it in a year's 
time unless human beings can find the Ramsey number for red five and blue 
five. We could marshal the world's best minds and fastest computers, and 
within a year we could probably calculate the value. If the aliens demanded 
the Ramsey number for red six and blue six, however, we would have no choice 
but to launch a preemptive attack.
    - Paul Erdos ("Ramsey Theory" - Ronald L. Graham and Joel H. Spencer)

Political Quotes
================
Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm
want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come
back to his farm in one piece? ...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 peace makers for lack of
patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.
    - Herman Goering (Nuremberg trials)

Why don't they pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting anybody from learning
anything? If it works as well as prohibition did, in five years Americans would
be the smartest race of people on Earth.
    - Will Rogers

You can lead a man to Congress, but you can't make him think.
    - Milton Berle

I had a little fantasy that goes like this: I'm getting to be an influential
person in San Francisco; what if I and five other powerful guys with cigars got
together in a smoke-filled room to decide who would be the next mayor of San
Francisco? We'd do it because we're good guys and we really want the city to be
wonderful for everybody. Then I thought, what's the difference between five good
guys holding that kind of power and five bad guys? Just good intentions, and
intentions can be corrupted.
    - Francis Ford Coppola

A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves.
    - Bertrand de Jouvenel

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known
unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there
are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.
    - Donald Rumsfeld, U.S. Secretary of Defense

Literary Quotes
===============
There is an art, it says, or rather, a knack to flying. The knack lies in
learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.
    - Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy

"You are not on the road to Hell, You tell me with a fanatic glee -- Vain
boaster, what shall that avail If hell is on its road to thee"
- Saki

"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?" "That depends a
good deal on where you want to get to." "I don't much care where..." "Then it
doesn't matter which way you go..."
    - Conversation between Alice and the Cheshire cat

There is always hope
    - J.R.R. Tolkein (LOTR, The Two Towers)

 War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
    - George Orwell (1984)

Not all those who wander are lost.
    - J.R.R. Tolkein

It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near
him.
    - J.R.R. Tolkein

The wide world is all about you; you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot
forever fence it out.
    - J.R.R. Tolkein

All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.
    - J.R.R. Tolkein (Gandalf in Lord of the Rings)

Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable,
must be the truth.
    - Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes)

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
    - George Orwell (Animal Farm)

During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.
    - George Orwell  (1984)

I have no data yet. It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.
Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories instead of theories to
suit facts.
    - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle [Sherlock Holmes]

In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very
angry and is widely regarded as a bad move.
    - Douglas Adams [Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy]

The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.
    - W. Shakespeare [The Merchent of Venice]