Here is the list of quotations and sayings I use for email signatures.
Jim Menard, jimm@io.com, http://www.io.com/~jimm/
Ruby and Smalltalk and dynamic runtimes,
Emacs and shell scripts and UNIX command lines,
Macros and lambdas and networking pings,
These are a few of my favorite things.
"[G]ood programming ... [is] like sex: you're not necessarily good at it
just because you're enjoying yourself. It depends what your partners'
experience is."
— TheophileEscargot in a blog comment
"Pisces: You will be busy exchanging ions across your gill membranes
today—watch out for predators, and trust your lateral line organs."
— Pharyngula (http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula)
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.
— Clarke's First Law, Arthur C. Clarke
The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by
accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals. We cause
accidents.
— Nathaniel S. Borenstein
Good engineering is hard to find, but bad engineering is fun to laugh at.
— Dan Franklin, on the xBBN mailing list
"There are two kinds of people, those who finish what they start and so on."
— Robert Byrne
"My 7 year old daughter: 'What's a Mad Scientist?'
Me: 'Um, like a scientist who does crazy things with their science.'
Her: 'Oh. I think I'll be a Mad Geologist.'"
— Posted by John at Chaotic Utopia
"What is work? Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at
or near the earth's surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling
other people to do so."
— Bertrand Russell, "In Praise of Idleness"
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
— Slashdot sig of Andy_R
"Eternity is a very long time, especially towards the end."
— Stephen Hawking
"You can gain experience, if you are careful to avoid empty redundancy. Do not
fall into the error of the artisan who boasts of twenty years experience in
his craft while in fact he has had only one year of experience—twenty
times." — Trevanian, in Shibumi
"For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of
life, please press three."
— Alice Kahn
"I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of
people."
— Sir Isaac Newton
"If you put a million monkeys at a million keyboards, one of them will
eventually write a Java program. The rest of them will write Perl programs."
— Anonymous
Perl's spec is a printout of Larry's source code, which looks the same in
ascii, ebcdic, and gzipped binary form.
— Steve Yegge, http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/scheming-is-believing
You can learn a lot about a person if you just take the time to inject them
with sodium pentothal.
— Alicat1194
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary
Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
— Benjamin Franklin
"Give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atom-smashers, and a girl in
a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who
writes the nation's laws."
— S.J. Perelman
"Programming communities need collective nouns. An obfuscation of Perl
hackers. A stalwart of C coders. A furrow of assembly wranglers. An effusing
of Ruby hackers. An ulcer of CSS authors. A grumbling of Lisp coders."
— Anonymous blog comment
"I always thought Smalltalk would beat Java, I just didn't know it would be
called 'Ruby' when it did."
— Kent Beck
"Axiom : Any technical group of sufficient size and activity will
spontaneously generate its very own sociopath."
— Joe Gregorio
"10 percent of computer users are Mac users, but remember, we are the top 10
percent."
— Douglas Adams
"On a long enough time scale, I guess ALL variables are temporary."
— "John Bigboote", in a comment on thedailywtf.com
"Other than telling us how to live, think, marry, pray, vote, invest, educate
our children and, now, die, I think the Republicans have done a fine job of
getting government out of our personal lives." — Craig Carter
"When all a programmer has is a hammer, all screws appear to be stupid."
— W. Jason Gilmore, paraphrasing a comment overheard at PyCon
In programming, do, or undo. There is always try. — Yoda (via Ron Jeffries)
"Can Emacs fly backwards around the world to turn back time? Which vulcan-grip
key combo is that?" "Control-Time, of course. Actually, you have to prefix
that with a negative number, if you want to go back. Obviously."
— http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?EmacsIsSuperman
The iMac is just evidence of how dangerous vi is. Obviously Steve came up
with the name by accident after forgetting he was *already* in insert mode.
— dagbrown on #emacs
"I think it would be harder for a good programmer to change editors than
to change languages." — Kenny Tilton in comp.lang.smalltalk
"Don't let what you can't do stand in the way of what you can." — John Wooden
Ben Zealley's corollary to Clarke's Third Law: "If you cannot distinguish my
technology from magic, you are insufficiently advanced."
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is insufficiently documented."
— kabdib on slashdot
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a Perl
script." — Programming Perl, 2nd edition
"Any technology which is distinguishable from magic is insufficiently
advanced." — Unknown
"Any sufficiently advanced continent is indistinguishable from Diskworld."
— John Dean in alt.fan.cecil-adams
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo."
— Unknown
"Despite the surge of power you feel upon learning Ruby, resist the urge to
trip others or slap them in the bald head. DO NOT LORD YOUR RUBYNESS OVER
OTHERS!" — why the lucky stiff on ruby-talk
An engineer is someone who does list processing in FORTRAN.
— .sig of TimC, seen in rec.humor.oracle.d
"I've always found [the news media] quite accurate, except when they're
reporting on a topic I know something about."
— Keith F. Lynch on rec.arts.sf.fandom
"So this comedian goes onstage and stands in front of the mike. Everyone in
the audience goes wild with laughter, and then the comedian says 'By the way,
all your drinks have been spiked with thiotimoline'."
— David Silberstein in rec.arts.sf.written
"read my lisps: ich bin ein emacser" — tekonivel on #emacs
"Innovation is not about saying yes to everything. It's about saying NO to all
but the most crucial features."
— Steve Jobs
"...it uses Smalltalk, rather than modern-day kludges such as Java, which
resembles a modern object-orientated environment in the way that a pub ashtray
resembles a cigar store."
— Andrew Orlowski, "Forgotten language enables nonstop gadgets", The Reg
"Generics in Java are an apology for having collections of Objects, and are
somewhat like the puritan's suspicion that someone, somewhere, might be
enjoying themselves."
— Steven T Abell in comp.lang.smalltalk
"Linux - because Mommy taught me to share."
— miracle69 on slashdot
I sit in a chair, pressing small plastic rectangles with my fingers while
peering at many tiny, colored dots.
"Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about
telescopes."
— E. W. Dijkstra
"Emacs is like a brain, at maximum you can only utilize about 10% of its real
power :)"
— delYsid on #emacs
"Lisp is the red pill."
— John Fraser, comp.lang.lisp
"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and
looks like work."
— Thomas A. Edison
"Scissors cuts Paper covers Rock crushes Lizard poisons Spock smashes Scissors
decapitates Lizard eats Paper disproves Spock vaporizes Rock crushes Scissors"
— Rock Paper Scissors Spock Lizard,
http://www.samkass.com/theories/RPSSL.html
"College students tend to rate all knowledge based on its ability to supply
them with beer. (There's an implicit conversion between money and beer that
occurs in there - but its transparent to the thought process)."
— Todd Blanchard
"I have a red sign on my door. It says 'If this sign is blue, you're moving
too fast.'"
— pyros on slashdot
"An operating system is a collection of things that don't fit into a
language. There shouldn't be one."
— Dan Ingalls
[On the Apple supercomputer at Virginia Tech] "Besides if an AI manifests
itself it'd be less likely to destroy the world and more likely to tell you
that your white socks do not match your purple tie." — Epistax on Slashdot
"As far as I've seen, once those XML worms eat into your brain, it's hard
to ever get anything practical done again. To an XML person, every nail
looks like a thumb. Or something like that." — fejj on advogato.org
"All this pseudo-template stuff is just fear dressed up as syntax."
— Dave Thomas, commenting on Java's new generics.
"No quantity can be harder to perceive and harder to measure than
innovation that never occurs." — J. Gleik
"Yes, I know /. is slanted. It still irritates me though."
— CrayzyJ on slashdot
"Well, if it wasn't slanted it'd be |."
— Eunuchswear on slashdot
"Carpe per diem... sieze the pay."
— "miker" in rec.music.makers.builders
"Even your Magic Eight Ball can tell you, 'Outlook not so good.'"
— Chris Mattern in rec.arts.anime.misc
"Thanks to the joint efforts of OpenOffice, Mozilla, and a few others, Emacs
officially entered the category of lightweight utilities." — kalifa on /.
# A Ruby script that prints all the digits of pi (sorted).
(0 .. 9).each { | i | print i while true }
"[H]ave these people *really* got so little to say, that they go around
quoting other people?"
— andyt
DataVision, the Open Source report designer. http://datavision.sourceforge.net
A: Yes
Q: Is top-posting bad?
— Derek Milhous Zumsteg
"'Deconstruct and recontextualize' sounds fancier than 'cut and paste',
but it's the same thing." — Donald Welsh in rec.humor.oracle.d
"I went on the Internet to find out how to prevent squirrel damage."
— Betty March
"This looks like a job for emergency pants!" — Torg, www.sluggy.com
"Anyone else picturing Wallace sitting in front of a Rube Goldburgesque
workstation, accidentally booting up Netscape and crying out, 'It's the
wrong browser, Grommit!' ?" — Jim Evans in rec.humor.oracle.d
"Indeed, an upsettingly large part of academia right now seems to be
working on bringing Java into the 1980s... sigh." — Avi Bryant
"I want to be remembered as someone who's not dead." — Christine Peterson
"HTML belongs in email the way vinyl siding belongs on gerbils. Sure
its cute at first, but its just plain WRONG!!!"
— .sig of Carmiac
Crash Windows XP in two lines of code:
#include <stdio.h>
main(void) { int i; for(i = 0; i < 5 ; i++) printf("\t\t\b\b\b"); }
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it." — Alan Kay
"The American legal system is, of course, just the British kernel with a
shorter uptime and a few clumsy security patches slapped in."
— www.ntk.net
"If you ever fear that machines will surpass humans in intelligence, just
ask Microsoft to write the OS." — pieceoftheuniverse in rec.humor.oracle.d
"Linux was released on August 25th, 1991. Therefore it is a Virgo, not a
Cancer." — Kevin Lyda
"My parents just came back from a planet where the dominant lifeform
had no bilateral symmetry, and all I got was this stupid F-Shirt."
— .sig of Paul Archer
"The wonder of all these Internet security problems is that they are
continually labeled as 'e-mail viruses' or 'Internet worms,' rather than
the more correct designation of 'Windows viruses' or 'Microsoft Outlook
viruses.'" — Robert X. Cringely
"Lead me not into temptation. I can find it myself."
— Jeffrey Kaplan's .sig, seen in rec.humor.oracle.d
"It's overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill."
— Anonymous Coward on slashdot.org
"Source code in files. How quaint." — Attributed to Kent Beck
"Good code in perl is fine, but there's something about bad code in perl
that's worse than bad code in other languages, something very HP-Lovecraft-
mad-servants-of-the-elder-gods-chattering-in-the-extradimensional-
insect-language kind of bad that makes my head hurt when I have to read
it." — Jish Karoshi in comp.lang.ruby
"There are three principal ways to lose money: wine, women, and engineers.
While the first two are more pleasant, the third is by far the more
certain." — Baron Rothschild, ca. 1800
"I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I
can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it."
— Jack Handey
"I've memorized all the digits of pi. Just not the order they go in."
— Charles A. Lieberman, in rec.humor.oracle.d
"I used to have a Heisenbergmobile. Every time I looked at the speedometer,
I got lost." — Critical Path in alt.geek
"I cannot articulate enough to express my dislike to people who think that
understanding spoils your experience... How would they know?"
— Marvin Minsky
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not
worth knowing." — Alan J. Perlis
"If the Computer is a universal control system, let's give kids universes
to control." — Theodore H. Nelson (1974)
"I invented the term Object-Oriented, and I can tell you I did not have C++
in mind." — Alan Kay
"Specifying an object, sending it a message, and getting back another
object as the result are the only things that ever happen in Smalltalk
code." — Ted Kaehler/ Dave Patterson, A Taste of Smalltalk
"Quotation confesses inferiority." — Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Linux is like a wigwam. No windows, no gates and an apache inside."
— Unknown
"No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical." — Niels Bohr
"Rumor has it the internet is out of money. Pack your stuff and go home."
— "Pud", www.f***edcompany.com
"COGITO, EGGO SUM." I think, therefore I am a waffle.
— .sig of Mr. Ska on Slashdot.org
"I am sure that like Java, [C#] will be a 'no pointer' language, where the
most common runtime error will be a 'NULL pointer exception'."
— Jerry Kott, in comp.lang.smalltalk
"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."
— John Gilmore, EFF
"Space Opera. It's not over until the fat lady explosively decompresses..."
— Matt Ruff / Lisa Gold, rec.arts.sf.written
"My other car is a cdr." — .sig of wishus on Slashdot.org
"Build a man a fire and he's warm for the rest of the evening.
Set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life."
— Steve Taylor, in comp.lang.smalltalk
"Sell a man a fish, he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish, you've lost
a customer."
— hartley_h, in comp.lang.perl.misc
"Do Squeakers Dream of Electric Mice?" — Mike Thomas
(http://www.squeak.org)
"What's a Superbowl? Does it save the city from ruin and destruction ON TOP
OF containing some part of a complete breakfast?" — J. on alt.fan.tom-servo
"How do you keep an Englishman entertained in his dotage? Tell him a joke
when he's young." — Charles-A. Rovira
"Mind you, deep in the IBM VM operating system source we once found a
comment that said 'remember to collect laundry on way home'."
— Alan J. Flavell in comp.lang.perl.misc
"Anyway, I heard that The Artist Formerly Known As Prince has now renamed
himself 'The Artist', making his full title 'The Artist, Formerly Known As
The Artist Formerly Known As Prince, Formerly Known As Prince'." — Screwtape
"All those who believe in psychokinesis raise my hand." — Anon.
As a math major, I don't have to be able to add — I just have to be able
to PROVE that I can add.
"Given infinite time, 100 monkeys could type out the complete works of
Shakespeare. Win 98 source code? Eight monkeys, five minutes."
— NullGrey
"Come to think of it, there are already a million monkeys on a million
typewriters, and Usenet is NOTHING like Shakespeare."
— Blair Houghton
"$665.95: The Retail Price of the Beast" — Unknown
"333. Mini-Me to the beast." — Dave Hinz on r.h.o.d
"I know you're not all figments of my imagination, because if you were,
you'd all look like beautiful models, and you'd also all be giving me
money. That's what *I* would imagine." — Paul L. Kelly in r.h.o.d
"Power corrupts. Absolute power is kinda neat." — Jeffrey Kaplan in r.h.o.d
"333: Eric the Half A Beast" — Tim Allen in rec.humor.oracle.d
"Maybe we could change the [SETI] program's title to 'Search for
Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence and Girl-girl Action!'. That would get the
ol' tax dollars rolling in..." — Bill East in rec.humor.oracle.d
"The reason why there is no good commercial Java development environment
is that the only folks that are good enough to write one all use EMACS."
— Unknown, on comp.lang.java.programmer
"Never anthropomorphize computers. They hate that." — Ricdude on slashdot
"Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc
informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."
— Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming
"Congratulations are in order for Tom Reid. He says he just found out he is
the winner of the 2021 Psychic of the Year award." — Seen on slashdot
"If you mark half [of this newsgroup's] posts as read, you still get
basically all the same information, just with a bit less detail. [This] is
a holographic newsgroup." — Tom "Tom" Harrington in rec.humor.oracle.d
"You might do well to heed the bumper sticker on a laser I had once:
'do not look into laser with remaining eye.'" — Daniel E. Macks
"The world is divided into one group: those who start counting at 0,
and those who don't." — Unknown
"BeOS: The Jackie Chan of operating systems." — Pat Gratton
...Except Jackie Chan is still alive.
"You will notice that BeOS has taken the best parts from all the major
operating systems and made them its own. We've got the power of the Unix
command line, the ease of use of the Macintosh interface, and Minesweeper
from Windows." — Tyler Riti
"Dvorak users of the world flgkd!" — Kirsten Chevalier in rec.humor.oracle.d
"Master, does Emacs have the Buddha nature?" the novice asked.
"I don't see why not. It's got bloody well everything else."
— John Fouhy
"Unix is extremely user-friendly. It also happens to be extremely
selective when picking its friends." — Daniel E. Macks
"If at first you don't succeed, don't go skydiving." — Unknown
"T-shirts are the computer industry's only persistent objects."
— Seen in R. L. Peskin's .sig
"Ask not a question of USENET, for it will answer both 'Yea.' and 'Nay.'
and 'Ask in another group.'" — Simon Slavin
"Cheat sheet for the 21st century: Closed, bad. Open, good." — Wired
"The Be staff...went to see the movie 'Men in Black.' ...The movie makes
a point that is somehow appropriate — It is impossible to completely rid
the universe of bugs, but at least you can drive something fast, arm
yourself with powerful tools, and look good doing it." — markg@be.com
"The 'inverse Dilbert correlation factor' — the more Dilbert cartoons pasted
on office doors and bulletin boards, the less well off the project is."
— Yourdon, "Death March"
"We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the
Complete Works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is
not true." — Robert Wilensky, University of California
—- BEGIN META GEEK CODE — --
gc
—- END META GEEK CODE — --
"The human mind is a dangerous plaything, boys. When it's used for evil,
watch out! But when it's used for good, then things are much nicer."
— The Tick
"The theory of computation states that all automatons can be emulated by a
Turing machine. I have a less abstract but more practical motto: If you can
do it on Intel, you can do it damn near anywhere!" — Eugene O'Neil
"An object at rest cannot be stopped!"
— The Evil Midnight Bomber What Bombs At Midnight
"Yes, evil comes in many forms, whether it be a man-eating cow or Joseph
Stalin, but you can't let the package hide the pudding! Evil is just plain
bad! You don't cotton to it. You gotta smack it in the nose with the
rolled-up newspaper of goodness! Bad dog! Bad dog!" — The Tick
"You guys have made me the happiest giant talking worm in the world."
— Earthworm Jim
"Sanity is a one-trick pony: rationality is all you get. With insanity,
the sky's the limit!" — The Tick
"Is 'anal-retentive' hyphenated?" — Alison Bechdel
"It's the wrong trousers, Gromit. And they've gone wrong!" — Wallace
"Verbing weirds language." — Calvin
"Even anarchists have an agenda." — Keith Beal
"Don't eat crackers in the bed of your future or you'll get ... scratchy!"
— The Tick
"Yeah, well, don't count your weasels before they pop, dink." — The Tick
"Slideshow ... boring. Loosing ... consciousness ..." — The Tick
"Eating kittens is just plain ... plain wrong! And no one should do it, ever!"
— The Tick
"This looks like a job for Legal Tender!" — The Tick
"SPOON!" — The Tick's battle cry
"Not in the face! Not in the face!" — Arthur's battle cry
"I don't know the meaning of the word surrender! I mean, I know it, I'm not
dumb ... just not in this context." — The Tick
"Hey, wait a minute. You've got both eyes! You're no special agent.
You're just some jerk who hates my moustache!" - The Tick
"I have found that humans often use Smalltalk during awkward moments."
— Commander Data, ST TNG
"Abraham Lincoln didn't die in vain. He died in Washington, D.C."
— Firesign Theatre
"Brought to you again by the Department of Redundancy Department."
— Firesign Theatre
"Java: the elegant simplicity of C++ and the blazing speed of Smalltalk."
— Roland Turner
Dash dash space newline
Four-line witty quotation
Perfect message end
— Donald Welsh in rec.humor.oracle.d
WS-* is to REST as Theory is to Practice
— Title of blog post by Dare Obasanjo