Words
An adage is a concise, memorable, and usually philosophical aphorism that communicates an important truth derived from experience, custom, or both.
A law is a universal principle that describes the fundamental nature of something, the universal properties and the relationships between things, or a description that purports to explain these principles and relationships.
In philosophy, a razor is a principle or rule of thumb that allows one to eliminate ('shave off') unlikely explanations for a phenomenon, or avoid unnecessary actions.
A proverb is a simple and insightful, traditional saying that expresses a perceived truth based on common sense or experience.
An effect is an idiom describing causality.
Similar to a paraphrase, but only as applies to quotes.
Edward de Bono
- You don’t have to agree with what you have just said to yourself.
- Calling all human thinking problem-solving restrains our potential uses of thinking.
- Those who do not understand your logic will not appreciate your proof, but they will appreciate your attack.
- If you put something simple, you are at the mercy of those who understand neither the subject or simplicity.
- There’s no greater block to creativity than the belief we already have the best answer.
- If you create something not there before, then you are creative. But this may not be a good thing. You may have just created a mess.
- If you do not fit into any of the simple boxes you will be unfairly forced into one of them or ignored completely.
- Logic can never be better than the perceptions and assumptions on which it is based.
- Previous information strongly affects the way new information is received.
- You can analyse the past but you have to design the future. Otherwise you’ll just fall into it.
- Socrates, Plato, & Aristotle did a good job in kick-starting our thinking, we’ve been trapped by it ever since.
- We are so smug and satisfied with our existing thinking that we are blind to how poorly it serves us in matters of human affairs, creativity, and design.
- Dealing with redundant complexity is an inefficient and unnecessary waste of time, attention, and mental energy.
- The purpose of any operation is to deliver value to someone. The best operations deliver value to everyone.
- Systems that seek to cover all exceptions make it immensely complicated for the bulk of people who are not exceptions.
- Robust and flexible systems often contain a lot of duplication and redundancy.
- It is only when you have a headache that not having a headache is given such a high value.
- Craftsmen engage themselves in complex tasks. The complexity of those tasks often gives a simplicity to their lives.
Thomas Carlyle
- I've got a great ambition to die of exhaustion rather than boredom.
- A great man shows his greatness by the way he treats little men.
- A person usually has two reasons for doing something, a good reason and the real reason.
Warren Buffet
- In the end the only wealth creation comes from what the business creates. There’s no magic to it.
- If you go on for a long time with a huge number of participants playing with ever increasing sums it creates its own apparent truth that can go on for a considerable period of time. It doesn’t go on forever.
Robert Cialdini
- With the sophisticated mental apparatus we have used to build world eminence as a species, we have created an environment so complex, fast-paced, and information-laden, that we must increasingly deal with it in the fashion of the animals we long ago transcended.
Winston Churchill
- Democracy is the worst form of government, except all those other forms we’ve tried.
- The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.
- Now, however, we have a new experience. We have victory - a remarkable and definite victory. The bright gleam has caught the helmets of our soldiers, and warmed and cheered all our hearts... Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning..
Ehrlich
- To err is human, it takes a computer to really foul things up!
Kessels
- Brilliance begins at rock bottom.
- If your ideas aren’t routinely mocked when shared with those who follow the rules, you’re probably doing it wrong.
Dave Farley
- To achieve something releasable everyday, you need to be able to make a change, make a mistake, and correct it in a single working day.
Richard Feynman
- The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
Benjamin Graham
- In the short run it’s a voting machine and in the long run it’s a weighing machine.
Tim Harford
- It’s easy to get stuck if we insist on never going downhill.
- The trouble is that when we start quantifying and measuring everything, we soon begin to change the world to fit the way we measure it.
- Targets tend to be simple while the world is complicated.
- We assume that by measuring one thing, we’re measuring everything. That is delusional. We hit the target but miss the point.
- As soon as we formalise a rule of thumb into a target, it becomes a source of distortion.
- We fail to see that a computer a hundred times more accurate and a million times faster will make ten thousand times more mistakes than a human.
- People who make the rules are hypnotised by a tidy aesthetic that looks good on paper but which is a disaster for those living and working under those tidy rules.
- Racial and ideological purity is not a recipe for success.
Harley
- Laws matter. They can give you confidence about the properties of the code you write, and how you rewrite it. They permit you to port concepts across languages to the extent the language can support them. On the other hand, if you are using JavaScript, then lawfulness may not be a priority.
Mark Henderson
- It is when agile minds follow interesting leads for their own sake that most innovations emerge.
- Throw out too much curiosity-led science in favour of applied work and you risk being left with nothing to apply.
Tony Hoare (C. A. R. Hoare)
- The readability of programs is immeasurably more important than their writability.
- If anyone is allowed to introduce inefficiency it should be the user programmer, not the language designer.
- If a compiler cannot diagnose the syntax of an individual statement until it reaches the end of the program, what hope has a poor human?.
Jez Humble
- Users don’t know what they want, they know what they don’t want once you’ve built it for them.
Jack Matson
- To survive you must adapt faster than your surroundings can change.
William James
- A new idea is first condemned as ridiculous, then dismissed as trivial, until finally, it becomes what everybody knows.
JBlitzen
- Programming is a constant battle between precision and simplicity. The source code is both extremely precise and extremely simple; it defines a process perfectly with minimal mental work necessary to understand it.
Kerr (1)
- On the folly of rewarding A while hoping for B
Kerr (2)
- Creating a complex system from scratch and understanding how it works is easier than coming to a system from the outside and figuring out how it works.
Paul Krugman
- Productivity isn’t everything, but in the long-run it is almost everything.
Daniel Levitin
- It’s not that experts are never wrong, it’s just that, statistically, they’re more likely to be right.
Thomas Mann
- A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
Friedrich Nietzsche
- He who has a why can bear almost any how.
- To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.
Dan North
- Ignorance is the single biggest impediment to throughput.
- A programmer's confidence in their own code is a notoriously poor indicator of quality.
Jordan Peterson
- Sacrifice. You get to pick your damn sacrifice. That's all, you don't get to not make one. You're sacrificial if you want to be or not.
- They say that all culture is terrible, the human being is a dispoiler, and nature is perfect. NO! Nature kills you, culture keeps you alive. There are things about you that are honourable and good and things about you that aren’t.
- You can tell when you’ve discovered something in the social sciences because you’re not happy about it.
- You have to be a fool before you can be a master.
- Freud was, afterall, a genius. You can tell that because people still hate him.
- Don’t ever underestimate the destructive power of sins of omission.
- You don’t want to do so much work that the amount of work you do interferes with the amount of work you could still do.
- The heat goes on, the pressures on. You're in the desert and it's unpleasant. You wait it out, you wait it out, you wait it out. You haven’t done anything wrong. You wait it out, you don’t apologise, you don’t back down. You wait and things will viciously turn in your favour. Now waiting it out whilst you’re roasting, that’s not pleasant.
- The evil king is always whittling away at the structure of the state. And you have to be awake and sharp to stop that from happening. So you don’t become corrupt, so your family doesn’t become corrupt, and so your state doesn’t have to become corrupt. You have to have your eyes open, and your wits sharp, and your words at the ready. And you have to be educated and you have to know about your history. And you have to know how to think, and you have to know how to read, and you have to know how to speak, and you have to know how to aim. And you have to be willing to hoist the troubles of the world upon your shoulders.
- There's only two reasons that men and women differ. One is cultural, the other is biological. When you minimise the cultural differences you maximise the biological differences.
Pragmatic Dave
- A good design is easier to change than a bad one.
- Big upfront design is dumb, no upfront design is dumber.
Propst
- We all have this desire for formal order. The only thing is that it conflicts severely with the more organic kind of spatial order human interchange uses best.
Purtle & Roman
- The unintended side effects of awareness days, people may conflate being knowledgeable about a health issue with taking action to address it.
Paul Rulkens
- If you want results you’ve never had before, you need to start doing things you’ve never done before.
- Many people go through life acting like a mediocre racecar driver, who sits in his car, looks through his rearview mirror, sees his competition, and is so far behind they think they are first.
- If you do what everyone else is doing, you get results everyone else is getting and those are normal results.
- For many people delegation means giving their work to other people, that’s not delegation, that’s management.
- If you spend your life compensating for your weaknesses, you’ll end your life with a very strong set of weaknesses.
Seneca
- It is inevitable that life will be not just short but very miserable for those who acquire by great toil what they must keep by greater toil.
Haim Shapira
- A statistician who has one foot immersed in icy water and the other in boiling water feels wonderful on average.
- Before making any decision ask yourself what would happen if everyone shared your views. And remember, not everyone does share your views.
~Unknown
- Trust no one, especially yourself.
- It’s easier to count trees in a forest than measure biodiversity.
- The mouse dies in the mousetrap because it doesn’t understand why the cheese is free.
- Bees don’t waste their time explaining to flies why honey is better than shit.
- Good judgement comes from experience, experience comes from bad judgement.
- You can’t make good decisions without good thinking, and good thinking requires time.
- There’s nothing agile about not planning to accommodate feedback.
- An uninformed majority will nearly always lose a battle against an informed minority
Thomas Sowell
- The academic world is the natural habitat of half-baked ideas. Except for those fields where there are decisive tests.
- If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism.
- Some things are believed because they are demonstrable true but many other things are believed because they are consistent with a widely held vision of the world, and this vision is accepted as a substitute for facts..
- It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.
- One of the ways of understanding the consequences of economic decisions is to look at them in terms of the incentives they create rather than simply the goals they pursue. This means that consequences matter more than intentions, and not just the immediate consequences but also the longer run repercussions.
- Human beings have been making mistakes and committing sins as long as there has been human beings. The great catastrophes of history have usually involved much more than that. Typically, there has been an addditional and crucial ingredient. Some method by which feedback from reality has been prevented so that a dangerous course of action could be blindly continued to a fatal conclusion.
Lionel Robbins
- Economics is study of the use of scarce resources that have alternative uses.
Brian Sutton-Smith
- The opposite of play is not work. It’s depression.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
- Better to be loved by a dozen than liked by the hundreds.
Yanis Varoufakis
- If you think about it, all wealth creation has always been produced collectively through recycling and through a gradual accumulation of knowledge.
- Every crisis is pregnant with a recovery.
Voltaire
- History never repeats itself. Man always does.
- It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.
- Our wretched species is so mad that those who walk on the well-trodden path always throw stones at those who are showing a new road.
- The more I read, the more I acquire, the more certain I am that I know nothing.
Wallace
- A close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn’t know they are locked up.
- Learning how to think means learning how to be a little less arrogant and be a little more critically aware of oneself.
- Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe.
Duncan Watts
- Everything is obvious, once you know the answer.
- Common sense is wonderful at making sense of the world, but not necessarily at understanding it.
- The key difference between science and storytelling is that in science we perform experiments that explicitly test our ‘stories’. And when they don’t work, we modify the story until they do.
- The problem is not that a model is bad, but that all models of complex systems are bad.
- Arguably, it was precisely the wisdom of the crowd that got us into this mess in the first place.
- The only way to deal adequately with strategic uncertainty is to manage it continuously.
- Applying generic rules to a complex world was an invitation to practical failure, social disillusionment, or most likely both.
- Plans fail not because planners ignore common sense, but rather because they rely on their own common sense to reason about the behaviour of people who are different from them.
- One cannot simply decide at one's convenience when to identify with one's ancestors and when to absolve oneself of them.
- Success drives from a complicated mix of individual choices, social constraints, and random chance.
- The social world is far messier than the physical world, and the more we learn about it, the messier it is likely to seem.
Earl Wiener
- Exotic devices create exotic problems.
- Digital devices tune out small errors while creating opportunities for large ones.
- If at first you don’t succeed… try a new system or a different approach.
- Whenever you solve a problem you usually create one. You can only hope that the one you created is less critical than the one you eliminated.
Niklaus Wirth
- A system that is not understandably in its entirety or at least to a significant degree by a single individual should probably not be built.
Marcus Aurelius
- The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.
Theodore Levitt
- People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!.
Carl Jung
- Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.
William Edwards Deming
- A bad system will beat a good person every time.
- It is wrong to suppose that if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.
- Let’s make toast the American way: I’ll burn, you scrape.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
- 'No don't. Don't dig up the past. Dwell on the past an you'll lose an eye'. But the proverb goes on to say 'forget the past and you'll lose both eyes'.
- Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free.
Terry Pratchett
- (Esmerelda Weatherwax) God helps those who help themselves.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
- To be great is to be misunderstood.
Eliyahu Goldratt
- Technology can bring benefits if, and only if, it can diminish limitations.
Edsger Dijkstra
- Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.
- Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better.
- The computing scientist’s main challenge is not to get confused by the complexities of his own making.
- If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.
- Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence!.
- The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.
- Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.
- It is not only the violin that shapes the violinist, we are all shaped by the tools we train ourselves to use, and in this respect programming languages have a devious influence: they shape our thinking habits.
- The purpose of abstracting is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise.
- The human tendency to get attached to the sources of one's misery has been hailed the great stabilising factor in many marriages and religions, but by their morbid attachment to those inadequate vehicles those disciplines have maneuvered themselves into a position in which they are beyond help.
- There is often a grave discrepancy between what the world asks for and what the world needs.
- Successful scientific research is the art of doing the just possible, and consequently scientific development is much better regarded as an autonomous process with its own private rules than as a planned activity with external objectives.
- Of course you are free to join "for your protection" an XYZ community by accepting its standards as law; but if you do so, know that the scientist in you has been replaced by the party member.
Publius Cornelius Tacitus
- A bad peace is worse than war.
- It is human nature to hate the one whom you have hurt.
- The desire for safety stands against every great and noble enterprise.
John Stuart Mill
- I have learned to seek my happiness by limiting my desires, rather than in attempting to satisfy them.
- It is not because men's desires are strong that they act ill; it is because their consciences are weak.
- Persons of genius, it is true, are, and are always likely to be, a small minority; but in order to have them, it is necessary to preserve the soil in which they grow.
- A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.
Albert Camus
- Danger makes men classical, and all greatness, after all, is rooted in risk.
- When the soul suffers too much, it develops a taste for misfortune.
- Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.
- The literal meaning of life is whatever you're doing that prevents you from killing yourself.
- But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.
- An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. I like this, because I am happy to be both halves, the watcher and the watched.
- The evil that is in the world almost always comes from ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.
Aristotle
- It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
Economics Explained
- No one can predict the economy, least of all economists.
Kent Beck
- First make the change easy (warning: this might be hard), then make the easy change.
D Kahneman, O Sibony, C R Sunstein
- The rule is simple: if there is more than one way to see anything, people will vary in how they see it.
George Orwell
- A humanitarian is always a hypocrite.
- After all, so much that is supposed to be new is simply the old standing on its head.
- It would seem that human beings are not able to describe, nor perhaps to imagine, happiness except in terms of contrast. That is why the conception of Heaven or Utopia varies from age to age.
- Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness.
- The coined word Utopia doesn't mean 'a good place', it means merely a 'non-existent place'.
- But what it could not do was to describe a condition in which the ordinary human being actively wanted to be. Many a revivalist minister, many a Jesuit priest (see, for instance, the terrific sermon in James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist) has frightened his congregation almost out of their skins with his word-pictures of Hell. But as soon as it comes to Heaven, there is a prompt falling-back on words like 'ecstasy' and 'bliss', with little attempt to say what they consist in. Perhaps the most vital bit of writing on this subject is the famous passage in which Tertullian explains that one of the chief joys of Heaven is watching the tortures of the damned.
- Nearly all creators of Utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having toothache.
Brad Frost
- Presenting fully baked Photoshop comps is the most effective way to show your clients what their website will never look like.
John Green
- Yeah about the test. The test will measure whether you are an informed, engaged, and productive citizen of the world. And it will take place in schools and bars and hospitals and dorm rooms and in places of worship. You'll be tested on first dates, in job interviews, while watching football, and while scrolling through your Twitter feed. The test will judge your ability to think about things other than celebrity marriages, whether you'll be easily persuaded by empty political rhetoric, and whether you'll be able to place your life and your community in a broader context. The test will last your entire life and it will be comprised of the millions of decisions that when taken together will make your life yours. And everything, everything, will be on it. I know right so pay attention.
- An eye for an eye leaves the whole world monocular.
- The responsibility for the wellbeing and success of the social order was shifted from gods to people. A power shift that will seesaw throughout human history until... probably forever actually.
Morpheus (The Matrix)
- You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.
Karl Popper
- The aim of argument, or of discussion, should not be victory but progress.
Cato the Elder
- Those who are serious in ridiculous matters will be ridiculous in serious matters.
Anthony Jay
- In corporate religions as in others, the heretic must be cast out not because of the probability that he is wrong but because of the possibility that he is right.
Peter Drucker
- There is nothing quite so useless, as doing with great efficiency, something that should not be done at all.
- If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old.
- Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.
- No one learns as much about a subject as one who is forced to teach it.
- People who don't take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year. People who do take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year.
- Results are obtained by exploiting opportunities, not by solving problems.
- So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work.
- Trying to predict the future is like trying to drive down a country road at night with no lights while looking out the back window.
- When a subject becomes totally obsolete we make it a required course.
- Meetings are by definition a concession to deficient organization For one either meets or one works. One cannot do both at the same time.
Goodhart's law
- When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure
Hofstadter's law
- It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law
Parkinson's law
- Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion
Atwood's law
- Any software that can be written in JavaScript will eventually be written in JavaScript
Segal's law
- A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure
Gall's law
- A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked
Conway's law
- Any piece of software reflects the organizational structure that produced it
O'Sullivan's first law
- In politics, all organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing
Price's law
- The square root of the number of all authors contribute half the publications in a given subject
Wirth's law
- Software gets slower more quickly than hardware gets faster
Shirky principle
- Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution
Putt's law
- Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand
Putt's corollary
- Every technical hierarchy, in time, develops a competence inversion
Postel's law
- Be conservative in what you do; be liberal in what you accept from others
Peter principle
- In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence
Doctorow's law
- Anytime someone puts a lock on something you own, against your wishes, and doesn't give you the key, they're not doing it for your benefit
Cunningham's law
- The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question, but to post the wrong answer
Brandolini's law
- The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it
Amara's law
- We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run
Occam's razor
- The most likely explanation is usually the simpler one
Hanlon's razor
- Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity
Hitchens's razor
- What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence
Hume's guillotine
- What ought to be cannot be deduced from what is
Popper's falsifiability principle
- For a theory to be considered scientific, it must be falsifiable
Hawthorne effect
- We modify our behaviour in response to the awareness of being observed
Dunning-Kruger effect
- Ignorance does not and cannot recognise itself
Endowment effect
- A tendency to overvalue the goods in our endowment, our possessions, just because they are ours
Inverse care law
- People most in need of health care are least likely to receive it