“If you have a parrot and you don’t teach it to say, ‘Help, they’ve turned me into a parrot’, you are wasting everybody’s time.”

        — Julia Segal (@juliasegal)

“Prejudices about what it means to be a person necessarily exclude those who are not bright on the stage of common action; those who do not welcome the glare of shining, blinding smiles, who do not lean closer to hear the roar and macramé of shouted words, who do not cut themselves and mould their flesh and spirit to fit the narrow human path, funnelling upward without looking back.”

        — Dawn Prince-Hughes, Songs of the Gorilla Nation

If anyone tells you that such a person speaks ill of you, don’t make excuses about what is said of you, but answer: “He does not know my other faults, else he would not have mentioned only these.”

        — Epictetus

“In a perfect world, you and I probably wouldn’t exists, so let’s not hope for one.”

        — Ze Frank, The Show, 18 Apr 2006

“There’s a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.”

        — Ursula K. Le Guin

“One man’s constant is another man’s variable.”

        — Alan Perlis

“People who fight fire with fire usually end up with ashes.”

        — Abigail Van Buren

“A computer without COBOL and Fortran is like a piece of chocolate cake without ketchup and mustard.”

“Moore’s Law of Mad Science: Every eighteen months, the minimum IQ necessary to destroy the world drops by one point.”

        — Eliezer Yudkowsky

“Behold the turtle. He makes progress only when he sticks his neck out.”

        — James Bryant Conant

“It is better to do the right problem the wrong way than the wrong problem the right way.”

        — Richard Hamming

“The twentieth century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.”

        — Alex Carey

“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.”

        — Clay Shirky, South by Southwest 2010

“Perfect pitch is when you throw a banjo into a trash can and hit an accordion.”

        — Willie Nelson

“If you are using PowerPoint to even 25% of its potential, your presentation will probably suck.”

        — Karl Seguin, Goodbye Microsoft Office

“I am the inferior of any man whose rights I trample underfoot.”

        — Horace Greeley

“Man is certainly stark mad; he cannot make a worm, and yet he will be making gods by dozens.”

        — Michel de Montaige

“If you really put a small value upon yourself, rest assured that the world will not raise your price.”

        — Unknown

“Being realistic is the most commonly travelled road to mediocrity.”

        — Will Smith

“There are two seasons in Scotland: June and winter.”

        — Billy Connolly

“Truth is not determined by majority vote.”

        — Doug Gwyn

“It’s hard to be a James Bond in an Abbott and Costello world.”

        — Unknown