“It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life.”
- Picard
Here are a few nice ones, I can’t really pick:
“Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work together for the benefit of all.” - John Maynard Keynes
(You can also apply this one to proprietary software vs. Free software (don’t say open source in my presence))
“The tyrants are only great because we are on our knees.” - Étienne de La Boétie
“Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.” - Rosa Luxemburg
don’t say [those words] in my presence
Will I regret asking why?
Free software tells you “do whatever you want, you’re free” but open source completely misses the point: it means you can read the code, but not necessarily recompile, modify and redistribute. Plus the term was invented for the confusion that would come from it. For example, a lot of AI models like LLM’s claim they are “open-source”, which basically means nothing: it’s far easier to say that than to claim it’s a free model, because that would imply freedoms to modify, reuse, redistribute the training data, weight etc. (no AI model allows that for now, and there will probably never be one that does).
In a similar vein “the greatest weapon in the hand of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed” … Steve Biko
“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.”
- Ernest Hemingway (though I’ll admit, I first heard it in Kingsman)
You’re not fronting having read all Hemingway, you’re sharing a quote with everyone. It’s fine if you heard it in Kingsman, just as it would have been fine if you had heard it in some other work of fiction that quotes Hemingway.
I like this one, it really says don’t measure yourself against others
“For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, direct, easy to understand and wrong.“
- Paraphrased H.L Mencken“To study religion is merely to know the mind of man, but if one truely wanted to know the mind of God, you must study physics.”
- Iain Banks“I believe that children are our future. Unless we stop them now.”
- Homer SimpsonWe do not inherit the world from our ansestors, we borrow it from our children. -Antoine de Saint Exupéry
“With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil - that takes religion.” ― Steven Weinberg
What the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you little bitch? I’ll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Navy Seals, and I’ve been involved in numerous secret raids on Al-Quaeda, and I have over 300 confirmed kills. I am trained in gorilla warfare and I’m the top sniper in the entire US armed forces. You are nothing to me but just another target. I will wipe you the fuck out with precision the likes of which has never been seen before on this Earth, mark my fucking words. You think you can get away with saying that shit to me over the Internet? Think again, fucker. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of spies across the USA and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, maggot. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life. You’re fucking dead, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can kill you in over seven hundred ways, and that’s just with my bare hands. Not only am I extensively trained in unarmed combat, but I have access to the entire arsenal of the United States Marine Corps and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable ass off the face of the continent, you little shit. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little “clever” comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your fucking tongue. But you couldn’t, you didn’t, and now you’re paying the price, you goddamn idiot. I will shit fury all over you and you will drown in it. You’re fucking dead, kiddo.
- Unknown soldier
“Not everything’s a lesson Ryan. Sometimes you just fail.”
- Dwight Schrute :D
As someone who loves space:
“Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.” - Arthur C. Clarke
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Arthur C. Clarke
“The needs of the many, outweigh the needs of the few.”
Not growing up with TOS, I always thought this quote was super old, like Greek philosopher stuff. Nope. It was friggin Spock! I gotta believe that the sentiment had to have existed long before Star Trek though. If it wasn’t, then… That sucks.
It was friggin Spock!
“I ship is safest in harbour, but that’s not what ships are for.”
“When people turn to you when shit goes wrong. That’s when you’re a man.”
Or a sysadmin
The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them. To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.
Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, #2)
The perfect comment doesn’t exi…
Never argue with an idiot. They will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience. - Mark Twain
“Be excellent to each other”