I collect lots of quotes. Lots of bang for the buck. There's a novel in every good quote. Here's my most recent batch of favorites: "Television is more interesting than people. If it were not, we would have people standing in the corners of our rooms." Alan Corenk "Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle." Plato "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." Aristotle "I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed." Michael Jordan "Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital." Aaron Levenstein (Professor of Management at Baruch College, City University of New York) "I think it only makes sense to seek out and identify structures of authority, hierarchy, and domination, and to challenge them; unless a justification for them can be given, they are illegitimate, and should be dismantled, to increase the scope of human freedom." Noam Chomsky "Some people are called to build the piano, some to carry the piano, and some are called to play the piano" Darrin Patrick "One of the most powerful teachings of the Buddhist tradition is that as long as you are wishing for things to change, they never will." Pema Chodron, Start Where You Are “None of us are as smart as all of us” Japanese proverb "The average man does not want to be free. He simply wants to be safe" H.L. Mencken Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose Bill Gates Atheism is a religion like off is a TV channel. The Godless Blogger "There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that you just legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, that their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous their prosperity will find its way up and through every class that rests upon it." William Jennings Bryan at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1896. "[T]he life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Thomas Hobbes "Remember, Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards and in high heels." Bob Thaves, "Frank and Ernest", 1982 "Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear." Thomas Jefferson

I love good quotes. There's a novel in every sentence. Some of them are explosive. I collect them from many sources, though I see many of them on my homepage, which is set for The Quotations Page. Here are my favorite quotes that I've collected over the past few months: -If you would cure anger, do not feed it. Say to yourself: 'I used to be angry every day; then every other day; now only every third or fourth day.' When you reach thirty days offer a sacrifice of thanksgiving to the gods. Epictetus (55 AD - 135 AD) -Life is a series of things you're not quite ready for. Rob Hopkins, of the Post Carbon Institute -An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today. Laurence J. Peter (1919 - 1988) -The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking. John Kenneth Galbraith (1908 - 2006) -The press is so powerful in its image-making role, it can make a criminal look like he’s the victim and make the victim look like he’s the criminal . . . If you aren’t careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing. Malcolm X Speaks, p.93 -As long as people believe in absurdities they will continue to commit atrocities. Voltaire [more . . . ]

I periodically post my most recently collected quotes (over the past 3 months). I just love collecting quotes, because there's a novel in every sentence--it's high-impact reading. I collect these from many sources, though more than a few of the following were presented to me by The Quotations Page, which I use as my homepage. Enjoy! "I will permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him." Booker T. Washington "If you cut yourself in half and both sides lived, which side would be you?" Anonymous on Reddit.com “Think of how stupid the average person is, and then realize half of them are stupider than that” George Carlin "If a thing isn't worth saying, you sing it. " Pierre Beaumarchais (1732 - 1799) "Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves." Carl Jung (1875 - 1961) "Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting." Alan Dean Foster, "To the Vanishing Point" "To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle." George Orwell “I haven’t failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” Thomas Edison, on asked how it felt to fail 10,000 times before he figured out the light bulb. "It is a curious thing... that every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste." Evelyn Waugh (1903 - 1966)

Complexity is the problem. Moving it from hardware to software, or vice versa, doesn’t help. Simplicity is the only answer. There was a product many years ago called the Canon Cat. It was a simple, dedicated word processor; done very nicely in Forth. Didn’t succeed commercially. But then, most products don’t. I despair. Technology, and our very civilization, will get more and more complex until it collapses. There is no opposing pressure to limit this growth. No environmental group saying: Count the parts in a hybrid car to judge its efficiency or reliability or maintainability.