The first mantra is: "Darling. I'm here for you." When you love someone the best thing you can offer him or her is your presence. How can you love if you are not there?'
— Thich Nhat Hanh, https://youtu.be/UEUxFNkISnU
We all make a living by what we get, but we make life by what we give... by what we give.
— Benjamin Clementine
Keep your identity small.
— Paul Graham, http://paulgraham.com/identity.html
You're under no obligation to be the same person you were 5 minutes ago.
— Alan Watts
One who wishes to believe says, "Does the evidence permit me to believe?" One who wishes to disbelieve asks, "Does the evidence force me to believe?" Beware lest you place huge burdens of proof only on propositions you dislike, and then defend yourself by saying: "But it is good to be skeptical." If you attend only to favorable evidence, picking and choosing from your gathered data, then the more data you gather, the less you know. If you are selective about which arguments you inspect for flaws, or how hard you inspect for flaws, then every flaw you learn how to detect makes you that much stupider.
— Eliezer Yudkowsky, http://www.yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues/
If the sky is blue,
I desire to believe that the sky is blue.
If the sky is not blue,
I desire to believe that the sky is not blue.
Let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want.
— A Litany of Tarski
Do not assume that categories interesting-to-humans are the ontological primitives of reality. An octopus has nine brains.
— Me!, https://twitter.com/RobertClaypool/status/713208901655793664
The truth will set you free, but first it will upset you.
— Who knows?
You cannot get a simple system by adding simplicity to a complex system.
— http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2012-March/065087.html
The secret to building large apps is never build large apps. Break your applications into small pieces.
— Brian Moschel, Organizing A jQuery Application
Treat servers like cattle, not pets.
— Noah Slater, https://blog.engineyard.com/2014/pets-vs-cattle
Shipping is a feature. A really important feature. Your product must have it.
— Joel Spolsky, The Duct Tape Programmer
Opinionated software is only cool if you have cool opinions.
— Tom MacWright, Soapbox: Longitude, Latitude is the Right Way
Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don't want to act, or even talk, alone; you don't want to 'go out of your way to make trouble.' Why not? — Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.
Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, 'everyone' is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy there would be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. [...]
But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That's the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked — if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in '43 had come immediately after the 'German Firm' stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in '33. But of course this isn't the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying 'Jewish swine,' collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in — your nation, your people — is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.
— Milton Mayer, They Thought There Were Free, The Germans, 1933-45