life

• If your goal is to make the world a better place, one thing you can do is pick a specific challenge that you really care about. Then, learn as much as you can about it and try to volunteer your time to help an organization that is working in this area.

  — Bill Gates

• Machines are worshipped because they are beautiful and valued because they confer power; they are hated because they are hideous and loathed because they impose slavery.

  — Bertrand Russell

• Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.

  — Steve Jobs

• Think deeply about things. Don’t just go along because that’s the way things are or that’s what your friends say. Consider the effects, consider the alternatives, but most importantly, just think.

  — Aaron Swartz

• Too many people go through life complaining about their problems. I've always believed that if you took one tenth the energy you put into complaining and applied it to solving the problem, you'd be surprised by how well things can work out.

  — Randy Pausch

• Our life is frittered away by detail. … Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail. … Simplify, simplify.

  — Henry David Thoreau

• To confess your fallibility and then do nothing about it is not humble; it is boasting of your modesty.

  — Eliezer Yudkowsky

• If you can think of nothing that wouldn't do harm, then do nothing.

  — Noam Chomsky

• I shall act always so as to increase the total number of choices

  — Heinz von Foerster

• If people got hit on the head by a baseball bat every week, pretty soon they would invent reasons why getting hit on the head with a baseball bat was a good thing.

  — Eliezer Yudkowsky

• I feel that the greatest reward for doing is the opportunity to do more.

  — Jonas Salk

• While information is the oxygen of the modern age, disinformation is the carbon monoxide that can poison generations.

  — Newton Lee

• Both knowledge and wisdom extend man's reach. Knowledge led to computers, wisdom to chopsticks.

  — Alan Perlis

• Relativity does set limits on what humans can ultimately do. But the universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human aspirations.

  — Carl Sagan

• Life gets boring, someone invents another necessity, and once again we turn the crank on the screwjack of progress hoping that nobody gets screwed.

  — Larry Wall

• The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space.

  — Immanuel Kant

• When you're screwing up and nobody says anything to you anymore, that means they've given up on you.

  — Randy Pausch

• I could have made money this way, and perhaps amused myself writing code. But I knew that at the end of my career, I would look back on years of building walls to divide people, and feel I had spent my life making the world a worse place.

  — Richard Stallman

• It used to be that, when something strange happened, we'd hear on the news "Police believe this is the act of an isolated nut." On the internet there are no isolated nuts; whatever kind of nut you are, you can find fifty nuts in the world exactly like you.

  — Bruce Perens

• Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous.

  — Confucius