---
title: "Quotes"
tags: software
---

# **Quotes**

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I keep a collection of quotes I find interesting from various sources. In general, I try to keep these to things I can directly reference, so I write the book, link, or other source I read it in

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2025-08-05

> Someone who asked, 'why believe what is true?' or 'why want what is good?' has failed to understand the nature of reasoning. He doesn't see that, if we are to justify our beliefs and desires at all, then our reasons must be anchored in the true and the good.

- Roger Scruton, Beauty

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2025-08-04

> The stock exchange is a poor substitute for the Holy Grail.

- [Joseph Schumpeter, quoted from 'Capitalism Buries Its Undertakers' by Robert Bellafoire](https://commonplace.substack.com/p/capitalism-buries-its-undertakers)

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2025-08-04

> Is the existence of billionaires all that makes people question capitalism today? Or is it also the dull horror of realizing that for all our cherished economic freedom, there doesn’t seem to be anything worth doing with that freedom besides ordering Uber Eats and watching porn?

- [Robert Bellafiore, Capitalism Buries Its Undertakers](https://commonplace.substack.com/p/capitalism-buries-its-undertakers)

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2025-07-22

> And the men who hold high places
> Must be the ones to start
> To mould a new reality
> Closer to the Heart

> The Blacksmith and the Artist
> Reflect it in their art
> Forge their creativity
> Closer to the Heart

> Philosophers and Ploughmen
> Each must know his part
> To sow a new mentality
> Closer to the Heart

> You can be the Captain
> I will draw the Chart
> Sailing into destiny
> Closer to the Heart

- [Rush, Closer to the Heart](https://www.rush.com/songs/closer-to-the-heart/)

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January 23, 2025

> Shall I be carried to the skies,
> On flowery beds of ease,
> While others fought to win the prize,
> And sailed through bloody seas?

- Laura Ingalls Wilder, _Little House in the Big Woods_, p. 96

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September 17, 2024

> Only a few prefer liberty – the majority seek nothing more than fair masters

- Sallust, Histories

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September 17, 2024

> Human nature is universally imbued with a desire for liberty, and a hatred for servitude.

- Julius Caesar, Gallic Wars

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September 12, 2024

> And I ask for your prayers that these vague and wandering thoughts of mine may some day become coherent and, having been so vainly cast in all directions, that they may direct themselves at last to the one, true, certain, and never-ending good.

- Petrarch, The Ascent of Mount Ventoux, April 26, 1336 at Malaucène

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September 3, 2024

> It is inhuman to bless where one is cursed.

- Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Pt 4: Maxims and Interludes, #181

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September 3, 2024

> The consequences of our actions take us by the scruff of the neck, altogether indifferent to the fact that we have 'improved' in the meantime.

- Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Pt 4: Maxims and Interludes, #179.

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August 16, 2024

> Who can doubt that, were Rome to know itself once more, it would rise again?

- Petrarch, quoted from Petrarch: Everywhere a Wanderer by Christopher Celenza, Ch. II, p. 56

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August 16, 2024

> Rome, soon to be destroyed, continued to laugh and play.

- Will Durant, The Age of Faith

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August 16, 2024

> What makes the heart of the Christian heavy? The fact that he is a pilgrim, and longs for his own country.

- Saint Augustine, self-written epitaph, quoted from The Age of Faith by Will Durant, Ch. III, Part V: The Patriarch

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August 13, 2024

> Once triumphant, the Church ceased to preach toleration

- Will Durant, The Age of Faith, Ch. III, Part II: The Heretics

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August 13, 2024

> in 470 a general impoverishment of fields and cities, of senators and proletarians, depressed the spirits of a once great race to an epicurean cynicism that doubted all gods but Priapus, a timid childlessness that shunned the responsibilities of life, and an angry cowardice that denounced every surrender and shirked every martial task.

- Will Durant, The Age of Faith, Ch. II, Part V: The Fall of Rome

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August 13, 2024

> To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.

- Cicero, Orator, 120

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August 10, 2024

> All that is profound loves a mask; the very profoundest things even have a hatred for images and likenesses. Shouldn’t the opposite be the only proper disguise to accompany the shame of a god?….Every profound spirit needs a mask; even more, a mask is continually growing around every profound spirit thanks to the constantly false, that is shallow interpretation of every word, every step, every sign of life he gives.

- Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Part 2

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August 8, 2024

> What a monument of human smallness is this idea of the philosopher king. What a contrast between it and the simplicity and humaneness of Socrates, who warned the statesman against the danger of being dazzled by his own power, excellence, and wisdom, and who tried to teach him what matters most – that we are all frail human beings. What a decline from this world of irony and reason and truthfulness down to Plato's kingdom of the sage whose magical powers raise him high above ordinary men; although not quite high enough to forgo the use of lies, or to neglect the sorry trade of every shaman – the selling of spells, of breeding spells, in exchange for power over his fellow men

- Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies

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August 4, 2024

> Even if we know how to educate tomorrow’s professional programmer, it is not certain that the society we are living in will allow us to do so. The first effect of teaching a methodology —rather than disseminating knowledge— is that of enhancing the capacities of the already capable, thus magnifying the difference in intelligence. In a society in which the educational system is used as an instrument for the establishment of a homogenized culture, in which the cream is prevented from rising to the top, the education of competent programmers could be politically impalatable.

- Edsger Dijkstra, The Humble Programmer

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July 30, 2024

> Friendship is not to be sought for its wages, but because its revenue consists entirely in the love which it implies

- Cicero, On Friendship

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July 30, 2024

> Direct self observation is not nearly sufficient for us to know ourselves: we need history, for the past flows on within us in a hundred waves. Indeed, we ourselves are nothing but that which at every moment we experience of this continual flowing.

- Nietzsche, 1878, Human, All Too Human

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July 30, 2024

> I’m increasingly certain that there are others like me in the world, alive right now, quietly suppressing themselves for social reasons. I hear from more of them every month. They suppress themselves because they don’t personally know of any House of Wisdom that they could attend to fully be themselves in. Because the scale and scope of their interests don’t quite correspond with that of those of the people around them, and they don’t know if it’s worth opening up about their inner truths – because they believe, accurately according to their past experience, that the likeliest outcome is that people will misunderstand them. A confused “huh?” is often the best you can hope for. Far better than being mocked, insulted, laughed at, dismissed.

> Over the years, I’ve increasingly developed a sense of lightness, clarity, courage and conviction in realizing that these are my people. That when I’m writing for the younger version of myself, and the future versions of myself, I’m writing for them. For us. All of us. I’m a me, but I’m also a we. And there is a deep kinship in that, a deep sense of belonging. And I have decided that I am willing to endure any amount of mockery and misunderstanding from the people who don’t get it, to be a bridge to the people who do. Because more than anything else, that is what I wish I had in my life. A space to understand and be understood. I found it first mainly in books. I have since found it in like-minded nerds. And I hope to share it with literally anybody else who wants it

- Visakan Veerasamy, We Were Voyagers

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July 30, 2024

> Nobody worth hero-worshipping would want you to worship them. They would want you to become heroic yourself.

- Visakan Veerasamy, We Were Voyagers

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July 30, 2024

> Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it is their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given; forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson, The American Scholar

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July 30, 2024

> The question of whether Machines Can Think is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim

- Edsger Dijkstra, 1984, The Threats to Computing Science

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July 30, 2024

> We must be very careful when we give advice to younger people; sometimes they follow it!

- Edsger Dijkstra, The Humble Programmer

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July 13, 2024

> We are living through an advice pandemic and nobody appears to have yet discovered an effective vaccine.

- Tom Cox, Can You Please Stop Telling Me To Live My Best Life Please

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July 8, 2024

> Bless you prison, bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

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June 30, 2024

> Our legacy is to fill the Universe with children who laugh more than we were allowed to.

- Noah Smith, Toward a Shallower Future

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May 16, 2024

> Congregations love to be scolded, but not reformed

- Will Durant, The Age of Faith

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May 16, 2024

> Educate the children and it won't be necessary to punish the men.

- Pythagoras

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May 15, 2024

> [...] books are the main peer group of any thinker.

- Henrik Karlsson, On Having More Interesting Ideas

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May 7, 2024

> [Gratitude] is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.

- Cicero, Defense of Cnaeus Plancius, Ch. 33, Section 80

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May 3, 2024

> The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.

- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

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Apr 29, 2024

> You are carrying God about you, you poor wretch, and know it not.

- Epictetus, quoted from Caesar and Christ by Will Durant

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Mar 30, 2024

> The evil was not in the bread and circuses, per se, but in the willingness of the people to sell their rights as free men for full bellies and the excitement of the games which would serve to distract them from the other human hungers which bread and circuses can never appease.

- Cicero

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Mar 25, 2024

> The heritage that we can now more fully transmit is richer than ever before. It is richer than that of Pericles, for it includes all the Greek flowering that followed him; richer than Leonardo’s, for it includes him and the Italian Renaissance; richer than Voltaire’s, for it embraces all the French Enlightenment and its ecumenical dissemination. If progress is real despite our whining, it is not because we are born any healthier, better, or wiser than infants were in the past, but because we are born to a richer heritage, born on a higher level of that pedestal which the accumulation of knowledge and art raises as the ground and support of our being. The heritage rises, and man rises in proportion as he receives it.

> History is, above all else, the creation and recording of that heritage; progress is its increasing abundance, preservation, transmission, and use. To those of us who study history not merely as a warning reminder of man’s follies and crimes, but also as an encouraging remembrance of generative souls, the past ceases to be a depressing chamber of horrors; it becomes a celestial city, a spacious country of the mind, wherein a thousand saints, statesmen, inventors, scientists, poets, artists, musicians, lovers, and philosophers still live and speak, teach and carve and sing. The historian will not mourn because he can see no meaning in human existence except that which man puts into it; let it be our pride that we ourselves may put meaning into our lives, and sometimes a significance that transcends death. If a man is fortunate he will, before he dies, gather up as much as he can of his civilized heritage and transmit it to his children. And to his final breath he will be grateful for this inexhaustible legacy, knowing that it is our nourishing mother and our lasting life.

- The Lessons of History, Will & Ariel Durant

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Feb 23, 2024

> The road to serfdom consists of working exponentially harder for a currency growing exponentially weaker.

- Vijay Boyapati, The Bullish Case for Bitcoin

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Feb 16, 2024

> Loneliness is a tax you have to pay to atone for a certain complexity of mind.

- Alain de Botton

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Feb 16, 2024

> So many people today — and even professional scientists— seem to me like someone who has seen thousands of trees but has never seen a forest. A knowledge of the historic and philosophical background gives that kind of independence from prejudices of his generation from which most scientists are suffering. This independence created by philosophical insight is — in my opinion — the mark of distinction between a mere artisan or specialist and a real seeker after truth.

- Albert Einstein to Robert A. Thornton, 7 December 1944, EA 61-574

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Feb 6, 2024

> I see now more clearly than ever before that even our greatest troubles spring from something that is as admirable and sound as it is dangerous -- from our impatience to better the lot of our fellows.

- Karl Popper, The Open Society and it's Enemies, preface to the second edition

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Feb 5, 2024

> [...] the most unfortunate of men is he who has not learned how to bear misfortune [...] men ought to order their lives as if they were fated to live both a long and a short time, [and] wisdom should be cherished as a means of traveling from youth to old age, for it is more lasting than any other possession.

- Bias of Priene, quoted from The Life of Greece by Will Durant, Ch. VI The Great Migration

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Feb 2, 2024

> [...] teenagers are always on duty as conformists.

- Paul Graham, Why Nerds are Unpopular

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January 1, 2024

> Why, Oppenheimer knows about everything. He can talk to you about anything you bring up. Well, not exactly. I guess there are a few things he doesn't know about. He doesn't know anything about sports.

- General Leslie Groves, quoted from American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, pp. 185-186.

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December 22, 2023

> Life everywhere is life, life is in ourselves and not in the external. There will be people near me, and to be a human being among human beings, and remain one forever, no matter what misfortunes befall, not to become depressed, and not to falter -- this is what life is, herein lies its task.

- Fyodor Dostoevsky, in a letter to his brother, the day he was pardoned from execution by firing squad.

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December 13, 2023

> Math constitutes the language through which alone we can adequately express the great facts of the natural world. And it allows us to portray the changes of mutual relationship that unfold in creation. It is the instrument through which the weak mind of man can most effectually read his creator's works.

- Ada Lovelace, quoted from The Innovators by Walter Isaacson, Ch. 1

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December 9, 2023

> It is wrong to think that belief in freedom always leads to victory; we must always be prepared for it to lead to defeat. If we choose freedom, then we must be prepared to perish along with it.

> No, we do not choose political freedom because it promises us this or that. We choose it because it makes possible the only dignified form of human coexistence, the only form in which we can be fully responsible for ourselves. Whether we realize its possibilities depends on all kinds of things — and above all on ourselves.

- Karl Popper, On Freedom

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December 7, 2023

> I think that there is only one way to science - or to philosophy, for that matter: to meet a problem, to see its beauty and fall in love with it; to get married to it and to live with it happily, till death do ye part - unless you should meet another and even more fascinating problem or unless, indeed, you should obtain a solution. But even if you do obtain a solution, you may then discover, to your delight, the existence of a whole family of enchanting, though perhaps difficult, problem children, for whose welfare you may work, with a purpose, to the end of your days.

- Karl Popper, Realism and the Aim of Science

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December 7, 2023

> Hence, men who are governed by reason [...] desire for themselves nothing, which they do not also desire for the rest of mankind

- Spinoza, Part IV, Prop XVIII

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September 26, 2023

> Among the nations who have adopted the Mosaic history of the world, the ark of Noah has been of the same use as was formerly to the Greeks and Romans the siege of Troy. On a narrow basis of acknowledged truth an immense but rude superstructure of fable has been erected,[...]

- Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter IX, p. 240

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