For the moment, this is just a brief collection of favorite quotes about thinking, understading, computing, prejudice, discovery, and other amusements. Eventually, I will make more of a story of these. If you find one that is too familiar, let me know.
"A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices." --- William James
"A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject." --- Winston Churchill
"If I have made myself clear, you must have misunderstood me." --- Alan Greenspan
"Man is the best computer we can put aboard a spacecraft ... and the only one that can be mass produced with unskilled labor." --- Wernher von Braun
"People who break things down to black and white do so for one of two reasons. They are too stupid to understand color. They are trying to manipulate others." --- Aaron Wall, author of the justly famous SEOBook.
"Honest criticism is hard to take, particularly from a relative, a friend, an acquaintance, or a stranger." --- Franklin P. Jones
"It is sometimes necessary to repeat truths because we find repeated instances of the old errors."--- Ludwig von Mises
"The less confident you are, the more serious you have to act." --- Tara Ploughman.
Incidentally, I liked this quote much better until I found that it is very widely placed on the web. Evidently, people who are inclined to write web pages find this to be a sympathetic notion.
"Criticism is prejudice made plausible." --- H.L Meking
"Everything is mental in life. The butt was made to lug the mind around." --- Puggy Pearson, 1973 WSOP winner.
"In general, they do what you want, unless you want consistency." ---- Larry Wall (on Perl functions)
“Programming can never just be programming, we must always explain programming using a metaphor. Programming IS manufacturing. Programming IS conducting a symphony. Programming IS making a peanut butter and jelly sandwitch. Insert your particular agenda here.” --- Todd Hoff from the introduction to his review of The Mind's Arrows by Clark Glymour.
After this Hoff continues “I think an interesting metaphor may be Programming IS Building Causal Models.”
"Perl - The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption." --- Keith Bostic