Popular quotes in last 24 hours

The Red Lion was a four-ale bar with a handful of lowbrowed sons of toil who looked as though they might be related to one another in ways frowned on by the Old Testament.

A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and...

I told them this novel was an American classic, in many ways the quintessential American novel. There were other contenders: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Moby-Dick, The Scarlet Letter. Some...

It is only through literature that one can put oneself in someone else's shoes and understand the other's different and contradictory sides and refrain from becoming too ruthless. Outside the sphere...

What could you do? Major Major asked himself again. What could you do with a man who looked you squarely in the eye and said he would rather die than be killed in combat

Every fairy tale offers the potential to surpass present limits, so in a sense the fairy tale offers you freedoms that reality denies.

If the Prophet could speak in this new age of modern amenities, I knew he would end such silly tradition.

Above all, Rasala wanted around him engineers who took an interest in the entire computer, not just in the parts that they had designed.

A YOUNG COMPUTER ENGINEER, known to be one of the most skillful in Westborough's basement, said he had a fantasy about a better job than his. In it, he goes to work as a janitor for a computer company...

I think that the rich can always call themselves democratic, but the sick people are not among the rich." I thought he was done, but he was only pausing for the interpreter to catch up. "Look, I'm...

Several talked about their flexible hours. No one keeps track of the hours we work, said Ken Holberger. He grinned. That's not altruism on Data General's part. If anybody kept track, they'd have to...

the Christianity of the peasants Farmer talked to had a different flavor: the shared conviction that the rest of the world was wrong for screwing them over, and that someone, someone just and perhaps...

It was an IBM machine, archaic now but gaudy then. The university owned it, in effect, and it lay inside a room that none but the machine's professional caretakers could enter during the day. But...

Engineers want to produce something, said Wallach. I didn't go to school for six years just to get a paycheck. I thought that if this is what engineering's all about, the hell with it. He went to...

About ten other young, male undergraduates regularly attended these sessions of midnight programming. It was a whole subculture. It's been popularized now, but it was a secret cult in my days, said...

Looking into the VAX, West had imagined he saw a diagram of DEC's corporate organization. He felt that VAX was too complicated. He did not like, for instance, the system by which various parts of the...

Looking into the VAX, West had imagined he saw a diagram of DEC's corporate organization. He felt that VAX was too complicated. He did not like, for instance, the system by which various parts of the...

...I reminded him that the weak cannot enter the kingdom of love, because it is a harsh and strict kingdom, and that women only surrender to determined men, because they give them the reassurance they...

Among engineers generally, the most common form of ambition-the one made most socially acceptable-has been the desire to become a manager. If you don't become one by a certain age, then in the eyes of...

Yet it is a fact, not entirely lost on management consultants, that some people would rather work twelve hours a day of their own choosing than eight that are prescribed. Provided, of course, that the...

Change the world? Of course they could. He really believed this, and he really believed that a small group of committed individuals could do it. He liked to say of PIH, People think we're unrealistic....

How does one person with great talents come to exert a force on the world? I think in Farmer's case the answer lies somewhere in the apparent craziness, the sheer impracticality, of half of everything...

As for the name of the theory behind selling enough stock to become millionaires, Richman told me, I don't know how you put it in the vernacular. We called it the Fuck You Theory.

Adopting a remote, managerial point of view, you could say that the Eagle project was a case where a local system of management worked as it should: competition for resources creating within a team...

It is not a large exaggeration to say that everything else in a computer exists in order to bring information swiftly to the ALU for manipulation; and for the ALU, adding is the mechanical equivalent...

I think I wanted to see how complicated things happen," West said years later. "There's some notion of control, it seems to me, that you can derive in a world full of confusion if you at least...

Beyond mountains there are mountains. - Haitian proverb

He recites the names of the trees, vines, shrubs, flowers that he's planted here over the years. I count about forty different species. Finally, in the dim light from the patio, he studies a new fern...

When you burn out, you lose enthusiasm. I always loved computers. All of a sudden I just didn't care. It was, all of a sudden, a job.

Sure, I said. But some people would ask, 'How can you expect others to replicate what you're doing here?' What would be your answer to that? He turned back and, smiling sweetly, said, Fuck you. Then,...

I have fought the long defeat and brought other people on to fight the long defeat, and I'm not going to stop because we keep losing. Now I actually think sometimes we may win. I don't dislike...

He woke up blinking from a slight headache and when he opened his eyes he saw a world seething in chaos where everything was in natural order.

A writer or any artist can't expect to be embraced by the people. I've done records where it seemed like no one listened to them. You write poetry books that maybe 50 people read. And you just keep...