Sourced Quotes, 17
Don’t worry about people stealing an idea. If it’s original, you will have to ram it down their throats. — Howard Aiken, as quoted in Portraits in Silicon by Robert Slater, 1987, p. 88.
Machines will do what we ask them to do and not what what we ought to ask them to do. — Norbert Wiener, 1949, published in John Markoff, NYTimes May 21, 2013
The shortcut that’s sure to work, every time: Take the long way. Do the hard work, consistently and with generosity and transparency. And then you won’t waste time doing it over. — Seth Godin, Seth’s Blog, May 13, 2013.
Most people doubt online meetings can work but they somehow overlook that most in-person meetings don’t work either. – Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants, p. 42, September 2013.
It’s total chaos. But out of that chaos will come some really amazing things. And right now there are amazing opportunities for young people coming into the industry to say, ‘Hey, I think I’m going to do this and there’s nobody to stop me.’ It’s because all the gatekeepers have been killed! — George Lucas, The Verge, June 13, 2013.
If the NSA released their heaps of prying spycode as open-source code, Silicon Valley would be all over that, instantly. They’d put a kid-friendly graphic front-end on it. They’d port it right into the cloud. — Bruce Sterling, The Ecuadorian Library, August 3, 2013.
I believe that the purpose of death is the release of love. — Laurie Anderson, Farewell to Lou Reed, Rolling Stone, November 21, 2013
The question [in Hollywood] used to be: How do we top ourselves? The new one seems to be: How do we stop ourselves? — Damon Lindelof, The New Rules of Blockbuster Screenwriting, Vulture, August 14, 2013
If you take someone to lunch you just get each other’s stories, but if you set up folding chairs together, you find out what people are really like. — Anne Herbert, The Whole Earth Jamboree Wasn’t Worth It Once, CoEvolution Quarterly, Winter 1978.
People are bad at looking at seeds and guessing what size tree will grow out of them. The way you’ll get big ideas in, say, health care is by starting out with small ideas. If you try to do some big thing, you don’t just need it to be big; you need it to be good. And it’s really hard to do big and good simultaneously. So, what that means is you can either do something small and good and then gradually make it bigger, or do something big and bad and gradually make it better. And you know what? Empirically, starting big just does not work. That’s the way the government does things. They do something really big that’s really bad, and they think, Well, we’ll make it better, and then it never gets better. — Paul Graham, Building Fast Companies for Growth, Inc. September 2013
Simple answers from xkcd
