2006

  • In a sense it's geek culture, it's what we learned from the Linux community and the original shareware community, that here were people who were doing the thing because they love doing it. What we have to realize is that that geek mentality, that open source mentality, of “I want to just learn the code because I love it” and make this thing better because I want to see other people have more fun with it, can pervade any industry and any enterprise. It requires though that you disconnect from the scarcity model and start seeing yourself as an abundant source of innovative potential. — Douglas Rushkoff, Interview on KQED (November 2006)
  • We may someday get that revolution he promised, but it won’t be led by a bunch of lawyers and pragmatists. — Mark Pilgrim on the restrictions of many Creative Commons licenses
  • I need someone to protect me from all the measures they take in order to protect me. — Banksy
  • Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great. — Mark Twain
  • And yet as night falls, a certain elegiac quality manifests itself, as the crowd gathers beneath the chandeliers with their wineglasses and dessert plates. Something is ending here, gone forever, and it takes a while to pinpoint it. It is the End of the Amateurs. — Bruce Sterling, the end of “The Hacker Crackdown”
  • This is a song about life as a spiralling force moving through the universe, unencumbered by modular time concepts. — The Fools, "Life Sucks Then You Die"
  • Silence says acceptance by its exclusion of statement. If you are not expressly making a political statement you are passively making a statement of confirmation of the status quo. — Heather Dewey-Hagborg, "Art and Freedom"
  • Not blind opposition to progress, but opposition to blind progress. — John Muir (also the slogan of the Sierra Club)
  • Nine women can't make a baby in one month. — Fred Brooks, “The Mythical Man-Month”
  • Someone said extreme programming was “making the world safe for programmers, and programmers safe for the world.” I love that! So, to the programmers: Make honest estimates, track your actuals, and ask for help when you hit a business problem. To customers: When you add up the estimates and you get an answer you don't like, don't change the estimates—get creative about what you ask the team to work on first. And, to project managers: Make problems visible and trust your team to solve them. — Kent Beck, informit.com
  • … we're moving into an era when we will define ourselves more by the technologies we refuse than the ones we accept. — Douglas Rushkoff
  • Bogons: Hypothetical particles of cluelessness. Idiots emit bogons, causing machinery to malfunction in their presence. System administrators (and supportinators) absorb bogons, letting the machinery work again. — Charlie Stross, “The Atrocity Archives”
  • Freedom is not worth having if it doesn't include the freedom to make mistakes. — Mahatma Gandhi
  • What is the use of living, if it be not to strive for noble causes and to make this muddled world a better place for those who will live in it after we are gone? — Winston Churchill
  • He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire. — Winston Churchill
  • For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs. — George Eliot, last lines of “Middlemarch”

2014 by adam shand. sharing is an act of love, please share.