Foolish quotes

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Edsger_Wybe_Dijkstra

Lines of Code

“My point today is that, if we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as 'lines produced' but as 'lines spent': the current conventional wisdom is so foolish as to book that count on the wrong side of the ledger.”

Samuel_C_Florman

Irrationality

“So for the foreseeable future man’s irrationality — which engineering philosophers have seen fit to ignore — will have to be taken very seriously into account. In retrospect, the ideals and dreams of engineering’s Golden Age seem foolish and immature.”
  • Source: From the book “The Existential Pleasures of Engineering” by {Samuel C. Florman}. Second edition published in 1994 by {St. Martin's Press}, New York, NY. First edition published in 1976. Kindle edition published in 2023. E-book ISBN 978-1466842366. Chapter 2, page 16.

Joseph_Goebbels

Attacking Democracy

“We enter the Reichstag to arm ourselves with democracy’s weapons. If democracy is foolish enough to give us free railway passes and salaries, that is its problem... We are coming neither as friends nor neutrals. We come as enemies! As the wolf attacks the sheep, so come we.”
  • Source: Joseph Goebbels in the 1928-04-30 issue of the Nazi party propaganda newspaper ‘Der Angriff’.
  • Notes: This quote demonstrates the danger when non-democratic fascists or extremists are elected to democratic political positions.

Andrew_Hui

Aphorism Genre

“The shortest of genres — the aphorism... A basic unit of intelligible thought, this microform has persisted across world cultures and histories, from Confucius to Twitter... Opposed to the babble of the foolish, the redundancy of bureaucrats, the silence of mystics, in the aphorism nothing is superfluous, every word bears weight.”
  • Source: From the book “A Theory of the Aphorism from Confucius to Twitter” by Andrew Hui. Published in 2019 by Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0691188959. Introduction, page 1.