When you come to a fork in the road, take it - Yogi Berra

In the hyperconnected world, there is only “good” “better” and “best,” and managers and entrepreneurs everywhere now have greater access than ever to the better and best people, robots and software everywhere. Obviously, this makes it more vital than ever that we have schools elevating and inspiring more of our young people into that better and best category, because even good might not cut it anymore and average is definitely over. - Thomas Friedman
How Did the Robot End Up With My Job?

Modern Computer Architecture is the art and science of sculpting chips without all the requisite tools; to run programs we cannot precisely analyze; to resist errors we cannot accurately predict; all in such a way that the society at large is given no reason to suspect the extent of our ignorance.
Adapted from Henry Petroski - Success through Failure: The Paradox Of Design

“Look,” said Roark. “The famous flutings on the famous columns—what are they there for? To hide the joints in wood—when columns were made of wood, only these aren’t, they’re marble. The triglyphs, what are they? Wood. Wooden beams, the way they had to be laid when people began to build wooden shacks. Your Greeks took marble and they made copies of their wooden structures out of it, because others had done it that way. Then your masters of the Renaissance came along and made copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood. Now here we are making copies in steel and concrete of copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood. Why?
Fountainhead, Ayn Rand - via Andre DeHon

“Always try to associate yourself with and learn as much as you can from those who know more than you do, who do better than you, who see more clearly than you.”
Eisenhower via David Brooks* The Follower Problem

“Take no man’s word for it”
Robert Hooke

“My arrogance, sir, extends just as far as my conscience demands”
Eric Liddell - Chariots of Fire

“Why do we fall, sir? So that we can learn to pick ourselves up”
Alfred - Batman Begins

Intellectuals, even more than the rest of us, like to believe that they reach conclusions solely through study and reflection. But like the rest of us, they sometimes choose their opinions to suit their friends rather than the other way around.
The Turning of an Atheist - NYTimes

For some reason not so well understood, mathematicians find it most difficult to communicate their joys and frustrations, their insights and experiences to the general public, indeed even to other fellow scientists! Perhaps, this is due to the fact that mathematicians are trained to use very precise language, and so find it hard to simplify and state something not entirely correct
S Ramanan - TIFR Golden Jubilee Talk on Projective Geometry

“A crisis is an interesting thing,” he said. In his view, a crisis is a point in a story, a moment in a narrative, that presents an opportunity for characters to think their way through a problem. A catastrophe, on the other hand, is something different: it is one of several possible outcomes that follow from a crisis.
Jon Gertner - ‘The Future is drying up’ - New Yorker 2007

We’ve grown accustomed to the idea that with sufficient hard work and dedication, there’s no barrier to how fully we can both grasp reality and confirm our understanding. But by gazing far into space we’ve captured a handful of starkly informative photons, a cosmic telegram billions of years in transit. And the message, echoing across the ages, is clear. Sometimes nature guards her secrets with the unbreakable grip of physical law. Sometimes the true nature of reality beckons from just beyond the horizon.
‘Darkness on the Edge of the Universe’ - The New York Times, 2011

Instead of designing beautiful data-structures and elegant algorithms, we’re looking up the EnterpriseFactoryBeanMaker class in the 3,456-page Bumper Tome Of Horrible Stupid Classes (Special Grimoire Edition), because we can’t remember which of the arguments to the createEnterpriseBeanBuilderFactory() method tells it to make the public static pure virtual destructor be a volatile final abstract interface factory decorator.
‘Whatever happened to programming’ - Reprog Blog

Reconquering peaks like K2 helps all of us, they say, and that is why we should care. “It’s a selfish act if it ends with you,” said Chris Warner, a seasoned American mountaineer who climbed K2 last year. “But guys go back and are deeply humbled by the experience that they have and they are much more capable of being husbands, brothers, people. There is a part of the whole experience that is ultimately metaphysical. Whenever you push the limits of ability, there is a lesson in there for all of us.”
‘Does Climbing Matter Anymore’ - NYTimes

If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and tastes like a duck, then, for all practical purposes, it is a duck
Anon

Genius is by nature temperamental. Only the rarest of rare can temper it to become predictable.
Cricinfo