“A computer shall not harm your work or, through inaction, allow your work to come to harm.”
Jef Raskin book The Humane Interface
The Humane Interface (2001)
The Humane Interface (2001)
“A computer shall not harm your work or, through inaction, allow your work to come to harm.”
Jef Raskin book The Humane Interface
The Humane Interface (2001)
Charles Stross The Laundry Files
This is how the iron law of bureaucracy installs itself at the heart of an institution. Most of the activities of any bureaucracy are devoted not to the organization’s ostensible goals, but to ensuring that the organization survives: because if they aren’t, the bureaucracy has a life expectancy measured in days before some idiot decision maker decides that if it’s no use to them they can make political hay by destroying it. It’s no consolation that some time later someone will realize that an organization was needed to carry out the original organization’s task, so a replacement is created: you still lost your job and the task went undone. The only sure way forward is to build an agency that looks to its own survival before it looks to its mission statement. Just another example of evolution in action.
Source: The Laundry Files, The Annihilation Score (2015), Chapter 16, “Democracy in Action” (pp. 311-312)
“Do not speculate, Sedenko, on things for which no evidence exists. You will waste your time.”
Michael Moorcock book The War Hound and the World's Pain
Source: The War Hound and the World's Pain (1981), Chapter 9 (p. 103)
William Penn (1644–1718) English real estate entrepreneur, philosopher, early Quaker and founder of the Province of Pennsylvania
The Preface
Fruits of Solitude (1682)
Context: There is nothing of which we are apt to be so lavish as of Time, and about which we ought to be more solicitous; since without it we can do nothing in this World. Time is what we want most, but what, alas! we use worst; and for which God will certainly most strictly reckon with us, when Time shall be no more.
Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989) American poet, novelist, and literary critic
Interview with Richard B. Sale (1969)
Context: But to poetry — You have to be willing to waste time. When you start a poem, stay with it and suffer through it and just think about nothing, not even the poem. Just be there. It's more of a prayerful state than writing the novels is. A lot of the novel is in doing good works, as it were, not praying. And the prayerful state is just being passive with it, mumbling, being around there, lying on the grass, going swimming, you see. Even getting drunk. Get drunk prayerfully, though.
John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America
"Remarks to the Delegates of Girls Nation (322)" (2 August 1963) http://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/Ready-Reference/JFK-Quotations.aspx <br class="br">1963