
Entry (1955)
Eric Hoffer and the Art of the Notebook (2005)
On Winston Churchill's speech against the Government of India Bill (1935) - (Audio file at BBC) http://news.bbc.co.uk/media/audio/38858000/rm/_38858167_churchill1.ram
1935
Entry (1955)
Eric Hoffer and the Art of the Notebook (2005)
“Language education… may achieve what George Bernard Shaw asserted is the function of art.”
Language Education in a Knowledge Context (1980)
Context: It may come as a surprise to our technocrat philosophers, but people do not read, write, speak, or listen primarily for the purpose of achieving a test score. They use language in order to conduct their lives, and to control their lives, and to understand their lives. An improvement in one's language abilities is therefore... observed in changes in one's purposes, perceptions, and evaluations. Language education... may achieve what George Bernard Shaw asserted is the function of art. "Art," he said in Quintessence of Ibsenismn, "should refine our sense of character and conduct, of justice and sympathy, greatly heightening our self knowledge, self-control, precision of action and considerateness, and making us intolerant of baseness, cruelty, injustice, and intellectual superficialty and vulgarity." …For my purposes, if you replace the word "art" with the phrase "language education," you will have a precise statement of what I have been trying to say.
“Curse God, and die. To George it seemed like remarkably sage and relevant advice.”
Source: This Is the Way the World Ends (1986), Chapter 6, “In Which a Sea Captain, a General, a Therapist, and a Man of God Enter the Tale” (p. 61)
“We all laugh and cough with the same language and will die with the same language as well!”
Quoted in Humor & Caricature (June 1995), p. 3
“To work hard, to live hard, to die hard, and then go to hell after all would be too damn hard.”
“Life is hard, and then you die.”
Usenet signatures
“Old habits did not just die hard. They refused to die at all.”
Source: The Heritage Universe, Transcendence (1992), Chapter 7, “The Torvil Anfract” (p. 70)
“The hard part of programming is the same regardless of the language.”
"You broke the Internet. We're making ourselves a GNU one." (August 2013) https://gnunet.org/internetistschuld (around 02:16)
2010s
Context: Programming is programming. If you get good at programming, it doesn't matter which language you learned it in, because you'll be able to do programming in any language. The hard part of programming is the same regardless of the language. And if you have a talent for that, and you learned it here, you can take it over there. Oh, one thing: if you want to get a picture of a programming at its most powerful, you should learn Lisp or Scheme because they are more elegant and powerful than other languages.