Quotes about code
page 2

“God grant me serenity to accept the code I cannot change, courage to change the code I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”

Erik Naggum (1965–2009) Norwegian computer programmer

Usenet signatures

Wisdom, God, Courage, Change

“On 11 October 1908, having worked for six years at my international magazine Poesia, in an attempt to free the Italian lyrical genius that was under sentence of death from its traditional and commercial fetters, I suddenly felt that articles, poetry and controversies were no longer enough. It was absolutely crucial to switch methods, get out into the streets, lay siege to theaters, and introduce the fisticuffs into the artistic struggle... My Italian blood raced faster when my lips coined out loud the word FUTURISM.
It was the new formula of Action-Art and a code of mental health. It was a youthful and innovative banner, anti-traditional, optimistic, heroic and dynamic, that had to be hoisted over the ruins of all attachment to the past.”

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944) Italian poet and editor, founder of the Futurist movement

quote from 'Guerra sola igiene del mundo', in Edizione Futuriste di Poesia', Milan 1915; as quoted in Futurism, ed. Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008, p. 21
1910's

Death, Health, Youth, Art

“I'd shrink government in a minute, if I could shrink GM, Bank of America, and all these immoral corporations that operate by an undemocratic code, with no soul and no conscience.”

Jerry Brown (1938) American politician/lawyer and current governor of California

From an unspecified KPFA-FM radio show program.
[Peter, Waldman, Back to Earth: Jerry Brown, the Voice of New-Age Populism, Gets Down to Business, Wall Street Journal, 10 August 1999]
1999

Soul

“I find our modern emphasis on 'rights' somewhat overdone and misleading … It makes people forget that the other and more important side of rights is duty. And indeed the great historic codes of our human advance emphasised duties and not rights … The Ten Commandments in the Old Testament and … the Sermon on the Mount … all are silent on rights, all lay stress on duties.”

Jan Smuts (1870–1950) military leader, politician and statesman from South Africa

On the rights embodied in the United Nations Charter of which he drafted the Preamble, as cited in Antony Lentin, 2010, Jan Smuts – Man of courage and vision, p. 144. ISBN 978-1-86842-390-3

People, Forgetting

“When you feel the need to write a comment, first try to refactor the code so that any comment becomes superfluous.”

Kent Beck (1961) software engineer

Source: Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code, 1999, p. 88

Feeling

“The spiral model presented in this article is one candidate for improving the software process model situation. The major distinguishing feature of the spiral model is that it creates a risk-driven approach to the software process rather than a primarily document-driven or code-driven process. It incorporates many of the strengths of other models and resolves many of their difficulties.”

Barry Boehm (1935) American software engineer

Source: A spiral model of software development and enhancement. (1988), p. 61

“I figure that since proprietary software developers use copyright to stop us from sharing, we cooperators can use copyright to give other cooperators an advantage of their own: they can use our code.”

Richard Stallman (1953) American software freedom activist, short story writer and computer programmer, founder of the GNU project

1990s, Copyleft: Pragmatic Idealism (1998)

“Keep your honor code between you and God, you don’t break that, no matter who’s not looking. God is.”

Caroline Myss (1952) author from the United States

As quoted in "Caroline Myss' Journey" by Terry Loncaric, at Conscious Choice (September 2003) http://www.consciouschoice.com/2003/cc1609/carolinemyss1609.html

God

“It's no coincidence that the worst published writer in the world today is also one of the world's most successful writers… Dan Brown. Now Dan Brown is not a good writer, The Da Vinci Code is not literature. Dan Brown writes sentences like "The famous man looked at the red cup." …and it's only to be hoped that Dan Brown never gets a job where he's required to break bad news. "Doctor is he going to be alright?" "The seventy five year old man died a painful death on the large green table… it was sad".”

Stewart Lee (1968) English stand-up comedian, writer, director and musician

Series 1 Episode 1: "Toilet Books"

Death, Pain, World, Sadness

“Hughes, who had entered the space program from astrophysics, came with a very good record, in fact a brilliant one. This troubled many of his military superiors, to whom high intelligence was a code word for instability and insubordination.”

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) American writer

“The Field of Vision” pp. 228-229 (originally published in Galaxy, October 1973)
Short fiction, The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (1975)

Intelligence

“The typical reaction of liberal intellectuals is to seize on the contradiction here: How can something be both wrong and right, or at least both wrong and OK, at the same time? What liberal intellectuals fail to see is that this so-called contradiction expresses the quintessence of the Machiavellian and therefore the modern, a quintessence that has been thoroughly absorbed by the man in the street. The world is ruled by necessity, says the man in the street, not by some abstract moral code. We have to do what we have to do.
If you wish to counter the man in the street, it cannot be by appeal to moral principles, much less by demanding that people should run their lives in such a way that there are no contradictions between what they say and what they do. Ordinary life is full of contradictions; ordinary people are used to accommodating them. Rather, you must attack the metaphysical, supra-empirical status of necessità and show that to be fraudulent.”

J.M. Coetzee book Diary of a Bad Year

Source: Diary of a Bad Year (2007), p. 17

Life, People, World, Way

“I was 21 at the time, so I was young, but I had already programmed for half my life, basically. And every project before that had been completely personal and it was a revelation when people just started commenting, started giving feedback on your code. And even before they started giving code back, that was, I think, one of the big moments where I said, "I love other people!"”

Linus Torvalds (1969) Finnish-American software engineer and hacker

Don't get me wrong -- I'm actually not a people person. Torvalds, Linus, 2016-02-17, <nowiki>Linus Torvalds: The mind behind Linux</nowiki>, 2016-04-08 http://www.ted.com/talks/linus_torvalds_the_mind_behind_linux/, 2010s, 2016

Love, Life, People, Thinking

“I would dramatically reduce the safeguards for software — from the ordinary term of 95 years to an initial term of 5 years, renewable once. And I would extend that government-backed protection only if the author submitted a duplicate of the source code to be held in escrow while the work was protected. Once the copyright expired, that escrowed version would be publicly available from the copyright office.
Most programmers should like this change. No code lives for 10 years, and getting access to the source code of even orphaned software projects would benefit all. More important, it would unlock the knowledge built into this protected code for others to build upon as they see fit. Software would thus be like every other creative work — open for others to see and to learn from.”

Lawrence Lessig (1961) American academic, political activist.

May the Source Be With You (2001)

Knowledge, Learning, Change

“In its current form UML is designed to support a wide variety of different modelling techniques and formalisms. This is evident, for example, in the state machine formalism which allows both Moore and Mealy formalism with hierarchical states including concurrent sub-states and both synchronous and asynchronous calling semantics. The result of this is not only that almost any state modelling style can be supported but also that many combinations of elements have no defined execution semantics. It is now widely recognised within the UML community, however, that considerable benefit can be gained by forming subsets of the UML with well defined execution semantics. Such subsets can form an “executable UML” which would enable the simulation, execution, testing and ultimately translation of UML models into target code. As part of this movement, work is progressing under the auspices of the OMG towards the definition of “profiles” that define such subsets and towards the more detailed definition of the contents of “actions” including a more precise definition of the execution semantics of UML models.”

Stephen J. Mellor (1952) British computer scientist

Mellor and Ian Wilkie (1999). A mapping from Shlaer-Mellor to UML http://www.ooatool.com/docs/SMUML99.pdf. Technical report, Projtech Inc. and Kennedy Carter Limited, 1999.

Communication, Support, Parting

“Hunting for sport is an improvement over hunting for food, in that there has been added to the test of skill and ethical code, which the hunter formulates for himself, and must live up to without the moral support of bystanders.”

Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) American writer and scientist

Source: 1930s, Game Management, 1933, Chapter XVI, "Game Economics and Esthetics", p. 391.

Food, Support, Sport

“Five hundred years ago, when faced with an eclipse, many of us would have believed it was the work of an angry god. But as we've unearthed the language of the Code, we've discovered that the apparent mysteries of our world can be understood without invoking the supernatural. And this for me is what's so remarkable. That despite the incredible complexity of the world we live in, it can all, ultimately, be explained by numbers. Just like the orbit of the planets, life too follows a pattern. And it can all be reduced to cause and effect. In the end, even the flip of a coin is determined by how fast it's spinning and how long it takes to hit the ground. The ultimate symbol of chance isn't random at all. It only appears that way. When we don't understand the Code, the only way we can make sense of our world is to make up stories. But the truth is far more extraordinary. Everything has mathematics at its heart. When everything is stripped away all that remains is the Code.”

Marcus du Sautoy (1965) British professor of mathematics

Conclusion in BBC's The Code, episode 3.

Life, God, Truth, World

“This leads to the second most dangerous, and very disingenuous claim by Fair Tax advocates, that it repeals the income tax. It does not. The Fair Tax Bill merely repeals various sections of the federal tax code relating to the income tax. The bill leaves the 16th Amendment intact; most tellingly, it uses tepid language about the 16th Amendment, saying only that Congress “finds” that it “should be repealed.”
This clearly leaves an opening for Congress to reinstate the income tax once the national sales tax is in place. Given the addiction to spending and the lack of integrity that pervades our government, I’m convinced that even if the Fair Tax passes, it’ll be implemented without doing away with the income tax — thus giving us the worst of both worlds. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if some congressman championed “bringing back” the income tax as the only solution to a future “debt crisis.””

R. Lee Wrights (1958–2017) American gubernatorial candidate

2012, " The Fair Tax Isn't Fair, It's a Farce http://www.libertyforall.net/?p=7101"

World, Future

“Human sense organs can receive only news of difference, and the differences must be coded into events in time (i. e., into changes) in order to be perceptible. Ordinary static differences that remain constant for more than a few seconds become perceptible, only by scanning. Similarly, very slow changes become perceptible only by a combination of scanning and bringing together observations from separated moments in the continuum of time.”

Gregory Bateson (1904–1980) English anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician and cyberneticist

Source: Mind and Nature, a necessary unity, 1988, p. 74-75

Sense, Change, Time

“The Diggbats didn’t like it one bit that they were being prevented from stealing copyrighted material … Kevin Rose has surrendered to the mob, and posted the code at his own blog, with a ludicrous explanation that amounts to endorsing the thugs … You either respect the concept of intellectual property, or you don’t.”

Charles Foster Johnson (1953) American musician

May 2, 2007 http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=25324_Diggbats_Revolting&only

“With the appearance of the human, the coding process of life burst beyond the DNA molecule and began carving its information in stone!”

Brian Swimme (1950) American cosmologist

From Journey of the Universe:

Life, Appearance

“The use of the high level language made each programmer a factor of 5 to 10 more productive in a coding sense and more concerned with the semantics than the syntax of modules.”

Fernando J. Corbató (1926–2019) American computer scientist

"A Managerial View of the Multics System Development" (1978)

Sense

“In so far as men have attempted to use the Old Testament as a code of model laws and institutions and have applied these to modern conditions, regardless of the historical connections, these attempts have left a trail of blunder and disaster. In so far as they have caught the spirit that burned in the hearts of the prophets and breathed in gentle humanity through the Mosaic Law, the influence of the Old Testament has been one of the great permanent forces making for democracy and social justice.”

Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) United States Baptist theologian

Source: Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907), Ch.1 The Historical Roots of Christianity the Hebrew Prophets, p. 2

Men, Justice, Law, Democracy

“Law represents from age to age the code of the dominant or ruling class, slowly accumulated, no doubt, and slowly modified, but always added to and always administered by the ruling class. Today the code of the dominant class may perhaps best be denoted by the word Respectability—and if we ask why this code has to a great extent overwhelmed the codes of the other classes and got the law on its side (so far that in the main it characterises those classes who do not conform to it as the criminal classes), the answer can only be: Because it is the code of the classes who are in power. Respectability is the code of those who have the wealth and the command, and as these have also the fluent pens and tongues, it is the standard of modern literature and the press. It is not necessarily a better standard than others, but it is the one that happens to be in the ascendant; it is the code of the classes that chiefly represent modern society; it is the code of the Bourgeoisie. It is different from the Feudal code of the past, of the knightly classes, and of Chivalry; it is different from the Democratic code of the future—of brotherhood and of equality; it is the code of the Commercial age and its distinctive watchword is—property.
The Respectability of today is the respectability of property. There is nothing so respectable as being well-off.”

Edward Carpenter (1844–1929) British poet and academic

Defence of Criminals: A Criticism of Morality (1889)

Age, Law, Literature, Past

“The Code-and-Fix Model. The basic model used in the earliest days of software development contained two steps:
:1. Write some code.
:2. Fix the problems in the code.
Thus, the order of the steps was to do some coding first and to think about the requirements, design, test, and maintenance later. This model has three primary difficulties: (a) After a number of fixes, the code became so poorly structured that subsequent fixes were very expensive. This underscored the need for a design phase prior to coding. (b) Frequently, even well designed software was such a poor match to users' needs that it was either rejected outright or expensively redevelopment…”

Barry Boehm (1935) American software engineer

Source: A spiral model of software development and enhancement. (1988), p. 61-62

Problem, Thinking

“This incident impressed upon me the Bedu’s indifference to human life. The man was sick and if God ordered it he would die. He was a stranger who came from a tribe unrelated to theirs. None of them felt an interest because he was a human being like themselves. His death would in no way affect them. Yet their code demanded that, however unwanted he might be, they should fight in his defence if he were attacked whilst with them.”

Wilfred Thesiger book Arabian Sands

Source: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 177.

Life, Death, God, Way

“[T]he free market may be a good, bad or insufficient idea, but, in any case, it is just a crude commercial code. Now it is regularly equated with or given credit for or even precedence over the freedom of man. But the freedom of man is a moral statement on the human condition, both in the practical and in the humanist sense. To equate it with a school of business is to betray a certain confusion. An unconscious unease.”

John Ralston Saul (1947) Canadian author and essayist

Voltaire's Bastards (1992)

School, Idea, Business, Sense

“During the summer of 2012, one Ferguson police officer detained a 32-year-old African American man who had just finished playing basketball at a park. The officer approached while the man was sitting in his car and resting. The car’s windows appeared to be more heavily tinted than Ferguson’s code allowed, so the officer did have legitimate grounds to question him. But, with no apparent justification, the officer proceeded to accuse the man of being a pedophile. He prohibited the man from using his cell phone and ordered him out of his car for a pat-down search, even though he had no reason to suspect that the man was armed. And when the man objected – citing his constitutional rights – the police officer drew his service weapon, pointed it at the man’s head, and arrested him on eight different counts. The arrest caused the man to lose his job.”

Eric Holder (1951) 82nd Attorney General of the United States

2010s, Update on Investigations in Ferguson (2015)

Cars, Search, Question, Appearance

“The Great Code was a silly and sloppy book. It was also a work of very great genius. The point is that genius is not enough. A book worthy of God and of Helen [Frye's wife] must do better than that.”

Northrop Frye (1912–1991) Canadian literary critic and literary theorist

1:160
"Quotes", Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World (2002)

God, Books

“The microbial brain—gifted with long-range transport, data trading, genetic variants… and the ability to reinvent genomes—began its operations some 91 trillion bacterial generations before the birth of the Internet. Ancient bacteria, if they functioned like those today, had mastered the art of worldwide information exchange. …The earliest microorganisms would have used planet-sweeping currents of wind and water to carry the scraps of genetic code…”

Howard Bloom (1943) American publicist and author

Source: Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century (2000), Ch.1 Creative Nets in the Precambrian Era

Art, Birth, Water

“Language and the human spirit are inextricably intertwined. We interpret the world through language. We express ourselves through language. Language is powerful. Language can bring us together or set us apart. It can be used to include — to bridge barriers between cultures, religions, worldviews — at the same time as it can be used to exclude by inflaming xenophobia and racism. Language can establish community and solidarity at the same time as it can be used to erect boundaries and divide communities. More often than not, when we turn on the TV we see language used to occlude — to hide reality — to deceive, to spin, to distract, to disempower, to reinforce us versus them conceptions of humanity. Language is no longer innocent. We can no longer conceptualize language as some kind of neutral code that can be taught in classrooms in splendid isolation from its intersection with issues of power, identity, and spirituality.”

Jim Cummins (professor) (1949) professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto

Language and the Human Spirit (2003)

World, Religion, Communication, Reality

“There is a sort of an unwritten code in Washington, among the underworld and the hustlers and these other guys that I am their friend.”

Marion Barry (1936–2014) American politician and former mayor of Washington, D.C.

Explaining why he was upset at being robbed at gunpoint, as quoted in the Washington Express (4 January 2006), p. 11
2000s

Guy

“Here is an empire in which is the only relic of the oldest civilization of the world—one which, 2,700 years ago, according to some authorities, had a system of primary education—which had its system of logic before the time of Aristotle, and its code of morals before that of Socrates. Here is a country which has had its uninterrupted traditions and histories for so long a period—that supplied silks and other articles of luxury to the Romans 2,000 years ago! They are the very soul of commerce in the East, and one of the wealthiest nations in the world. They are the most industrious people in Asia, having acquired the name of the ants of the East…You find them not as barbarians at home, where they cultivate all the arts and sciences, and where they have carried all, except one, to a point of perfection but little below our own—but that one is war. You have there a people who have carried agriculture to a state of horticulture, and whose great cities rival in population those of the Western world. Now, there must be something in such a people deserving of respect. If in speaking of them we stigmatize them as barbarians, and threaten them with force because we say they are inaccessible to reason, it must be because we do not understand them; because their ways are not our ways, nor our ways theirs. Now, is not so venerable an empire as that deserving of some sympathy—at least of some justice—at the hands of conservative England?”

Richard Cobden (1804–1865) English manufacturer and Radical and Liberal statesman

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1857/feb/26/resolutions-moved-debate-adjourned in the House of Commons (26 February 1857) on China. 1850s

War, People, World, Education

“I'll tell you what happens with impossible promises. You start with far fetched resolutions. They are then pickled into a rigid dogma, a code, and you go through the years sticking to that, out-dated, misplaced, irrelevant to the real needs, and you end in the grotesque chaos of a Labour council—a Labour council—hiring taxis to scuttle round a city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers. I'm telling you - and you'll listen - you can't play politics with people's jobs and with people's services. The people will not abide posturing.”

Neil Kinnock (1942) British politician

Source: Speech to the Labour Party Conference in Bournemouth (1 October 1985).

People

“The more our commercial system gains in complication, the more does the common prosperity of us all come to depend upon the due performance of all contracts. Commercial development is broadly illustrating one profound truth: that the real basis of social morality is self-interest. If the subject of rivalry between nations is business, the code which has come to dominate business must necessarily come to dominate the conduct of governments.”

Norman Angell book The Great Illusion

The Great Illusion (1910)

Truth, Business, Dependency

“Much of what we do as adults is based on this imitative absorption during our childhood years. Frequently we imagine that we are behaving in a particular way because such behaviour accords with some abstract, lofty code of moral principles, when in reality all we are doing is obeying a deeply ingrained and long 'forgotten' set of purely imitative impressions (along with out carefully concealed instinctive urges) that makes it so hard for societies to change their customs and their 'beliefs'. Even when faced with exciting, brilliantly rational new ideas, based on the application of pure, objective intelligence, the community will still cling to its old home-based habits and prejudices. This is the cross we have to bear if we are going to sail through our vital juvenile 'blotting-paper' phase of rapidly mopping up the accumulated experiences of previous generations. We are forced to take the biased opinions along with the valuable facts.”

Desmond Morris book The Naked Ape

(2010), p. 86
The Naked Ape (1967)

Way, Home, Imagination, Intelligence

“Yes, it is absurd [to say that without God, murder is permissible], because even according to your sacred fables Moses murdered an Egyptian and then looked around to make sure no one saw him before trying to conceal the body, and the same goes for the myth of Cain and Abel, where Cain lied about killing his brother. Both of these characters obviously already knew that murder was wrong a long time before the story of the Ten Commandments, and this might be because Hammurabi had already established the code of law many centuries earlier than these myths found their way into the Bible, or it might be that, like most social animals, even superstitious savages understood that you shouldn't kill or maim other members of your own society (unless your religion commands it). One minute, God supposedly says "thou shalt not kill", and the next minute He orders His own people to kill every man and his brother, except of course for Moses's brother who really should have been the only one who was killed in that story. But somehow he was spared and promoted to priest instead; saved by nepotism. Then God told them all to kill all their neighbors, every man, woman and child, including the infants and the unborn. But the fact is that murder is still wrong, regardless of what God has to say about it, and there is still no justification when God allegedly commands His prophets to plunder communities and commit genocide.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Youtube, Other, The Damn Commandments https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8u3z69YpLx0 (January 7, 2015)

God, People, Religion, Law

“The unit of coding is the most basic segment, or element, of the raw data or information that can be assessed in a meaningful way regarding the phenomenon.”

Richard Boyatzis (1946) American business theorist

Source: Transforming qualitative information (1998), p. 63.

Way

“The subject detects the presence and interrelationships of the basic components of one of the two-dimensional drawings - particularly, the variously oriented straight lines, the several types of vertices by which they are connected and, presumably, something of the structural relationships among these components within the two-dimensional pattern. Then, on the basis of some higher-level processing of these extracted features and their interrelationships, an internal representation, code, or verbal description is generated for each picture separately that captures the intrinsic structure of the three-dimensional object in a form that is independent of the particular orientation in which that object happens to be displayed.”

Roger Shepard (1929) American psychologist

Source: Mental images and their transformations. 1982, p. 64; as cited in: Keith K. Niall, "‘Mental rotation’, pictured rotation, and tandem rotation in depth." Acta psychologica 95.1 (1997): 31-83.

Drawing

“How is it possible that today's academic Left has supported rather than protested campus speech codes as well as the grotesque surveillance and over-regulation of student life? American colleges have abandoned their educational mission and become government colonies, ruled by officious bureaucrats enforcing federal dictates. This despotic imperialism has no place in a modern democracy.”

Camille Paglia book Free Women, Free Men

From the Introduction http://archive.is/4luev to Free Women, Free Men https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/1101871814, Paglia, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group (2017) Free Women, Free Men (2017)

Life, Education, Democracy, Support

“As educators of linguistically and culturally diverse students we face choices with respect to how we view language and human potential. Is language the means of interpreting our increasingly complex world and mobilizing intellect, imagination, and identity to create new knowledge and act on social realities or is it simply a set of sounds and symbols and the codes that bind them? Can our society benefit from all the intelligence, imagination, and multilingual talent it can get or should schools develop these attributes only among a privileged elite while focusing on English-only basic skills for those constructed as incapable of independent learning?”

Jim Cummins (professor) (1949) professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto

Language and the Human Spirit (2003)

World, Education, School, Imagination

“When then, my Lords, are all the generous efforts of our ancestors, are all those glorious contentions, by which they meant to secure themselves, and to transmit to their posterity, a known law, a certain rule of living, reduced to this conclusion, that instead of the arbitrary power of a King, we must submit to the arbitrary power of a House of Commons? If this be true, what benefit do we derive from the exchange? Tyranny, my Lords, is detestable in every shape; but in none is it so formidable as where it is assumed and exercised by a number of tyrants. But, my Lords, this is not the fact, this is not the constitution; we have a law of Parliament, we have a code in which every honest man may find it. We have Magna Charta, we have the Statute-book, and we have the Bill of Rights…It is to your ancestors, my Lords, it is to the English barons that we are indebted for the laws and constitution we possess. Their virtues were rude and uncultivated, but they were great and sincere…I think that history has not done justice to their conduct, when they obtained from their Sovereign that great acknowledgment of national rights contained in Magna Charta: they did not confine it to themselves alone, but delivered it as a common blessing to the whole people…A breach has been made in the constitution—the battlements are dismantled—the citadel is open to the first invader—the walls totter—the place is no longer tenable.—What then remains for us but to stand foremost in the breach, to repair it, or to perish in it?…let us consider which we ought to respect most—the representative or the collective body of the people. My Lords, five hundred gentlemen are not ten millions; and, if we must have a contention, let us take care to have the English nation on our side. If this question be given up, the freeholders of England are reduced to a condition baser than the peasantry of Poland…Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it; and this I know, my Lords, that where law ends, there tyranny begins.”

William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham (1708–1778) British politician

Speech in the House of Lords on John Wilkes (9 January 1770), quoted in William Pitt, The Speeches of the Right Honourable the Earl of Chatham in the Houses of Lords and Commons: With a Biographical Memoir and Introductions and Explanatory Notes to the Speeches (London: Aylott & Jones, 1848), pp. 90-4.

People, Books, Justice, Law

“Only when a disputed point has long caused bloodshed and disturbance, or when a successful invader (military or theological) insists on a change, is it necessary to draw up a code.”

Edward Jenks (1861–1939) British legal scholar

Source: A Short History Of The English Law (First Edition) (1912), Chapter I, Old English Law, p. 4

Change, Success, Drawing

“A legal code that protects the prerogatives of the owners and is officially respected (and hence calculable) is another element.”

Richard Sandbrook (1946–2005) environmentalist

Source: The State and Economic Stagnation in Tropical Africa, p. 320

“Thus we see that though there are for instance in the England of to-day a variety of classes, and a variety of corresponding codes of public opinion and morality, one of these codes, namely that of the ruling class whose watchword is property, is strongly in the ascendant. And we may fairly suppose that in any nation from the time when it first becomes divided into well-marked classes this is or has been the case. In one age—the commercial age—the code of the commercial or money-loving class is dominant; in another—the military—the code of the warrior class is dominant; in another—the religious—the code of the priestly class; and so on.”

Edward Carpenter (1844–1929) British poet and academic

Defence of Criminals: A Criticism of Morality (1889)

Love, Money, Age, Time

“How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts the human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, (1963)

God, Law, Soul, Nature

“Careful listening to current country and western and rock music with the help of an interpreter for coded phrases shows that young people are hearing a constant stream of messages about getting high, feeling good, going on trips, and using drugs of all kinds with all methods.”

Virgil Miller Newton (1938) American priest

Miller Newton (1983). The Teenage Drug Epidemic, El Paso Physician, vol 6, pp. 5-6.
On Teenage Drug Use

People, Music, Feeling, Help

“Please don't fall into the trap of believing that I am terribly dogmatic about [the go to statement]. I have the uncomfortable feeling that others are making a religion out of it, as if the conceptual problems of programming could be solved by a simple trick, by a simple form of coding discipline!”

Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930–2002) Dutch computer scientist

Dijkstra (1973) in personal communication to Donald Knuth, quoted in Knuth's "Structured Programming with go to Statements".
1970s

Religion, Feeling, Problem

“Beyond that, however, genetic messages are coded in such a way that there is a constant give-and-take between those messages and the present experience of any given individual. That is, no genetic event is inevitable.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Session 907, Page 271
Dreams, Evolution and Value Fulfillment, Volume One (1986)

Way

“A bug! A bug! Isn’t it just so satisfying to discover bugs in other people’s programs? Especially people from Microsoft. I don’t know why, it’s probably some kind of Freudian code-envy thing.”

Paul DiLascia (1959–2008) American software developer

1995/6
About Microsoft

People, Envy

“In attempted justification of the statute, it is said that it deals not with publication per se, but with the "business" of publishing defamation. If, however, the publisher has a constitutional right to publish, without previous restraint, an edition of his newspaper charging official derelictions, it cannot be denied that he may publish subsequent editions for the same purpose. He does not lose his right by exercising it. If his right exists, it may be exercised in publishing nine editions, as in this case, as well as in one edition. If previous restraint is permissible, it may be imposed at once; indeed, the wrong may be as serious in one publication as in several. Characterizing the publication as a business, and the business as a nuisance, does not permit an invasion of the constitutional immunity against restraint. Similarly, it does not matter that the newspaper or periodical is found to be "largely" or "chiefly" devoted to the publication of such derelictions. If the publisher has a right, without previous restraint, to publish them, his right cannot be deemed to be dependent upon his publishing something else, more or less, with the matter to which objection is made. Nor can it be said that the constitutional freedom from previous restraint is lost because charges are made of derelictions which constitute crimes. With the multiplying provisions of penal codes, and of municipal charters and ordinances carrying penal sanctions, the conduct of public officers is very largely within the purview of criminal statutes. The freedom of the press from previous restraint has never been regarded as limited to such animadversions as lay outside the range of penal enactments. Historically, there is no such limitation; it is inconsistent with the reason which underlies the privilege, as the privilege so limited would be of slight value for the purposes for which it came to be established.”

Charles Evans Hughes (1862–1948) American judge

Near v. Minnesota, 283 U.S. 697 (1931).
Judicial opinions

Exercises, Business, Freedom, Dependency

“I have zero problem with Catholics wanting to come to the US, but that I have great concerns about Muslims, as a good % of them do want to kill me, or force their religion and moral code on me.”

Robert A. Hall (1946) American politician

I'm Tired (February 19, 2009)

Religion, Problem

“Ever wish you could draw a few diagrams, press a button, and have a working software system that meets your needs? Sound like magic? Perhaps, but that’s a major part of the Executable UML vision. The basic idea is that you will use a CASE tool to develop detailed UML diagrams and then supplement them by specifications written in a formal language, presumably the OMG’s Object Constraint Language (OCL). The basic idea behind Executable UML is that systems can be modeled at a higher level of abstraction than source code, simulated to support validation of your efforts, and then translated into efficient code. This higher-level of abstraction should help to avoid premature design, enable you to change your system as your requirements evolve, and to delay implementation decisions until the last minute.”

Scott W. Ambler (1966) Canadian software engineer/consultant/author

Source: Agile Modeling: Effective Practices for eXtreme Programming and the Unified Process (2002), p. 172

Idea, Support, Decision, Effort

“Communist morals follow a simple formula. Anything which Promotes the communist cause is good; anything which hinders it is bad. Upon examination, that philosophy turns out to be a code of opportunism and expediency, or a code of no morals at all. Anyone who does not conform to the dictates of the Party as to what is good for Communism and what is not, is subjected to the most severe penalties under Articles 131 and 133 of the Soviet Constitution. Thus, the perfect example of "class" morality, which the Marxists attribute to the Judaic-Christian code, is to be found right in the Communist plan of action itself.”

W. Cleon Skousen book The Naked Communist

The Naked Communist (1958)

Penalty, Communication, Perfection

“The possibilities for slavery expansion were almost endless. Douglas would have done these things, but he couldn't subscribe to the slave code. And on that basis, they seceded, and that split the Democratic Party, and that elected Abraham Lincoln.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), The Lincoln-Douglas Debates

“Anyone who bar-codes their employees isn’t likely to be the forgiving type, and the reflex of long-held obedience through hierarchy is usually enough to overcome fear of a combat death. That’s how you fight wars, after all—with soldiers who are more afraid of stepping out of line than they are of dying on the battlefield.”

Richard K. Morgan book Altered Carbon

Source: Altered Carbon (2002), Chapter 14 (p. 182)

Death, War, Fear, Forgiveness

“The programmers who write improvements to GCC (or Emacs, or Bash, or Linŭ, or any GPL-covered program) are often employed by companies or universities. When the programmer wants to return his improvements to the community, and see his code in the next release, the boss may say, "Hold on there — your code belongs to us! We don't want to share it; we have decided to turn your improved version into a proprietary software product."
Here the GNU GPL comes to the rescue. The programmer shows the boss that this proprietary software product would be copyright infringement, and the boss realizes that he has only two choices: release the new code as free software, or not at all. Almost always he lets the programmer do as he intended all along, and the code goes into the next release.”

Richard Stallman (1953) American software freedom activist, short story writer and computer programmer, founder of the GNU project

1990s, Copyleft: Pragmatic Idealism (1998)

Communication, Universe

“Is it coding — or code breaking? Is it like Deborah’s job? Do be careful, Tommy, people go queer doing that and can’t sleep and walk about all night groaning and repeating 978345286 or something like that and finally have nervous breakdowns and go into homes.”

Agatha Christie book N or M?

N or M? (1941)

People, Home, Sleep, Night

“So, is “Caliph Ibrahim” of the Islamic State an extremist, a militant, a terrorist or an Islamic fighter? None of the above. All those labels imply behavior that makes some sort of sense in terms of human reality and normal ideologies. Yet the Islamic State and its kindred have broken out of the entire conceivable range of political activity, even its extreme forms. A “militant” spends much of his time promoting an idea or a political program within acceptable rules of behavior. The neo-Islamists, by contrast, recognize no rules apart from those they themselves set; they have no desire to win an argument through hard canvassing. They don’t even seek to impose a point of view; they seek naked and brutal domination. A “terrorist,” meanwhile, tries to instill fear in an adversary from whom he demands specific concessions. Yet the Islamic State et al. use mass murder to such ends. They don’t want to persuade or cajole anyone to do anything in particular; they want everything. “Islamic fighter” is equally inapt. An Islamic fighter is a Muslim who fights a hostile infidel who is trying to prevent Muslims from practicing their faith. That was not the situation in Mosul. No one was preventing the city’s Muslim majority from practicing their faith, let alone forcing them to covert to another religion. Yet the Islamic State came, conquered and began to slaughter. The Islamic State kills people because it can. And in both Syria and Iraq it has killed more Muslims than members of any other religious community. How, then, can we define a phenomenon that has made even al Qaeda, the Taliban and the Khomeinist gangs appear “moderate” in comparison? The international community faced a similar question in the 18th century when pirates acted as a law onto themselves, ignoring the most basic norms of human interaction. The issue was discussed in long negotiations that led to the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) and the Treaty of Rastadt (1714) and developed a new judicial concept: the crime against humanity. Those who committed that crime would qualify as “enemies of mankind” — in Latin, hostis generis humanis. Individuals and groups convicted of such a crime were no longer covered by penal codes or even the laws of war. They’d set themselves outside humanity by behaving like wild beasts… Neo-Islamist groups represent a cocktail of nihilism and crimes against humanity. Like the pirates of yesteryear, they’ve attracted criminals from many different nationalities… Having embarked on genocide, the neo-Islamists do not represent an Iraqi or Syrian or Nigerian problem, but a problem for humanity as a whole. They are not enemies of any particular religion, sect or government but enemies of mankind. They deserve to be treated as such (as do the various governments and semi-governmental “charities” that help them). To deal with these enemies of mankind, we need much more than frozen bank accounts and visa restrictions.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

"Beyond terrorism: ISIS and other enemies of humanity" http://nypost.com/2014/08/20/beyond-terrorism-isis-and-other-enemies-of-humanity/, New York Post (August 20, 2014). New York Post

Hostility, War, People, Fear

“If this code works, it was written by Paul DiLascia. If not, I don't know who wrote it”

Paul DiLascia (1959–2008) American software developer

Misc

“The national Democratic Party and its southern affiliates labored mightily to re-subjugate the newly free blacks, eventually succeeding by implementing Jim Crow laws, motivating the birth of the Klan and then protecting it, establishing separate-but-equal schools and public facilities, and enacting codes of lawful segregation, all of which Democrats defended in a fight to the death until the 1960s. In U. S. history, from the ratification of the Constitution to the economic devastation wrought by Obama on contemporary black Americans, the men and women who run Democratic Party, from Jefferson and Jackson forward, have been the ferocious enemy of black Americans entering the mainstream of American life, to this day bending every tool of political power to keep them angry, unemployed, mired in poverty, and politically and economically dependent in a manner that approaches quite near to re-enslavement.”

Michael Scheuer (1952) American counterterrorism analyst

As quoted in Michael Scheuer's Non-Intervention https://archive.is/QBuxT (22 June 2015), by M. Scheuer. 2010s

Life, Death, Women, Men

“There would be dreamers of dreams and seers of visions and hearers of voices; readers of the entrails of beasts and interpreters of the flight of birds; there would be burning bushes and stone tablets on mountain-tops, and inspired words dictated to aged disciples on lonely islands. There would arise special castes of men and women, learned in these sacred matters; and these priestly castes would naturally emphasize the importance of their calling, would hold themselves aloof from the common herd, endowed with special powers and entitled to special privileges. They would interpret the oracles in ways favorable to themselves and their order; they would proclaim themselves friends and confidants of the god, walking with him in the night-time, receiving his messengers and angels, acting as his deputies in forgiving offenses, in dealing punishments and in receiving gifts. They would become makers of laws and moral codes. They would wear special costumes to distinguish them, they would go through elaborate ceremonies to impress their followers, employing all sensuous effects, architecture and sculpture and painting, music and poetry and dancing, candles and incense and bells and gongs.”

Upton Sinclair book The Profits of Religion

Book One : The Church of the Conquerors, "The Priestly Lie"
The Profits of Religion (1918)

Women, Men, God, Age

“A lot of people who are in the movie business don't really know much about movies, and they certainly don't know movie history. You have to even find a code when you're talking to these people—you can't use the references that you would use when talking to somebody who knows movie history. When you go in to pitch something, it depends what you invoke. You can't invoke anything really before 1980 with these people because they don't know what you're talking about. It's limiting. They get annoyed. They get offended that you are somehow trying to expose the fact that they don't know things, and make them feel inadequate. Which is of course not the point, or why you do it.”

Joe Dante (1946) film director

"Fun, Yes, But By No Means Civilized": Interview with Joe Dante (Part 2) https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/fun-yes-but-by-no-means-civilized-interview-with-joe-dante-part-2 (July 8 2009)

People, Feeling, History, Business

“What about the 200-year record of prominent Democrats who didn't bother with code words? They were openly and explicitly for slavery before the Civil War, supported lynching and 'Jim Crow' laws after the war, and regularly defended segregation and white supremacy throughout most of the 20th century.”

Bruce Bartlett (1951) American historian

Bruce Bartlett, "Whitewash" http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB122513867582273213 (December 2007), The Wall Street Journal 2000s

War, Law, Support

“Real programmers can write assembly code in any language.”

Larry Wall (1954) American computer programmer and author, creator of Perl

[8571@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV, 1990]
Usenet postings, 1990

“In a war the normal codes of civilized behavior are suspended. It would be unthinkable in so-called normal life to go into someone's home where a family is grieving over the death of a loved one and spend long moments photographing them. It simply wouldn't be done. Those picture could not have been made unless I was accepted by the people I'm photographing. It's simply impossible to photograph moments such as those…without the complicity of the people I'm photographing…without the fact that the welcomed me, that they accepted me, that they wanted me to be there. They understand that a stranger who's come there with a camera to show the rest of the world what is happening to them…gives them a voice in the outside world that they otherwise wouldn't have. I try my best to approach people with respect. I want them to see that I have respect for them and the situation they're in. I want to be very open in my approach…feel open in my own heart towards them. I want them to be aware of that. People do sense it…with very few words…sometimes with no words at all.”

James Nachtwey (1948) American photographer

War Photographer, documentary, 2001

Love, Life, Death, War

“There is an inborn tendency to be Free. Every being is struggling to be Free. No one wants bondage. No one wants misery. The very idea of disease and death is appalling to all. Still, a being thinks that it will be happy by sense-pleasures. Can these sense-pleasures make one happy? No. Any amount of sense-pleasures will not make one really happy. Sense-pleasures will bring momentary satisfaction and then make one unhappy. Then comes the question: Where does this real happiness lie? It lies in knowing the True Nature. To know your True Nature, you have to control your mind. In order to control your mind, you have to live a true life. You must be a man of good character. That is why all the Scriptures ask their followers to be good, kind, gentle, noble, charitable, truthful, etc. In fact, moral and ethical codes of good conduct are the starting points of all Religions. They start with moral and ethical codes and end with God-realization or Self-realization.”

Swami Narayanananda (1902–1988) Indian guru

The Essence of Life (1980), also in Minor Works II (2001), p. 131f

Life, Death, God, Happiness

“A statute of 1344 shows some weakness; but the statute of 1391 is memorable, not merely as being the Mortmain Code of three centuries, but as extending the rule of mortmain to all bodies, religious and secular alike, having perpetual succession. For this extension marks the definite recognition by English Law of the corporation, or, as it is sometimes called, the 'fictitious person' - the legal personality which is not restricted to the limits of individual life. The gradual evolution of this institution is one of the most fascinating chapters in legal history…”

Edward Jenks (1861–1939) British legal scholar

Source: A Short History Of The English Law (First Edition) (1912), Chapter VIII, Methods Of Alienation, p. 106

Life, Law, History, Success

“In the dynamic of today’s campus life, anti-racist codes are not really about enforcing a kind of social etiquette, universally applied. They are about power exercised by some over others.”

Jeffrey Tucker (1963) American writer

Source: Spooks and Speech Controls, archive.lewrockwell.com, 2016-05-22 http://archive.lewrockwell.com/orig/tucker4.html,

Life, Exercises, Universe

“"We do not encourage initiative," said the factory manager. "What you must do is to learn to work to the safety rules." It was my first day in my first job, as a plant chemist in an explosives factory, located in the English countryside, in July 1941. Happily, he was quite wrong. We were not making some old, tried and tested explosive like nitroglycerine or TNT. It was the first large -scale production of a brand-new chemical, code-named RDX-Research Department eXplosive-developed by a government military research department.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Source: A Long Search for Information (2004), p. 3.

Learning

“There are two kinds of laws: man's and God's. A man-made code that squares with the moral law, or the law of God, is a just law. But a man-made code that is inharmonious with the moral law is an unjust law. And an unjust law, as St. Augustine said, is no law at all. Thus a law that is unjust is morally null and void, and must be defied until it is legally null and void as well. Let us not forget, in the memories of 6,000,000 who died, that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal’, and that everything the Freedom Fighters in Hungary did was ‘illegal.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

Interview in Playboy (January 1965) https://web.archive.org/web/20080706183244/http://www.playboy.com/arts-entertainment/features/mlk/04.html 1960s

God, Law, Freedom, Memory

“If you just want to use the system, instead of hacking on its internals, you don't need source code.”

Andrew S. Tanenbaum (1944) Dutch computer scientist

In a Usenet message, 5 Feb 1992.
The "Linux is Obsolete" Debate

“Regardless of how secure a communication line is and how unbreakable a cryptographic algorithm seems to be, the weak links are often the endpoints - the sender (before encryption) and the recipient (after decryption) - unless they are code talkers using a language more obscure than Navajo.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Counterterrorism and Cybersecurity: Total Information Awareness (2nd Edition), 2015

Communication

“In a word, the home is a little dull. When you have got a woman in a box, and you pay rent on the box, her relationship to you insensibly changes character. It loses the fine excitement of democracy. It ceases to be companionship, for companionship is only possible in a democracy. It is no longer a sharing of life together—it is a breaking of life apart. Half a life—cooking, clothes, and children; half a life—business, politics, and baseball. It doesn’t make much difference which is the poorer half. Either half, when it comes to life, is very near to none at all.Of course, this artificial distinction does not strictly obtain in any particular marriage. There is an attempt to break it down. It is an honourable attempt. But our civilization is nevertheless built on that distinction, In order to break down that distinction utterly, it will be necessary to break down all the codes and restrictions and prejudices that keep women out of the great world. It is in the great world that a man finds his sweetheart, and in that narrow little box outside of the world that he loses her. When she has left that box and gone back into the great world, a citizen and a worker, then with surprise and delight he will discover her again, and never let her go.”

Floyd Dell (1887–1969) novelist, poet, playwright, critic, editor

[Dell, Floyd, Feminism for Men, The Masses, New York, 1914]

Life, Women, Marriage, Children

“I always want to design a frame that’s open to everyone. I don’t see art as a secret code.”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

“ Artist’s Quotes http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/unilever-series-ai-weiwei/artists-quote.” Excerpted from a conversation with curators Juliet Bingham and Marko Daniel, Beijing, May 31 and June 1, 2010. Tate Museums, UK. 2010-, 2010

Secret, Art

“It was as easy as keying in a door code. Somehow he felt that arming fusion bombs to detonate around him should have been more difficult.”

Daniel Abraham (1969) speculative fiction writer from the United States

Source: Leviathan Wakes (2011), Chapter 50 (p. 504)

“The official style is at once humble, polite, curt and disagreeable: it derives partly from that used in Byzantine times by the eunuch slave-secretariat, writing stiffly in the name of His Sacred Majesty, whose confidence they enjoyed, to their fellow-slaves outside the palace precincts — for the Emperor had summary power over everyone; and partly from the style used by the cleric-bureaucracy of the Middle Ages, writing stiffly in the name of the feudal lords to their serfs and, though cautious of offending their employers, protected from injury by being servants of the Church, not of the Crown, and so subject to canon, not feudal, law. The official style of civil servants, so far as it recalls its Byzantine derivation, is written by slaves to fellow-slaves of a fictitious tyrant; and, so far as it recalls its mediaeval derivation, is written by members of a quasi-ecclesiastical body, on behalf of quasi-feudal ministers (who, being politicians, come under a different code of behaviour from theirs) to a serflike public.”

Robert Graves (1895–1985) English poet and novelist

Source: The Reader Over Your Shoulder (1943), Ch. 4: "The Use and Abuse of Official English".

Age, Law, Confidence, Time

“The image of the whole of Bharatavarsha being a chakravartikshetra is as old as the oldest Vedic literature. The Itihasa-Purana provide glorious accounts of many chakravartins-Ikshvaku, Puru, Prithu Vainya, Sivi Ausinara, Mandhata, Raghu and so on-who accompanied the ašvamedha horse demanding submission from all kingdoms and republics, big and small, spread all over the country. The rãjasûya yajña which was performed at the end of this campaign was more in the nature of a meeting of equals than a durbar held by a despot in order to humble or humiliate subordinate princes and patriarchs. Sri Krishna had demanded death for Jarasandha because the latter had violated this dharmic tradition of empire-building, and kept a hundred kings captive in his castle. The Nandas had won notoriety as an ignoble dynasty because they had also violated the standard code of conduct laid down by the rãjadharma for righteous emperors, destroyed many local dynasties, and reduced other princes to provincial satraps.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Muslim Separatism – Causes and Consequences (1987)

Death, Literature, Nature, Horse

“Literature should not be suppressed merely because it offends the moral code of the censor.”

William O. Douglas (1898–1980) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Dissenting, Roth v. United States, 354 U.S. 476 (1957)
Judicial opinions

Literature

“Ultimately, if you accept the evolutionary theory, you dismiss ethics, you don’t have to abide by a set of moral codes, you determine your own conscience based on your own desires. You have no reason for things such as selfless love, when a father dives in to save his son from drowning. You can trash the Bible as irrelevant, just silly fables, since you believe that it does not conform to scientific thought. You can be like Lucifer, who said, “I will make myself like the Most High.””

Ben Carson (1951) 17th and current United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; American neurosurgeon

As quoted in "Evolution? No" http://archives.adventistreview.org/2004-1509/story2.html, The Adventist Review (2004)

Love

“As a working Sinologist, each time I look up a word in my Webster's or Kenkyusha's I experience a sharp pang of deprivation. Having slaved over Chinese dictionaries arranged in every imaginable order(by K'ang-hsi radical, left-top radical, bottom-right radical, left-right split, total stroke count, shape of successive stroke, four-corner, three corner, two-corner, Kuei-hsieh, ts'ang-chieh, telegraphic code, rhyme tables, phonetic keys, and so on ad nauseam), I have become deeply envious of specialists in those languages, such as Japanese, Indonesian, Hindi, Persian, Russian, Turkish, Korean, Vietnamese, and so forth, which possess alphabetically arranged dictionaries.”

Victor H. Mair (1943) American sinologist and linguist

The Need for an Alphabetically Arranged General Usage Dictionary of Mandarin Chinese (February 1986).

Imagination, Time, Success

“Perhaps a suitable analogy to explain the short-falls of Dawkins's account of evolution is to think of an oil painting. In this analogy Dawkins has explained the nature and range of pigments; how the extraordinary azure colour was obtained, what effect cobalt has, and so on. But the description is quite unable to account for the picture itself. This view of evolution is incomplete and therefore fails in its side-stepping of how information (the genetic code) gives rise to phenotype, and by what mechanisms. Organisms are more than the sum of their parts, and we may also note in passing that the world depicted by Dawkins has lost all sense of transcendence.”

Simon Conway Morris (1951) British palaeontologist

p9.
The Crucible of Creation (1998)

World, Nature, Thinking, Sense

“I finally understood that the half page of code on the bottom of page 13 of the Lisp 1.5 manual was Lisp in itself. These were “Maxwell’s Equations of Software!””

Alan Kay (1940) computer scientist

ACM Queue A Conversation with Alan Kay Vol. 2, No. 9 - Dec/Jan 2004-2005 http://www.acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=273&page=4 2000s

“The inflexible integrity of the moral code is, to me, the secret of the authority, the dignity, the utility of History.
If we may debase the currency for the sake of genius, or success, or rank, or reputation, we may debase it for the sake of a man’s influence, of his religion, of his party, of the good cause which prospers by his credit and suffers by his disgrace. Then History ceases to be a science, an arbiter of controversy, a guide of the Wanderer, the upholder of that moral standard which the powers of earth and religion itself tend constantly to depress. It serves where it ought to reign; and it serves the worst cause better than the purest.”

John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton (1834–1902) British politician and historian

Letter to Mandell Creighton (5 April 1887), published in Historical Essays and Studies, by John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton (1907), edited by John Neville Figgis and Reginald Vere Laurence, Appendix, p. 504; also in Essays on Freedom and Power (1972)

Secret, Religion, History, Suffering

“The GNU GPL is not Mr. Nice Guy. It says "no" to some of the things that people sometimes want to do. There are users who say that this is a bad thing — that the GPL "excludes" some proprietary software developers who "need to be brought into the free software community."
But we are not excluding them from our community; they are choosing not to enter. Their decision to make software proprietary is a decision to stay out of our community. Being in our community means joining in cooperation with us; we cannot "bring them into our community" if they don't want to join.
What we can do is offer them an inducement to join. The GNU GPL is designed to make an inducement from our existing software: "If you will make your software free, you can use this code."”

Richard Stallman (1953) American software freedom activist, short story writer and computer programmer, founder of the GNU project

Of course, it won't win 'em all, but it wins some of the time.
1990s, Copyleft: Pragmatic Idealism (1998)

People, Guy, Communication, Decision

“[I]t's guilty of the very thing that makes kids hate history as a subject when it's taught badly: The Da Vinci Code makes the past feel like a dull, grainy, faraway thing, instead of something vibrant and alive.”

Stephanie Zacharek (1963) American film critic

Review http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/review/2006/05/18/da_vinci/index.html of The Da Vinci Code (2006)

Hate, Feeling, History, Past

“The analogy between Shannon and codes in biology isn't something that sprang from my belief in God… except maybe on some deeper or more transcendent level.”

George Gilder (1939) technology writer

Interview with the Boston Globe (27 July 2005)

God

“The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. In a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfil this role requires systematic propaganda.”

Edward S. Herman book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

Source: Manufacturing Consent, with Noam Chomsky, 1988, p. 1.

World, Behavior, Communication, Wealth

“To undress is the dress code these days and I didn't start it. We are all voyeurs, so why the complaints? Until girls don't walk in a swimsuit on the stage they don't get the crown so why is everyone so holier-than-thou?”

Mallika Sherawat (1976) Indian actress

[The Babe with Balls, http://www.binabakshi.com/journalism.htm, Bina Bakshi, May 2004]

Girl

“This wasteful governing by fear, by contempt for the basic dignities of life, this steady asphyxiation of a dependent people, should be the very last means to be adopted by those who themselves know too well the awful significance, the unforgettable suffering of such an existence. It is unworthy of my great people, the Jews, who have striven to abide by a code of moral rectitude for some 5,000 years, who can create and achieve a society for themselves such as we see around us but can yet deny the sharing of its great qualities and benefits to those dwelling amongst them.”

Yehudi Menuhin (1916–1999) American violinist and conductor

Source: Americans for Justice in the Middle East A J M E News, Volumes 14-17 http://books.google.co.in/books?id=lTVtAAAAMAAJ, 1988, p. 30

Life, People, Fear, Suffering

“I'm begging you, your right to religion and freedom to exercise religion and read all of the passages of the Bible as you want to read them and as your church wants to preach them… are going to come under the ropes in the next year. If it lasts that long it will be the next year. I beg you, look for the words "social justice" or "economic justice" on your church Web site. If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words. Now, am I advising people to leave their church? Yes!”

Glenn Beck (1964) U.S. talk radio and television host

The Glenn Beck Program
Premiere Radio Networks
2010-03-02
Goodstein
Laurie
Outraged by Glenn Beck’s Salvo, Christians Fire Back
New York Times
2010-03-11
0362-4331
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/12/us/12justice.html
2010s, 2010

People, Religion, Justice, Exercises

“Nature has color-coded groups of individuals so that statistically reliable predictions of their adaptability to intellectual rewarding and effective lives can easily be made and profitably used by the pragmatic man-in-the street.”

William Shockley (1910–1989) American physicist and inventor

As quoted in "Shockley's Race View called 'Senile, Fascist'" in St. Petersburg Times (8 September 1971) http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=888&dat=19710908&id=sewNAAAAIBAJ&sjid=vnUDAAAAIBAJ&pg=4930,1230689

Color, Nature

“What are the great faults of conversation? Want of ideas, want of words, want of manners, are the principal ones, I suppose you think. I don't doubt it, but I will tell you what I have found spoil more good talks than anything else;—long arguments on special points between people who differ on the fundamental principles upon which these points depend. No men can have satisfactory relations with each other until they have agreed on certain ultimata [finalities] of belief not to be disturbed in ordinary conversation, and unless they have sense enough to trace the secondary questions depending upon these ultimate beliefs to their source. In short, just as a written constitution is essential to the best social order, so a code of finalities is a necessary condition of profitable talk between two persons.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894) Poet, essayist, physician

The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)

Men, People, Idea, Question

“The code also assumes that it's difficult to misspell 'a' or 'b.”

Larry Wall (1954) American computer programmer and author, creator of Perl

[199710221731.KAA24396@wall.org, 1997]
Usenet postings, 1997

“There's a human race, and different skin colors, and different racial, what we call racial characteristics. There's several theories about where those come in. Probably the best theory is that the Tower of Babel, which would have been a few hundred years after the flood, is where the races began. When god confused the languages, they went off into their small groups, all speakin' the same language. And if you get a small in-breeding group, you know, 2000 years after the creation, you're gonna get genetic disorders, and racial traits could be a result of this Tower of Babel incident. But I think that there's no question from scripture and from science that all humans are the same race, and have the same genetic code, and certainly can interbreed. So there's no reason scripturally to be a racist. You know, we all came from Adam and Eve, and then later from Noah and his family.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Coast-to-Coast AM interview (August 2-3, 2000)

God, Family, Color, Question

“The world of their [the bourgeois’] predecessors was a backward, pre-technological world, a world with the good conscience of inequality and toil, in which labor was still a fated misfortune; but a world in which man and nature were not yet organized as things and instrumentalities. With its code of forms and manners. with the style and vocabulary of its literature and philosophy. this past culture expressed the rhythm and content of a universe in which valleys and forests, villages and inns, nobles and villains, salons and courts were a part of the experienced reality. In the verse and prose of this pre-technological culture is the rhythm of those who wander or ride in carriages. who have the time and the pleasure to think, contemplate, feel and narrate. It is an outdated and surpassed culture, and only dreams and childlike regressions can recapture it. But this culture is, in some of its decisive elements. also a post-technological one. Its most advanced images and positions seem to survive their absorption into administered comforts and stimuli; they continue to haunt the consciousness with the possibility of their rebirth in the consummation of technical progress. They are the expression of that free and conscious alienation from the established forms of life with which literature and the arts opposed these forms even where they adorned them. In contrast to the Marxian concept, which denotes man's relation to himself and to his work in capitalist society, the artistic alienation is the conscious transcendence of the alienated existence—a “higher level” or mediated alienation. The conflict with the world of progress, the negation of the order of business, the anti-bourgeois elements in bourgeois literature and art are neither due to the aesthetic lowliness of this order nor to romantic reaction—nostalgic consecration of a disappearing stage of civilization. “Romantic” is a term of condescending defamation which is easily applied to disparaging avant-garde positions, just as the term “decadent” far more often denounces the genuinely progressive traits of a dying culture than the real factors of decay. The traditional images of artistic alienation are indeed romantic in as much as they are in aesthetic incompatibility with the developing society. This incompatibility is the token of their truth. What they recall and preserve in memory pertains to the future: images of a gratification that would dissolve the society which suppresses it”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), pp. 59-60

Life, Fate, Pleasure, Truth

“Slavery was a central concern of governance form the time of the first nation-state. The Code of Hammurabi, the earliest know set of laws for governing an empire, prescribed death for anyone who harbored a fugitive or otherwise helped a slave to escape. The relationship between the law and bondage goes back even farther: Indeed, the oldest extant legal documents don't concern the sale of land, houses, or even animals, but slaves.”

Derrick Jensen book The Culture of Make Believe

Source: The Culture of Make Believe (2003), p. 60

Death, Law, Time, Help

“Most religions, and certainly the Abrahamic ones, have three features that are foreign to science. The most important is religion’s linkage to moral codes that define and enforce proper behavior, behavior supposedly reflecting God’s will. The second is the widespread belief in eternal reward and punishment: the notion that after death not just your fate but everyone else’s depends on adherence to conduct mandated by your religion. And the third is the notion of absolute truth: that the nature of your god, and what it wants, is unchanging. While some believers see their ability to fathom God’s nature as limited, and don’t accept the notion of a heaven or hell, the certainty of religious dogma is ar more absolute and far less provisional than the pronouncements of science.
This combination of certainty, morality, and universal punishment is toxic. It is what leads many believers not only to accept unenlightened views, like the disenfranchisement of women and gays, opposition to birth control, and intrusions into people’s private sex lives, but also to force those views on others, including their own children and society at large, and sometimes even to kill those who disagree.”

Jerry Coyne book Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible

Source: Faith vs. Fact (2015), pp. 219-220

Death, Women, God, Fate

“My agenda, pre-Trump, is the same agenda post-Trump. I am so glad that we have a president in the White House who wants to accomplish the things that the people of the state of Arizona, and people around this country, want to accomplish, I will be focused on things like border security, stopping illegal immigration, stopping rewarding people who came here illegally, and repealing Obamacare. I will be making sure the tax code is corrected, fair, and stimulates the economy’s growth — as well as making sure that America is energy independent. Those are things I have been fighting for since the first time I ran for the Arizona State Senate, trying to affect those things at the state level, and they are things that have been consistent even in my pre-political life.”

Kelli Ward (1969) American politician

Interview: Dr. Kelli Ward On Her Comments About Replacing John McCain https://bigleaguepolitics.com/interview-dr-kelli-ward-comments-replacing-john-mccain/ (July 21, 2017)

Life, People, Time, Fight

“The decisions I made designing wiki were very much inspired by my desire to create a model for the collaborative process I thought should happen in large code bases. I wanted wiki to mimic that.”

Ward Cunningham (1949) American computer programmer who developed the first wiki

A Conversation with Ward Cunningham (2003), Collective Ownership of Code and Text

Decision

“For example, the GPLv2 in no way limits your use of the software. If you're a mad scientist, you can use GPLv2'd software for your evil plans to take over the world ("Sharks with lasers on their heads!!"), and the GPLv2 just says that you have to give source code back. And that's OK by me. I like sharks with lasers. I just want the mad scientists of the world to pay me back in kind. I made source code available to them, they have to make their changes to it available to me. After that, they can fry me with their shark-mounted lasers all they want.”

Linus Torvalds (1969) Finnish-American software engineer and hacker

Linux Licensing, Forbes, 2006-03-09, Lyons, Daniel, 2006-08-28 http://www.forbes.com/technology/2006/03/09/torvalds-linux-licensing-cz_dl_0309torvalds1.html, 2000s, 2006

World, Way, Evil, Change

Quotes about code page 2

Quotes about code
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