Quotes about code
page 3

Theo de Raadt photo

“Low code quality keeps haunting our entire industry. That, and sloppy programmers who don't understand the frameworks they work within. They're like plumbers high on glue.”

Theo de Raadt (1968) systems software engineer

Quoted in U.S. military helps fund Calgary hacker, Akin, David, 2004-04-06, 2007-01-10, Globe and Mail, http://web.archive.org/web/20040815134728/http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20030406.whack46/BNStory/Technology/?query=openbsd, 2004-08-15 http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20030406.whack46/BNStory/Technology/?query=openbsd,

“Communist writers likewise maintain that the Judaic-Christian code of ethics is "class" morality. By this they mean that the Ten Commandments and the ethics of Christianity were created to protect private property and the property class. To show the lengths to which Communist writers have gone to defend this view we will mention several of their favorite interpretations of the Ten Commandments. They believe that "Honor thy Father and thy Mother" was created by the early Hebrews to emphasize to their children the fact that they were the private property of their parents. "Thou shalt not kill" was attributed to the belief of the dominant class that their bodies were private property and therefore they should be protected along with other property rights. "Thou shalt not commit adultery" and "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife" were said to have been created to implement the idea that a husband was the master of the home and the wife was strictly private property belonging to him. This last line of reasoning led to some catastrophic consequences when the Communists came into power in Russia. In their anxiety to make women "equal with men" and prevent them from becoming private property, they degraded womankind to the lowest and most primitive level. Some Communist leaders advocated complete libertinism and promiscuity to replace marriage and the family.”

The Naked Communist (1958)

Condoleezza Rice photo

“In response to a question about what "keeps her up at night", I worry about the fact that in K-12 education I can look at your zip code and tell whether or not you're going to get a good education.”

Condoleezza Rice (1954) American Republican politician; U.S. Secretary of State; political scientist

Interview by Donna Shalala C-Span Video Library No Higher Honor http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/302536-1 University of Miami, School of Business Administration, November 3, 2011.

Susan Faludi photo
Benjamin N. Cardozo photo

“Code is followed by commentary, and commentary by revision, and thus the task is never done.”

Benjamin N. Cardozo (1870–1938) United States federal judge

Page 132
Other writings, The Growth of the Law (1924)

Taslima Nasrin photo
Hiram Price photo

“The Republican Party is strong enough to dare to do right and cannot afford to shirk a duty. The colored men North and South were loyal to the Government in the days of its greatest peril. There was not a rebel or a traitor to be found among them. They ask the privilege of citizenship now that slavery has been forever banished from our country. Why should the great freedom-loving State of Iowa longer deny them this right? No one reason can be given that has not been used to bolster up slavery for the last hundred years. The war that has just closed has swept that relic of barbarism from our land; let the Republican Party have the courage to do justice…I have no fear of the result in a contest of this kind. We shall carry the election and have the satisfaction of wiping out the last vestige of the black code that has long been a disgrace to our State.”

Hiram Price (1814–1901) American politician

As quoted in History of Iowa from the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century https://books.google.com/books?id=gTdAAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA1&lpg=PA1&dq=%22With+proper+safeguards+to+the+purity+of+the+ballot+box,+the+elective+franchise+should+be+based+upon+loyalty+to+the+Constitution+and+the+Union+recognizing+and+affirming+the+equality+of+all+men+before+the+law%22&source=bl&ots=z_M1ul7IWl&sig=8CNmDX4D9Q3cLBaZ1hxR_MgATZE&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjI7_W07L7UAhVMcT4KHT1uDXAQ6AEIJzAA#v=onepage&q=%22With%20proper%20safeguards%20to%20the%20purity%20of%20the%20ballot%20box%2C%20the%20elective%20franchise%20should%20be%20based%20upon%20loyalty%20to%20the%20Constitution%20and%20the%20Union%20recognizing%20and%20affirming%20the%20equality%20of%20all%20men%20before%20the%20law%22&f=false (1903), by Benjamin F. Gue, Volume III, Chapter 1

Theo de Raadt photo

“[…] beer results in ideas, which results in new code.”

Theo de Raadt (1968) systems software engineer

[slashdot, http://bsd.slashdot.org/story/00/12/11/1455210/theo-de-raadt-responds]

Germaine Greer photo
William Blake photo

“The Old and New Testaments are the great code of art.”

William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist

Oldest source found: "The Harvard Advocate" (Vol. 102–103), p. 268
Attributed

Sukarno photo
Ivar Jacobson photo
Bjarne Stroustrup photo
Matt Mullenweg photo

“We are much better at writing code than haiku.”

Matt Mullenweg (1984) American entrepreneur

http://automattic.com/ Automattic Home Page

Martin Amis photo
Paul Davies photo
Ismail ibn Musa Menk photo

“And the same applies to the spouse. You know you love them, but you need to say it again and again. Like we got to the food, moments ago, and you need to say: "This food is – mashallah – it's really, really great". Even if the salt is a little bit more. Because sometimes, as I was saying, she spent so much time bringing it in front of us – and we are worried about how it's smelling, number one, and number two is we say, as we taste it, "The salt is too much, no?" What are you talking about? She just looks at you and her face flops. «I've been at it for three hours here, four hours I've been busy with this for so many months…» And what does she even say? "Next time I'll try a bit harder" – that's if she's a good woman; if not, she will say: "Never gonna cook this again!" It's typical. And if you have someone who is very witty: "The next time there's salt to be put in, I'll call you to put it." So we need to praise the cooking of our wives, we need to praise their dress code, especially… For example, I can let you know something that has worked, for some people. When you find some women, you know, they don't like to dress appropriately, so the husband sometimes wants to tell them something. There're two, three ways of doing it. You can either say, "This is very bad, I don't want you to wear this." And, you know, you might have a response. But if you want a response from the heart, what you do is, you tell them: "The other dress looked much better than this." You see, so you are praising one thing, and that praise is not there when the other thing is there. So, you have told them, in a way, that «this is what I really love». And go beyond the limits in praise – that's your wife, don't worry, you can say whatever you want, mashallah, in terms of goodness. Like the food, when you eat, even if it is a little bit this way or that way, just praise it, mashallah. See what it is. Praise the effort, at least. Let me tell you what has happened once. They say the imam in the mosque had said: "You need to praise the cooking of your wife". Just like I said now. So the man went home, and he had this meal, and he was looking at it, and looking at his wife, and smiling, all happy, mashallah, excited and everything. And when he finishes, he says: "Oh! It was awesome!" And the wife says, "What? I've been cooking for you for 21 years, you never said that! Today, when the food came from the neighbor, you want to say it was awesome?"”

Ismail ibn Musa Menk (1975) Muslim cleric and Grand Mufti of Zimbabwe.

"The Fortunate Muslim Family: Divine Solution to the Fragmented Family" (20 February 2012), lecture at the University of Malaya ( YouTube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QaeZcV_azE)
Lectures

Erik Naggum photo
Roger Ebert photo

“The movie stars six teenage characters who have been marketed on TV and in toy stores. They have names, but no discernible personalities. None of them ever says anything more interesting than "You guys!" As teenagers, they are skilled in-line skaters and karate fighters, but they don't get their real powers until they turn into faceless clones in Power Rangers uniforms with plastic masks and helmets. Is that the message? Faceless conformity is the way to success? Certainly the Rangers are not individuals in or out of uniform, but I wonder if they don't represent a triumph of merchandising over creativity. Children's heroes have traditionally been individualistic and eccentric. The Rangers are not, properly speaking, even characters. They are color-coded products… Paging through the movie's press kit, I came across this quote attributed to Amy Jo Johnson, who plays Kimberly, the Pink Power Ranger: " `Mighty Morphin Power Rangers™: The Movie' is a mix between Star Wars and The Wizard of Oz. " I wonder if Amy Jo actually said "TM" when she was delivering that wonderfully fresh and spontaneous quote, which is so much more involved than anything she says in the movie. More to the point, I wonder if she has ever seen "Star Wars" or "The Wizard of Oz."”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/mighty-morphin-power-rangers-the-movie-1995 of Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers: The Movie (30 June 1995)
Reviews, Half-star reviews

Jerry Coyne photo
Ward Cunningham photo
Harry Truman photo
Fitz-Greene Halleck photo
Linus Torvalds photo
Jennifer Beals photo
Jayachamarajendra Wadiyar photo
Roger Ebert photo
Marshall McLuhan photo

“Today, computers hold out the promise of a means of instant translation of any code or language into any other code or language.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 80

William Empson photo

“Attending there let us absorb the cultures of nations
And dissolve into our judgement all their codes.
Then, being clogged with a natural hesitation
(People are continually asking one the way out),
Let us stand here and admit that we have no road.”

William Empson (1906–1984) English literary critic and poet

"Homage to the British Museum" (1932), line 8; cited from John Haffenden (ed.) The Complete Poems (London: Allen Lane, 2000) p. 55.
The Complete Poems

Grady Booch photo
Ward Cunningham photo

“Let's not worry about what somebody reading the code tomorrow is going to think. Let's not worry about whether it's efficient. Let's not even worry about whether it will work. Let's just write the simplest thing that could possibly work.”

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

A Conversation with Ward Cunningham (2003), The Simplest Thing that Could Possibly Work

Jonah Goldberg photo

“In short, “social justice” is code for good things no one needs to argue for -- and no one dare be against.”

Jonah Goldberg (1969) American political writer and pundit

2010s, 2014, What is Social Justice (2014)

Bill Gates photo
Otto Weininger photo
Jiddu Krishnamurti photo
Larry Wall photo

“It won't be covered in the book. The source code has to be useful for something, after all…”

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

[10160@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV, 1990]
Usenet postings, 1990

Robert A. Heinlein photo
Maxine Waters photo
Paul Davies photo

“What is remarkable is that human beings are actually able to carry out this code-breaking operation, that the human mind has the necessary intellectual equipment for us to "unlock the secrets of nature"…”

Paul Davies (1946) British physicist

Source: The Mind of God: The Scientific Basis for a Rational World (1992), Ch. 6: 'The Mathematical Secret', p. 148

James M. McPherson photo
Jeffrey Montgomery photo
J. B. S. Haldane photo

“The time has gone by when a Huxley could believe that while science might indeed remould traditional mythology, traditional morals were impregnable and sacrosanct to it. We must learn not to take traditional morals too seriously. And it is just because even the least dogmatic of religions tends to associate itself with some kind of unalterable moral tradition, that there can be no truce between science and religion.
There does not seem to be any particular reason why a religion should not arise with an ethic as fluid as Hindu mythology, but it has not yet arisen. Christianity has probably the most flexible morals of any religion, because Jesus left no code of law behind him like Moses or Muhammad, and his moral precepts are so different from those of ordinary life that no society has ever made any serious attempt to carry them out, such as was possible in the case of Israel and Islam. But every Christian church has tried to impose a code of morals of some kind for which it has claimed divine sanction. As these codes have always been opposed to those of the gospels a loophole has been left for moral progress such as hardly exists in other religions. This is no doubt an argument for Christianity as against other religions, but not as against none at all, or as against a religion which will frankly admit that its mythology and morals are provisional. That is the only sort of religion that would satisfy the scientific mind, and it is very doubtful whether it could properly be called a religion at all.”

J. B. S. Haldane (1892–1964) Geneticist and evolutionary biologist

Daedalus or Science and the Future (1923)

Immanuel Kant photo
Muhammad Ali Jinnah photo
Newton Lee photo
Gore Vidal photo

“Nonprofit status is what created the Bible Belt. The tax code brought religion back to this country.”

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) American writer

2000s, What I've Learned (2008)

H.L. Mencken photo
Daniel Handler photo
Margaret Mead photo
Robert A. Heinlein photo
Joseph Beuys photo
John C. Dvorak photo
Nayef Al-Rodhan photo
Michael Halliday photo

“What makes learning possible is that the coding imposed by the mother tongue corresponds to a possible mode of perception and interpretation of the environment. A green car can be analysed experientially as carness qualified by greenness, if that is the way the system works.”

Michael Halliday (1925–2018) Australian linguist

Source: 1970s and later, Learning How to Mean--Explorations in the Development of Language, 1975, p. 140 cited in: Clare Painter (2005) Learning Through Language In Early Childhood. p. 64.

Debito Arudou photo

“Too many Japanese believe that they can say whatever they like in Japanese ('that statement was for a domestic audience' is very often an excuse for gaffes), as though Japanese is some secret code.”

Debito Arudou (1965) Author/activist with Japanese citizenship born in the USA

Debito Arudou on defending the Japanese weeklies, as well as Ryann Connell and his collaborators, by suggesting that the Mainichi Shimbuns now defunct WaiWai column was "an essential guide to Japanese attitudes and editorial directives." Justin Norrie, "Japan rails at Australian's tabloid trash" http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/news/world/japan-rails-at-australians-tabloid-trash/2008/07/04/1214951041660.html?page=2, Brisbane Times (2008-07-05)

C. Wright Mills photo
William H. Starbuck photo
Kent Hovind photo
Frank Herbert photo
Vannevar Bush photo
Robert Skidelsky photo
Ward Cunningham photo
Antonio Negri photo
Donald Ervin Knuth photo

“Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.”

Donald Ervin Knuth (1938) American computer scientist

Donald Knuth's webpage http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/faq.html states the line was used to end a memo entitled Notes on the van Emde Boas construction of priority deques: An instructive use of recursion (1977)

Syama Prasad Mookerjee photo
Hannah Arendt photo

“Note that I hold the single-author record for total CERT advisories, proving that in my copious youth I knew how to sling code but not how to manage risk.”

Paul Vixie (1963) American internet pioneer

NANOG mailing list http://www.merit.edu/mail.archives/nanog/2002-02/msg00482.html (2002)
Notes: talking about software security bugs.

TotalBiscuit photo

“Stephane replied within 24 hours and gave us a review code. These are the facts. It's unthinkable that Stephane could possibly believe that we had no intention of monetizing the content.”

TotalBiscuit (1984–2018) British game commentator

Other videos, This video is no longer available: The Day One[:<nowiki>]</nowiki> Garry's Incident Incident

Richard Dawkins photo

“Imagine you are God. You’re all-powerful, nothing is beyond you. You’re all-loving. So it is really, really important to you that humans are left in no doubt about your existence and your loving nature, and exactly what they need to do in order to get to heaven and avoid eternity in the fires of hell. It’s really important to you to get that across. So what do you do? Well, if you’re Jehovah, apparently this is what you do. You talk in riddles. You tell stories which on the surface have a different message from the one you apparently want us to understand. You expect us to hear X, and instinctively understand that it needs to be interpreted in the light of Y, which you happen to have said in the course of a completely different story 500-1,000 years earlier. Instead of speaking directly into our heads - which God has presumed the capability of doing so - simply, clearly and straightforwardly in terms which the particular individual being addressed will immediately understand and respond to positively - you steep your messages in symbols, in metaphors. In fact, you choose to convey the most important message in the history of creation in code, as if you aspired to be Umberto Eco or Dan Brown. Anyone would think your top priority was to keep generation after generation after generation of theologians in meaningless employment, rather than communicate an urgent life-or-death message to the creatures you love more than any other.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

FFRF 2012 National Convention, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJTQiChzTNI?t=43m19s

Sayyid Qutb photo

“A society cannot be Islamic if it expels the civil and religious Laws of Islam from its codes and customs, so that nothing of Islam is left except rites and ceremonials.”

Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966) Egyptian author, educator, Islamic theorist, poet, and politician

Source: Social Justice in Islam (1953), p. 26

Linus Torvalds photo

“Real quality means making sure that people are proud of the code they write, that they're involved and taking it personally.”

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

Interview with Linus Torvalds of The Linux Foundation, 2008-09-15, Torvalds, Linus, 2008-12-31 http://www.linuxfoundation.org/events/node/154,
2000s, 2008

Martin Luther King, Jr. photo
Eric Holder photo
Gabe Newell photo

“George Lucas should have distributed the "source code" to Star Wars. Millions of fans would create their own movies and stories. Most of them would be terrible, but a few would be genius.”

Gabe Newell (1962) American computer programmer and businessman

It's A Mod, Mod Underworld, Victoria Murphy Barret, Forbes, 2005-12-12, 2008-02-21, http://web.archive.org/web/20080501213031/http://www.forbes.com/business/forbes/2005/1212/064_2.html, 2008-05-01 http://www.forbes.com/business/forbes/2005/1212/064_2.html,

Nicholas Wade photo
Erik Naggum photo
Winston S. Churchill photo
Sinclair Lewis photo
Anne Rice photo
Alfred North Whitehead photo