But the way the prophets of the twentieth century went to work was this. They took something or other that was certainly going on in their time, and then said that it would go on more and more until something extraordinary happened. And very often they added that in some odd place that extraordinary thing had happened, and that it showed the signs of the times.

[A few pages later:]

"Just as," said Dr. Pellkins, in a fine passage, "... just as when we see a pig in a litter larger than the other pigs, we know that by an unalterable law of the Inscrutable it will some day be larger than an elephant, just as we know, when we see weeds and dandelions growing more and more thickly in a garden, that they must, in spite of all our efforts, grow taller than the chimney-pots and swallow the house from sight, so we know and reverently acknowledge, that when any power in human politics has shown for any period of time any considerable activity, it will go on until it reaches to the sky."

--- G.K. Chesterton: The Napoleon of Notting Hill, 1904. Thanks to S.

Success consists of conquering the fear of failure

--- Saint Beuve

Shutting down peer-two-peer networks was like taking a half-course of antibiotics every six months. It just led to the evolution of more decentralized networks that are more efficient and more difficult to shut down.

--- Tom McInerney, co-founder of "legit" file-sharing site Guba.com, quoted in "What'll it be, matey? The hangman's rope or service to the queen?", Good Morning Silicon Valley, June 27, 2006

The news, as "lecture," is giving way to the news as a "conversation."

--- Tom Curley, President and CEO, Associated Press, remarks at the Online News Association Conference, Nov. 12, 2004, cited by Jay Rosen, Web Users Open the Gates, special to washingtonpost.com, June 19, 2006

There are no facts in the future

-- Edmond (Ed) Thomas, engineer and partner in the law firm of Harris, Wiltshire and Grannis, former Chief Engineer of the Federal Communications Commission and CTO at Verizon, in conversation, 14 June 2006

A successful businessman visted his old economics professor. While chatting, the former student noticed an exam on the professor's desk and began reading. Shocked, he announced, "This is the same exam you gave me fifteen years ago! Aren't you afraid the students are just going to track down old tests?" The professor laughed. "No, that's okay. I do keep the same questions. It's the answers I change every year."

--- Todd Bucholtz in "New ideas from dead economists", 1989, p 236

I stood among them, but not of them.

--- Lord Byron, cited by Todd Bucholtz in "New ideas from dead economists", 1989, p 106

More info, from http://www.online-literature.com:

I stood
Among them, but not of them; in a shroud
Of thoughts which were not their thoughts.

Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto iii. Stanza 113.

A price as low as literally free can mean the economic equivalent of a free kitten -- I may get a free kitten, but then I have to deal with the consequences, with no exit strategy.

--- Bruce Sterling, Shaping Things, Ch. 9, p. 71

Jill B. told me about these two poems her father, Chippy Armstrong, used to quote:

A man is not old when his hair turns grey
A man is not old when his teeth decay
But a man is ready for his last long sleep
When his mind makes appointments, his body can't keep.

I burn my candle at both ends
It scarce can last the night
But oh my foes and oh my friends
It makes a lovely light.

There's an absence of actual doers. We have the deciders.

--- Steve Elrod, VP Scientific Affairs, TAP Pharmaceutical Products, a virtual drug company, quoted in feature on Drug Discovery in New Scientist, 6 Aug 2005, p. 57

The company outsources al preclinical bench-level work - including the discovery of new molecules. Elrod's also quoted as saying, "We have the competency, but not the capacity."

Country music is three chords and the truth

--- "I fall to pieces" songwriter Harlan Howard, cited by Nashville songwriter Ben Bowling in The rise of 'redneck' stirs up country music, Patrik Jonsson, Christian Science Monitor, 12 Oct 2005

Now I finally know what we are going to do with all those cycles

--- science writer Fred Hapgood, in a mail exchange with Edward Castronova, cited by Castronova in Synthetic Worlds: The business and culture of online games (2005) p. 279

How ironic that those who devote many hours to MMPORGs are considered social misfits. Maybe the truth is that contemporary society has become so misfitted itself that anyone who wants to interact with others must pay money to enter an alternative society that has been constructed for the specific purpose of encouraging teamwork among strangers.

--- Edward Castronova, Synthetic Worlds: The business and culture of online games
(2005) p. 274

Securities analysts believe that companies make money. Companies make shoes!

--- Peter Drucker, in Brent Schlender, 'Peter Drucker Takes the Long View: An Interview', Fortune, Sep 28 1998, cited in Carlota Perez, Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital p. 124

New media don't succeed because they're like the old media, only better: they succeed because they're worse than the old media at the stuff the old media is good at, and better at the stuff the old media are bad at.

--- Cory Doctorow, Microsoft Research DRM talk, June 17, 2004

No one will sue you for patent infringement till you have money, and once you have money, people will sue you whether they have grounds to or not.

--- Paul Graham, March 2006, Are software patents evil?, an essay is derived from a talk at Google

Another one from this story: "Things always seem intangible when you don't understand them."

The easiest thing for a reader to do is to quit reading.

--- Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Gartner, quoted by Roy Peter Clark in Writing Tool #23: Place Gold Coins Along the Path.

[It] is becoming increasingly clear that to understand living systems in any deep sense, we must come to see them not materialistically, as machines, but as (stable) complex, dynamic organization.

--- Carl Woese, A new biology for a new century (Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews, vol 68, p 173), quoted by Freeman Dyson in Make me a hipporoo, new Scientist, 11 February 2006

It's not that DOD flunks audits, it's that DOD's books cannot be audited. DOD aspires for the position where it flunks an audit.

--- Winslow T. Wheeler of the Center for Defense Information, quoted in The Pentagon's Broken Book-keeping, Defense Industry Daily, 28 Feb 2006.

From the DID piece:

For instance, the DoD has about 5.2 million inventory items, compared with 11,000 at Wal-Mart or 50,000 at Home Depot stores. Now multiply that by the fact that the same item may have several different order codes in different DoD departments, which do not use the same format. The DoD also has $1.3 trillion in assets (Wal-Mart: $120 billion) and $1.9 trillion in liabilities (Wal-Mart: $20 billion).

Which means their problems may continue for some time. To add to the difficulties involved, the Pentagon only began putting income statements together in the 1990s; before that, it had never needed to put a value on anything. Some believe that overhang will cripple any "clean audit efforts," which stood at 16% of assets and 49% of its liabilities as of June 2005.

... The Raleigh-Durham News & Observer reports that the US Defense Department now hopes to settle the balance sheet on 47% of assets and 49% of liabilities by 2007.

[S]earch engines are [] like a TV camera crew let loose in the middle of a crowd of rowdy fans after a game. Seeing the camera, everyone acts boorishly and jostles to get in front. The act of observing something changes it.

--- Lee Gomes, Our Columnist Creates Web 'Original Content' But Is in for a Surprise, Wall Street Journal, 1 Mar 2006

Quote in context:

My beef, actually, is with the search engines and the economics of the modern Web. Google, for example, says its mission is 'to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.' The way that's written, one thinks perhaps of a satellite orbiting high above the earth, capturing all its information but interfering with nothing. In fact, search engines are more like a TV camera crew let loose in the middle of a crowd of rowdy fans after a game. Seeing the camera, everyone acts boorishly and jostles to get in front. The act of observing something changes it. Which is what search engines are causing to happen to much of the world's 'information.' Legitimate information ... risks being crowded out by junky, spammy imitations. Nothing very useful about that.

Within five years, half of media will be created by non-professionals

--- Matt Corwine, writer, PR consultant, music critic, record producer, Web designer, DJ and lecturer; comments over coffee at Avante in Capitol Hill, 23 Feb 2006

Some more nuggets from the same meeting:

[I’m] selling things that can’t be digitized

Smart people treat recordings as a marketing expense

The past one hundred years is sort of a blip as far as [the structure of the] music [industry] is concerned

Dan Gillmor failed with Bayosphere because he was more interested in changing the news business than doing the news

To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, remove things every day.

--- common paraphrase of Lao Tse, Tao Te Ching Chapter 48

Linguistics is arguably the most hotly contested property in the academic realm. It is soaked with the blood of poets, theologians, philosophers, philologists, psychologists, biologists, and neurologists, along with whatever blood can be got out of grammarians.

--- Russ Rymer, cited by Fauconnier and Turner, Ch. 17, The Way We Think (2002); according to wikipedia, published in Annals of Science in "The New Yorker", 13th April 1992

[It] seems increasingly likely that the constants of nature are more like the temperature of the Earth - properties of our local environment that vary from place to place.

--- Leonard Susskind, physicist

Source: Because we're here, Interview with Leonard Susskind, New Scientist 17 Dec 2005. Quote in context:

Q. Steven Weinberg recently said that this is one of the great sea changes in fundamental science since Einstein, that it changes the nature of science itself. Is it such a radical change?

A. In a way it is very radical but in another way it isn't. The great ambition of physicists like myself was to explain why the laws of nature are just what they are. Why is the proton just about 1800 times heavier than the electron? Why do neutrinos exist? The great hope was that some deep mathematical principle would determine all the constants of nature, like Newton's constant. But it seems increasingly likely that the constants of nature are more like the temperature of the Earth - properties of our local environment that vary from place to place. Like the temperature, many of the constants have to be just so if intelligent life is to exist. So we live where life is possible.

For some physicists this idea is an incredible disappointment. Personally, I don't see it that way. I find it exciting to think that the universe may be much bigger, richer and full of variety than we ever expected. And it doesn't seem so incredibly philosophically radical to think that some things may be environmental.

We only confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no big ones

--- Francois Duc de La Rochefoucauld, a seventeenth-century French writer and moralist

From Inside Influence Jan 2006, which discusses which faults to confess.

Quantum theory isn't a description of physical reality. All it does is provide correct answers to meaningful questions about experiments.

--- The late physicist Asher Peres

cited by Mark Buchanan in "Discovering the true nature of reality", New Scientist, 18 Jun 2005, p 34

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

--- Umberto Eco, quoted in the Writer's Almanac, 5 January 2006

Of all the qualities in a manager conducive to innovation initiative, a degree of uncertainty may be the most powerful. If a manager is confident but uncertain – confident that the job will get done but without being certain of exactly the best way of doing it – employees are likely to have more room to be creative, alert, and self-starting.

--- Ellen Langer, Mindfullness (1989) Ch. 8, p 143

The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play.

--- Arnold Toynbee

Some people become radical out of hatred. Others become radical out of love and sympathy. I come out of the second class. I have hated very few people... I have faith, despite the imperfections of the human race, that a better society, a better world, a more just world, a kindlier world can come into being.

--- I.F. Stone, left-wing journalist, quoted in Writer's Almanac, 24 December 2005

A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject.

--- Sir Winston Churchill

Not believe in Web 2.0! You might as well not believe in fairies!

--- Rex Hammock

Quote courtesy SiliconValley.com's daily email:

"Not believe in Web 2.0! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get
your papa to hire Tim O'Reilly to come over to your house and explain Web 2.0 to
you, but even if Tim O'Reilly showed up and you didn't understand what the heck
he was talking about, what would that prove? So what if nobody can actually
explain Web 2.0 without using techno babble and business buzzwords? That is no
sign that there is no Web 2.0. The most real things in the world are those that
neither children nor men can see -- and that's why they develop buzzwords. Did
you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that's no proof
that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there
are unseen and unseeable in the world."

-- Rex Hammock explains the mystery behind the elusive concept of Web 2.0

When everyone is different, the pointing out of differences is merely description. But when everyone is trying to look the same, the pointing out of difference has the ring of prejudice.

--- Natalia Ilyin, Blonde Like Me: The Roots of the Blonde Myth in Our Culture (2000), "Farrah and the Song Girls", p 100

This is one of the best books I've read in ages. Ilyin is smart, hilariously funny, and writes about deep, complex subjects in a deceptively simple way. Here's the quote in context:

Rita's best friend Doris who lived across the street, brought Rita big flats of frozen ravioli. Were they Italian-American? Who knew?

...

Rita only evidenced her German background in her attraction to Hummel
figurines. My friend Leslie, half Greek, knew no Greek, and my sisters andI spoke no Russian. My friend Claire was ethnically Jewish, now that I look back on it, but no one was exactly observing Yom Kippur over there. I think some black people lived in the house with the abundant azaleas, but I never saw them.

The people who moved to Las Gallinas Avenue came there without a past, and lived like stateless people. They came with no history, and made none.

In New York people routinely call you up and say things like "Come on over! My sister's here with her Serbian boyfriend, and our neighbors are going to drop by -- you remember them -- she's Ashkenazi and he's Sephardic." But when I was growing up in California, everyone in my white-bread suburb was making an effort to be identical.

When everyone is different, the pointing out of differences is merely description. But when everyone is trying to look the same, the pointing out of difference has the ring of prejudice. Once, when my European brother-in-law described some friend of his as a second-generation Hungarian, I remember thinking, "Aren't we beyond that yet?" as if it were only a matter of time until the entire country would develop cultural amnesia, and what a good thing that would be.

There are no bits that are desired by humans that are not available [on the web]

--- Marc Smith, in conversation 15 December 2005. When checking this with Marc, this was his reply:

In my typical hyperbolic style: yes, I said this.

Of course I am wildly overstating, the public internet is only a fraction of the net; vast databases of content and data are locked up all over the place. But there is a kernel of truth in this assertion: a business model that depends on the widespread distribution of bits which remain in a controlled container will not long stand. To date I do not know of a DRM system that is not cracked. Every XBOX, PS2, Hollywood video, recording, etc. is available on the (not so) darknet right now. Knowledge of the darknet is spreading fast – most people have some infringing content. A business model based on these files not being available because of some novel technical innovation (present or future) seems misguided. A business based in part on selling such technology seems misguided – perhaps we should rename DRM “Doesn’t Really Matter”?

Basic research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing

-- Attributed to Werner von Braun. For more Von Braun quotes, see http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun, http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/w/wernher_von_braun.html.

God invented war so that Americans could learn geography

--- Iranian blogger, quoted by Nasrin Alavi in her book on Iranian blogs, "We Are Iran: The Persian Blogs"; heard on Radio Open Source, 13 Dec 2005 show on Iran: Demographics and Democracy.

If I ever do take an active part in the world, it will be as a thinker and demoralizer. I will simply tell the truth: but that truth will be horrible, cruel, naked.

--- Gustave Flaubert, cited in Writer's Almanac, Monday 12 December 2005

The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself.

--- James Thurber

If the twentieth century, with first the telegraph, then the telephone, and finally the internet, was about communication; then, the twenty-first century will be about integration

--- Stanley Crouch, quoted (paraphrased?) by Robert Dean in an amazon.com review of Wynton Marsalis' "All Rise"

Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence.

---- Napoleon

In a hop garden, a fruit garden, a kitchen garden, both the rent of the landlord, and the profit of the farmer, are generally greater than in a corn or grass field. But to bring the ground into this condition requires more expense. Hence a greater rent becomes due to the landlord. It requires, too, a more attentive and skilful management. Hence a greater profit becomes due to the farmer. The crop too, at least in the hop and fruit garden, is more precarious. Its price, therefore, besides compensating all occasional losses, must afford something like the profit of insurance. The circumstances of gardeners, generally mean, and always moderate, may satisfy us that their great ingenuity is not commonly over-recompensed. Their delightful art is practised by so many rich people for amusement, that little advantage is to be made by those who practise it for profit; because the persons who should naturally be their best customers supply themselves with all their most precious productions.

-- Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (1776), Bk I, Ch. XI, Pt. I, http://www.worldebooklibrary.com/eBooks/Renascence_Editions/wealth/wealth1.html

Adam Smith on the power of personal wealth - money only confers power if you spend it (by highlight):

"Wealth, as Mr. Hobbes says, is power. But the person who either acquires, or succeeds to a great fortune, does not necessarily acquire or succeed to any political power, either civil or military. His fortune may, perhaps, afford him the means of acquiring both, but the mere possession of that fortune does not necessarily convey to him either. The power which that possession immediately and directly conveys to him, is the power of purchasing; a certain command over all the labour, or over all the produce of labour, which is then in the market. His fortune is greater or less, precisely in proportion to the extent of this power; or to the quantity either of other men's labour, or, what is the same thing, of the produce of other men's labour, which it enables him to purchase or command. The exchangeable value of everything must always be precisely equal to the extent of this power which it conveys to its owner. "

Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, 1776, Book 1, Chapter 5 "Of the Real and Nominal Price of Commodities, or their Price in Labour, and their Price in Money", http://www.worldebooklibrary.com/eBooks/Renascence_Editions/wealth/wealth1.html

Hell with the fires out.

-- General Alfred Sully's description of the Dakotas after he patrolled the area in 1864. Quoted in Writer's Almanac, 2 November 2005

Poverty is when people lack the means to appear in public without shame

-- Amrtya Sen, paraphrased by William Greider in The Soul of Capitalism (2003) p.9

One paradox of the information age is that, while we are able to find out instantly so many more things than the ancestors could ever know, the anchor of self-knowledge -- who we are and where we fit in, what we count for in this new scheme -- seems to be weaker.

-- William Greider, The Soul of Capitalism (2003), p. 8

We originally came to India for the [low] cost. We stayed because of the quality, and now we're investing because of the innovation

-- Dan Scheinman, Sr. VP of Corporate Development, Cisco; quoted in Cisco Seeks Talent Abroad, Lisa DiCarlo, Forbes, 21 Oct 2005

From the story:

Cisco (nasdaq: CSCO - news - people ) has invested in and had operations in India for several years but is stepping up its investement partly because it can't ignore India's brainpower and partly because of market reforms that favor business and foreign investment.

"We originally came to India for the [low] cost. We stayed because of the quality, and now we're investing because of the innovation," says Dan Scheinman, senior vice president of corporate development. He notes that India's universities are churning out tens of thousands of engineers, many of whom used to come to the U.S. after graduating, but who are now choosing to stay at home.

Cisco, which has less than 5% of its global workforce in India, didn't want to miss out. Scheinman says the country is producing an "incredible number of engineers who are building some of the world's most advanced networks and applications," led by broadband and mobile applications. That throws a harsh light on the dwindling number of young Americans going into the sciences and helps explain why U.S. companies are looking elsewhere to stay competitive.

Software as process crystallized in programs and workflow, and interpreted by hardware, is bureaucracy

-- George Spix, email, 18 October 2005

The Internet is like alcohol in some sense. It accentuates what you would do anyway.

-- Esther Dyson, panel discussion in Time Magazine, 16 Oct 2005

Quote in context:

SO IS THE INTERNET TRULY CREATING CONNECTIONS AMONG PEOPLE? OR DIVIDING US AS WE HIDE INSIDE OUR PRIVATE SHELLS?

...

ESTHER DYSON, editor of technology newsletter Release 1.0 for CNET Networks: The Internet is like alcohol in some sense. It accentuates what you would do anyway. If you want to be a loner, you can be more alone. If you want to connect, it makes it easier to connect. In my own experience, it has drawn my family closer, as we post pictures on Flickr. It has done more than tap into something latent; it has actually created something that wasn't there with the younger family members. We couldn't do that before because we were all geographically separated.

DRM will be like the Prohibition

-- Jon Pincus, in coversation, 6 October 2005

"The Stone Age did not end for lack of stone, and the Oil Age will end long before the world runs out of oil"

-- Sheikh Zaki Yamani, a Saudi Arabian who served as his country's oil minister three decades ago

Quoted by the Economist, The End of the Oil Age, 23 Oct 2003