joshengle 's List: Quotes

• There is no difference, from the attacker’s point of view, between gross and tiny errors. Both of them are equally exploitable. In at least three challenges, the mere fact of getting distinguishable error messages was enough to recover the entire message.

    

  This lesson is very hard to internalize. In the real world, if you build a bookshelf and forget to tighten one of the screws all the way, it does not burn down your house

• Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

  • -Hanlon's razor
• Occam's razor

  • See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor
• "You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity")

  • -Robert A. Heinlein "Logic of Empire" 1941
• ...misunderstandings and neglect create more confusion in this world than trickery and malice. At any rate, the last two are certainly much less frequent.

  • -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe "The Sorrows of Young Werther" -1774

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• forbidden to go east

  • East - towards the US East coast?
• After a time, I myself was allowed to go into the   dead houses and search for metal.
• l was taught   how to stop the running of blood from a wound and many secrets.
• A   priest must know many secrets
• If the hunters think we do all things by chants and   spells, they may believe so
• it does not hurt them
• My knowledge made me happy—it was like a   fire in my heart.
• We are not ignorant like the Forest People
• our women   spin wool on the wheel, our priests wear a white robe.
• Nevertheless, my knowledge and   my lack of knowledge burned in me
• It was what I have always seen—a river,   and, beyond it, a great Dead Place and in it the gods walking.
• He asked me how the gods were dressed
• It may eat   you up."
• "This is a very strong dream," he said.
• Once I had young dreams. If your   dreams do not eat you up, you may be a great priest
• "My son,"
• If they eat   you, you are still my son. Now go on your journey.
• There was a white fawn   with them—a very great sign.
• I did not even see   the panther spring upon the white fawn.
• Then I knew I was   meant to go east—I knew that was my journey.
• I   made my fire and roasted meat.
• So I knew my magic was strong and my journey   clean, in spite of the law.
• Ou-dis-sun

  • Hudson?
• They were men—they   went a dark road, but they were men.
• Perhaps, in the old days, they   ate knowledge too fast.

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• Bad government results from too much government

• you have to be clear about what a scientific theory is
• a theory is just a model of the universe or a restricted part of it, and a set of rules that relate quantities in the model to observations that we make.
• It exists only in our mind and does not have any other reality (whatever that might mean).
• A theory is a good theory if it satisfies two requirements:
• It must accurately describe a large class of observations on the basis of a model that contains only a few arbitrary elements
• it must make definite predictions about the result of future observations
• Any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis: you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory.
• On the other hand, you can disprove a theory by finding even a single observation that disagrees with the predictions of the theory
• Each time new experiments are observed to agree with the predictions the theory survives, and our confidence in it is increased; but if ever a new observation is found to disagree, we have to abandon or modify the theory.

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• "Each morning when I awake, I experience again a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dali."
• "So little of what could happen does happen."

• “There is only one difference between a madman and me. The madman thinks he is sane. I know I am mad.”

• “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”

• This all the nations of the world must know: only our bodies were sent into exile and subjugated to alien rule; our souls were not given over into captivity and foreign rule... In any matter affecting the Jewish religion, the Torah, and its mitzvot and customs, we are not subject to the dictates of any power
  
        – Rabbi Sholom DovBer of Lubavitche (quoted by his son, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, at the Leningrad train station upon being sent to exile by the Soviet regime in 1927)

• "Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."

• If you set up the false dichotomy, of course people will choose security over privacy -- especially if you scare them first. But it's still a false dichotomy. There is no security without privacy. And liberty requires both security and privacy. The famous quote attributed to Benjamin Franklin reads: "Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." It's also true that those who would give up privacy for security are likely to end up with neither.
  - joshengle on 2008-03-04

• "Do what you feel in your heart to be right- for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do, and damned if you don't."

• "Do what you feel in your heart to be right- for
  you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do, and damned if
  you don't."   --  Eleanor Roosevelt
  - joshengle on 2008-02-28

• "music is, to me, proof of the existence of God. It is so extraordinarily full of magic and in tough times of my life I can listen to music and it makes such a difference"

•  "Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing." 

   "Such are the differences among human beings in their sources of pleasure, their susceptibilities of pain, and the operation on them of different physical and moral agencies, that unless there is a corresponding diversity in their modes of life, they neither obtain their fair share of happiness, nor grow up to the mental, moral, and aesthetic stature of which their nature is capable." 

   John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859)