1 - Creativity and innovation always build on the past. 2 - The past always tries to control the creativity that builds on it. 3 - Free societies enable the future by limiting the past. 4 - Ours is less and less a free society. -- Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture.

It’s hard to grasp abstractions if you don’t understand what they’re abstracting away from. -- Nathan Weizenbaum

The acts of the mind, wherein it exerts its power over simple ideas, are chiefly these three: 1. Combining several simple ideas into one compound one, and thus all complex ideas are made. 2. The second is bringing two ideas, whether simple or complex, together, and setting them by one another so as to take a view of them at once, without uniting them into one, by which it gets all its ideas of relations. 3. The third is separating them from all other ideas that accompany them in their real existence: this is called abstraction, and thus all its general ideas are made. -- John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)

Heureux l'étudiant qui comme la Rivière peut suivre son cours sans quitter son lit... -- Sebastien, sur commentcamarche.net

Whatever is worth doing at all, is worth doing well. -- Earl of Chesterfield

The proof is by reductio ad absurdum, and reductio ad absurdum, which Euclid loved so much, is one of a mathematician’s finest weapons. It is a far finer gambit than any chess gambit: a chess player may offer the sacrifice of a pawn or even a piece, but a mathematician offers the game. -- G. H. Hardy

If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough. ~Albert Einstein

Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can. –Arthur Ashe

Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne

Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower. ~Steve Jobs