It is impossible to sharpen a pencil with a blunt axe. It is equally vain to try to do it with ten blunt axes instead. -- Edsger Dijkstra

Only bad designers blame their failings on the users. -- unknown

All creativity is an extended form of a joke. -- Alan Kay

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)

Abstraction is a form of data compression: absolutely necessary, because human short-term memory is so small, but the critically important aspect of abstraction is the algorithm that gets you from the name back to the "uncompressed" details. -- Bruce Wilder (blog post comment)

To the optimist, the glass is half full. To the pessimist, the glass is half empty. To the engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be. -- author unknown (quoted in `Robust Systems', Gerald Jay Suseman)

Build your own dreams, or someone else will hire you to build theirs. –Farrah Gray

First, have a definite, clear practical ideal; a goal, an objective. Second, have the necessary means to achieve your ends; wisdom, money, materials, and methods. Third, adjust all your means to that end. –Aristotle

If you want to achieve excellence, you can get there today. As of this second, quit doing less-than-excellent work. ~Thomas J. Watson

All our dreams can come true if we have the courage to pursue them. ~Walt Disney