Quotes
Boldness
“It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.”
- Mark Twain
“When you want to fight us, we don’t let you and you can’t find us. But when we want to fight you, we make sure that you can’t get away.”
- Mao Zedong
“The secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is — to live dangerously. Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships into un-charted seas!”
- Friedrich Nietzsche
“Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.”
- William Hutchinson Murray
Perseverance
“First they ignore you, then laugh at you and hate you. Then they fight you, then you win.”
- attributed variously to Mohandas Gandhi or Nicholas Klein
“I never knew worse few months than when I was bashing my head against a brick wall attempting to start my own outfit in the early 1970s. The whole process was pure misery. Looking back through the prismed eyes of a champagne flute, I suppose I could argue that perhaps it was my finest moment. Not that it felt like it at the time. To be honest, it nearly broke me. But I would not give in.”
- Felix Dennis
“When fortune wants to advance a new prince she creates enemies for him, making them launch campaigns against him, so that he is compelled to overcome them and climb higher on the ladder they have brought him.”
- Niccolo Machiavelli
“Life just got harder? You must have levelled up.”
- Courage Wolf
The Future
“There [China], is a sleeping giant. Let him sleep! If he awakes, he will shake the world.”
- Napoleon Bonaparte
“If the goal of human history is a uniform type of man, reproducing at a uniform rate, in a uniform environment, kept at a constant temperature, pressure and humidity, living a uniformly lifeless existence, with his uniform physical needs satisfied by uniform goods, all inner waywardness brought into conformity by hypnotics and sedatives, or by surgical extirpations, a creature under constant mechanical pressure from incubator to incinerator, most of the problems of human development would disappear. Only one problem would remain: why should anyone, even a machine, bother to keep this kind of creature alive?“
- Lewis Mumford
“That age will be rich indeed when those relics which we call Classics, and the still older and more than classic but even less known Scriptures of the nations, shall have still further accumulated, when the Vaticans shall be filled with Vedas and Zendavestas and Bibles, with Homers and Dantes and Shakespeares, and all the centuries to come shall have successively deposited their trophies in the forum of the world. By such a pile we may hope to scale heaven at last.“
- Henry David Thoreau
“I think the way to use these big ideas is not to try to identify a precise point in the future and then ask yourself how to get from here to there, like the popular image of a visionary. You’ll be better off if you operate like Columbus and just head in a general westerly direction.”
- Paul Graham
“Don’t worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
- Alan Kay
“Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live forever in a cradle.”
- Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky
Perspective
“Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.”
- Ambrose Bierce
“All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental.”
- Kurt Vonnegut
“The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.”
- John Maynard Keynes
Miscellaneous
“Everyone’s been talking a lot about a universal face book within Harvard. I think it’s kind of silly that it would take the University a couple of years to get around to it. I can do it better than they can, and I can do it in a week.”
- Mark Zuckerberg (2004)
“I divide my officers into four classes; the clever, the lazy, the industrious, and the stupid. Each officer possesses at least two of these qualities. Those who are clever and industrious are fitted for the highest staff appointments. Use can be made of those who are stupid and lazy. The man who is clever and lazy however is for the very highest command; he has the temperament and nerves to deal with all situations. But whoever is stupid and industrious is a menace and must be removed immediately!”
– General Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord