1. In science, self-satisfaction is death. Personal self-satisfaction is the death of the scientist. Collective self-satisfaction is the death of the research. It is restlessness, anxiety, dissatisfaction, agony of mind that nourish science. Jacques-Lucien Monod 2. If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it? Albert Einstein 3. Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people. B. Shaw 4. The preservation of the means of knowledge among the lowest ranks is of more importance to the public than all the property of the rich men in the country. John Adams (second president of the USA) 5. The mathematical sciences particularly exhibit order, symmetry, and limitation; and these are the greatest forms of the beautiful. Aristotle (in Metaphysica) 6. All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them. Galileo Galilei 7. The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts. Bertrand Russell 8. They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security. Benjamin Franklin 9. The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy. Martin Luther King, Jr. 10. Do not worry about your difficulties in mathematics; I can assure you that mine are still greater Albert Einstein 11. If you want truly to understand something, try to change it. Kurt Lewin 12. To understand recursion, one must first understand recursion. Unknown 13. Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new. Albert Einstein 14. Happiness does not depend on outward things, but on the way we see them. Leo Tolstoy 15. Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid; humans are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant; together they are powerful beyond imagination Albert Einstein 16. Microsoft has had clear competitors in the past. It's good that we have museums to document them. Bill Gates 17. Prediction is difficult, especially of the future. Mark Twain (also attributed to Niels Bohr) 18. Engineers study interesting real-world problems, but fudge their results. Mathematicians get exact results, but study only toy problems. But computer scientists, being neither engineers nor mathematicians, study toy problems and fudge their results. Gary W. Flake 19. If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it. Albert Einstein 20. Your theory is crazy, but it's not crazy enough to be true. Niels Bohr 21. When you steal from one author, it's plagiarism; if you steal from many, it's research. Wilson Mizner 22. The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one. Elbert Hubbard 23. Admit your errors before someone else exaggerates them. Andrew V. Mason 24. An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field. Niels Bohr 25. If you don't make mistakes, you're not working on hard enough problems. F. Wikzek 26. The good thing about standards is that there are so many of them. Unknown 27. The period of greatest gain in knowledge and experience is the most difficult period in one's life. Dalai Lama 28. Theory is when you know something, but it doesn't work. Practice is when something works, but you don't know why. Programmers combine theory and practice: Nothing works and they don't know why. (Anonymous) Whether you like Bill Gates or not this is pretty cool. Here's some advice Bill Gates recently dished out at a high school speech about 11 things they did not learn in school. He talks about how feel-good, politically correct teaching has created a full generation of kids with no concept of reality and how this concept sets them up for failure in the real world. RULE 1: Life is not fair - get used to it. RULE 2: The world won't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself. RULE 3: You will NOT make 40 thousand dollars a year right out of high school. You won't be a vice president with car phone, until you earn both. RULE 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss. He doesn't have tenure. RULE 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping they called it Opportunity. RULE 6: If you mess up, it's not your parents' fault, so don't whine about your mistakes, learn from them. RULE 7: Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you are. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent's generation, try delousing the closet in your own room. RULE 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life has not. In some schools they have abolished failing grades and they'll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer. This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life. RULE 9: Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you find yourself. Do that on your own time. RULE 10: Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs. RULE 11: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.