Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Computer

"It is easier to tell our therapist about our sex life than it is to tell our accountant about our finances." - Vicki Robin

"Before, the weather was seen as an act of Mother Nature, and now suddenly the weather is potentially our fault? Mother Nature is just chemistry, biology, and physics. As human beings we have the ability to imagine. If we don't, we'll hit the wall, and there will be no seat belts or air bags, and we will end up being [a bug on the windshield or should we say] a bad biological experiment on the planet. If a species doesn't learn to fit in with Mother Nature... it gets kicked out of the planet. It's simple, every day when you wake up and look into your mirror... you're looking at Endangered Species." - Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman

"We are entering an era of creative destruction on steroids." - Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman

"There is no tropical island paradise I know of which remotely matches up to the fantasy ideal that such a phrase is meant to conjure up, or even to what we find described in holiday brochures. It's natural to put this down to the discrepancy we are all used to finding between what advertisers promise and what the real world delivers. It doesn't surprise us much any more. So it can come as a shock to realise that the world we hear described by travellers of previous centuries (or even previous decades) and biologists of today really did exist. The state it's in now is only the result of what we've done to it, and the mildness of the disappointment we feel when we arrive somewhere and find that it's a bit tatty is only a measure of how far our own expectations have been degraded and how little we understand what we've lost. The people who do understand what we've lost are the ones who are rushing around in a frenzy trying to save the bits that are left." - Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams

"What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your own mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that’s really the essence of programming. By the time you’ve sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you’ve certainly learned something about it yourself. The teacher usually learns more than the pupil. Isn’t that true?" - Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams

"I look at the Augusteum, and I think that perhaps my life has not actually been so chaotic, after all. It is merely this world that is chaotic, bringing changes to us all that nobody could have anticipated. The Augusteum warns me to not to get attached to any obsolete ideas about who I am, what I represent, whom I belong to, or what function I may once have intended to serve. Yesterday I might have been a glorious monument to somebody, true enough--but tomorrow I could be a fireworks depository. Even in the Eternal City, says the silent Augusteum, one must always be prepared for riotous and endless waves of transformation." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"There’s a trick to the 'graceful exit.' It begins with the vision to recognize when a job, a life stage, or a relationship is over — and let it go. It means leaving what’s over without denying its validity or its past importance to our lives. It involves a sense of future, a belief that every exit line is an entry, that we are moving up, rather than out." - Ellen Goodman

"It can be creative, but in a more abstract way. Writing code can be kind of creativity you know, in terms of solving problems. My photographs are a lot like that, except they’re creating visual problems by solving them, as it were." - Erik Johannson

"The beginnings of the hacker culture as we know it today can be conveniently dated to 1961, the year MIT acquired the first PDP-1." - Eric S. Raymond

"Giving birth is little more than a set of muscular contractions granting passage of a child. Then the mother is born." - Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste

"The girl with a future avoids a man with a past." - Evan Esar

"I wanted to play my violin and have my musical expression through the instrument. But then I was really young when I had my first opportunity to conduct." - Gustavo Dudamel and the Teresa Carreño Youth Orchestra

"No man is indispensable." - Italian Proverbs

"The cat loves fish, but is sloth to wet her feet." - Italian Proverbs

"Clothes are of but little loss, if you escape from drowning." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

"Eomer said, How is a man to judge what to do in such times? As he has ever judged, said Aragorn. Good and evil have not changed since yesteryear, nor are they one thing among Elves and another among Men. It is a man?s part to discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien