Andrei Serjantov -- Quotes

Here is a set of some of the interesting and insightful quotes I like. You will find relatively few famous ones, some are personal and very much reflect the people quoted (who are anonymous).

Some have stayed with me for 10 or so years; some are more transient. You might even recognize your own. Some are of the ones on linked pages are ideal for putting on chapter headings of a PhD thesis!

"You just ask them"
-- Richard Feynman

About something which he discovers to be easily obtainable, while most people go fairly round-about ways to get it.

(background) In social networks the "6 degrees" effect is well know. For instance, various experiments show that you can pass a message from a person in Alaska to a person in New York via only 6 different people. This is because there are a few people who are very highly connected.

- The six degrees effect has also been observed in languages -- you can get from any word to any other using only synonyms is just a few steps.
- So the natural counterexample you think of when you go to bed is "cat and rhododendron".
- When you wake up, you think: "cat -> pussy -> bush -> rhododendron"...
- Which merely suggests that the highly connected nodes in the linguistic network represent various private parts of the body!
-- R.J.A.

- Do you know how blah, blah, blah works?
- Magic!
- Magic???
- Yeah, you don't need science, you just need imagination.

-- E.C.

"Some days you are the pigeon, some days you are the statue"

"Hacking your way into Heaven is the ultimate hack"

-- G.D.

Alan Westin described privacy as, "Part philosophy, some semantics, and much pure passion".
Privacy and Freedom, Atheneum, New York, 1967.

"I don't care what the process algebra people come up with, I just want to understand the nature of computation."

-- M.F.

"You have no privacy anyway, get over it"
Scott Mc Nealy, CEO Sun Microsystems, 1995

- And now I show you the Renaming Lemma.
- Wasn't it called something else?

-- A.P.

Page 11 of this large document contians a number of gems by Edsger W. Dijkstra.
Beware: 10Mb file download.

Yale Computer Science Department has a nice page of quotes by Alan Perlis. Epigrams of Programming.

Last updated: 25 March 2004

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