Words of Wisdom

Semper aut discere, aut docere, aut scribere dulce habui.

I took pleasure in learning, or teaching, or writing something.

                                              Bede

"Focusing is about saying no."                                     Steve Jobs

"A good idea is often surprisingly simple." 
Ferdinand Alexander Porsche 

"The less confident you are, the more serious you have to act."

                                                  Tara Ploughman

"Change breaks the brittle."

                                                 Jan Houtema

"Short words are best and the old words when short are best of all."

                                                Winston Churchill

"Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it."

                                                   Alan Kay

"Dealing with failure is easy: Work hard to improve. Success is also easy to handle: You've solved the wrong problem. Work hard to improve."

                                                 Alan Perlis

"The imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man."

                                                 Richard Feynman

"The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."

                                                  Brandeis

"Modern invention has been a great leveller. A machine may operate far more quickly than a political or economic measure to abolish privilege and wipe out the distinctions of class or finance."

                                                Ivor Brown, The Heart of England

"If our goal is to write poetry, the only way we are likely to be any good is to try to be as great as the best."

                                                  Donald Hall, Poetry and Ambition

"The public should always be wondering how it is possible to give so much for the money."

                                                 Henry Ford

"We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about."

                                                 Einstein

"Many who burnt heretics in the ordinary way of their business were otherwise excellent people."

                                                G. M. Trevelyan, "Bias in History"

"We're even wrong about which mistakes we're making."

                                                Carl Winfeld

"The key to performance is elegance, not battalions of special cases."

                                                 Jon Bentley and Doug McIlroy

"If you analyze the function of an object, it’s form often becomes obvious."

                                                Ferdinand Alexander Porsche 

"Form has to follow function."

                                                Ferdinand Alexander Porsche 

"Your twenties are always an apprenticeship, but you don't always know what for."

                                                 Jan Houtema

"Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great."

                                                  Mark Twain

"The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."

                                                   Goering at the Nuremberg Trials

"Get the important things right."

                                                   N. P. Collingwood

"Most interesting phenomena have multiple causes."

                                                   N. P. Collingwood

"People don't change their minds. They die, and are replaced by people with different opinions."

                                                    Arturo Albergati

"The best way to do something 'lean' is to gather a tight group of people, give them very little money, and very little time."

                                                   Bob Klein, chief engineer of the F-14 program

© 2013 Basil M Karatzas & Karatzas Marine Advisors & Co.

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