Roy W. Miller - Quotations

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Roy W. Miller

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Quotations

Some of my favorite quotations:
(Text last updated July 22, 2010)

We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.”(Henry Wadsworth Longfellow )

You should dig a well before you are thirsty. (Gerry Turcotte, a former President of the Communications Research Centre Canada (CRC), the agency of the Canadian federal government's Industry Canada responsible for conducting applied research and development in communications and related technologies.)

The one who says it cannot be done should never interrupt the one actually doing the work. (Unknown source)

[As a consequence of the above quote ...] A great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do. (Walter Bagehot)

Anyone who follows a crowd will never be followed by a crowd. (Unknown source)

If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don't. (Michael Pollan in his book Food Rules: An Eater's Manual)

Our vision is every book ever printed in any language [fetched and viewable on our eBook Kindle device] in under 60 seconds. Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com during presentation at Pace University May 6, 2009
Remember half your users (or readers) are below average. (Unknown source)

Write net. ["Net" in this context does not refer to the Internet. "Net" is used in the context like "net cost". So the expression means to "write briefly".] (Seen in the office of a technical writer. Unknown source)

All I ask of you is one thing: please don't be cynical. I hate cynicism -- it's my least favorite quality and it doesn't lead anywhere. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you're kind, amazing things will happen. Conan O'Brien, as he signed off the "Tonight Show" January 22, 2010 after an ugly shakeup at NBC.

Well-informed people know it is impossible to transmit the voice over wires and that, were it possible to do so, the thing would be of no practical value. (From an 1865 editorial in the Boston Post, applauding the arrest of Joshua Coopersmith, who had been attempting to raise funds to develop a telephone. Quotted by Denzil Doyle in his excellent entrepreneurial book Making Technology Happen)

One rarely does well what one rarely does. (St Francis de Sales. [Born August 21, 1567, into a family of nobility, he was educated by the Jesuits where he earned a Doctorate in both Civil and Church Law.])

It matters little how one begins, provided that he be resolved to go on well, and to end well. (St Francis de Sales.)

We are continually faced by great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insolvable problems. (Unknown source)

Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do... The best way to predict the future is to invent it. Really smart people with reasonable funding can do just about anything that doesn't violate too many of Newton's Laws! ( Alan Kay while working at Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in 1971. Alan Kay was the "father" of windowing based systems including Mac, Windows, NextStep, X-Windows, etc.)

By the time I got to school, I had already read a couple hundred books. I knew in the first grade that they were lying to me because I had already been exposed to other points of view. School is basically about one point of view -- the one the teacher has or the textbooks have. They don't like the idea of having different points of view, so it was a battle. (Alan Kay (see above for who he is) as quoted in the book Out of their Minds: The Lives and Discoveries of 15 Great Computer Scientists)

You cannot discover new oceans unless you have the courage to loose sight of the shore. (Unknown source)

Change is inevitable. Progress is optional. (Unknown source)

A real leader faces the music, even when he doesn't like the tune. (Unknown source)

When you're finished changing, you're finished. (Benjamin Franklin)

The most important thing with communication is to hear what is not being said. (Unknown source)

Today's trend ends up in tomorrow's landfill

(David Amram, composer/conductor/multi-instrumentalist)

Humans are allergic to change. They love to say, "We've always done it this way". I try to fight that. That's why I have a clock that runs counter-clockwise. (Rear Admiral Grace Hooper, mathematician, computer scientist, teacher. Her many accomplishments include the invention of the first computer compiler which formed the basis of COBOL, and the person who coined the term computer bug.) 1906-1994)

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent; it is the one that is most adaptable to change. (Charles Darwin)

The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas-covered planet going around a nuclear fireball ninety million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be. (Douglas Adams)

On one planet [earth], and possibly only one planet in the entire universe, molecules that would normally make nothing more complicated than a chunk of rock, gather themselves together into chunks of rock-sized matter of such staggering complexity that they are capable of running, jumping, swimming, flying, seeing, hearing, capturing and eating other such animated chunks of complexity; capable in some cases of thinking and feeling, and falling in love with yet other chunks of complex matter. (Richard Dawkins)

Change requires individuals who recognize that new things can be done and who take the initiative to get them done ... The existing bureaucracies, public and private, will not take on the job of changing what is. (Lester Thurow in his book Building Wealth.)

You manage things, you lead people. We went overboard on management and forgot about leadership. (Grace Hooper)

The future is here -- it just has not been uniformly distributed. (William Gibson)

The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat. (Lily Tomlin)

Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read. (Groucho Marx)

No matter how absurd I try to make the Dilbert comic strip I can't stay ahead of what people are actually experiencing in their own workplaces. (Scott Adams in his book The Dilbert Principle page 1)

If you're one in a million, there are about 6,700 other people just like you -- and more than 1700 of them are on the Internet. (Hal Rubenstein in his book Paisley Goes with Nothing. Updated for the Internet by Roy Miller. (Original quote updated for current world population and the number of people on the Internet from InternetWorldStats.com)

Computing is not about computers anymore. (Nicholas Negroponte in his book Being Digital. The book is also available on audio tape.)

Long distances used to be a moat that both insulated and isolated people from workers on the other side of the world. But every day, technology narrows that moat inch by inch. Every person in the world is on the verge of becoming both a coworker and a competitor to every one of us ... Technological change is going to reach out and sooner or later change something fundamental in your business world. (Andrew S. Grove, President and CEO of Intel Corporation, from his book Only the Paranoid Survive page 5.) The book is also available on audio tape.)

Get Innovative or Get Dead! (Title of book by Matthew J. Kiernan which includes many other quotable phrases.)

To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk. (Thomas Edison)

All the atoms we are made of are forged from hydrogen in stars that died and exploded before our solar system formed. So if you are romantic, you can say we are literally stardust. If you are less romantic, you can say we're the nuclear waste from fuel that makes stars shine." (Sir Martin Rees, Britain's astronomer royal.)

Stay clear of foolish discussions which lead into the sin of anger with each other (2 Timothy 2:16)

Imagine if your had been born in a completely different country. You would probably speak a different language and have a different religion. You'd like different people, different foods. Maybe you'd hate all the people you now like. In short, you'd be completely different person but it would still be "you." (Jim Unger, from his cartoon collection The Best of Herman, page 61.)

It is our nature to yearn for change; adapting to it is what we fear. Chaos does not loom over our future, only our own fears do. But those willing to think the unthinkable will see opportunity rather than chaos, and fortune rather than fear. Such individuals will know how to navigate to the next millennium. (Frank Ogden, from his book Navigating in Cyberspace: A guide to the next millennium. page 11. Text is also on CD-ROM at the back of the bound book.)

From the classroom perspective, the computer is not a tool to automate teaching but an environment in which students can learn and develop their cognitive skills through exploration and discovery.
In the world of work, the computer is not just a tool to increase productivity but a learning environment in which employees continuously develop their information-processing and communications skills. (Robert K. Logan from his book The Fifth Language: Learning a Living in the Computer Age page 9.)

In real estate the motto is "location, location, location". On the Internet if location matters then something is wrong. (Roy Miller)

Eye awl wheeze Czech four hypos inn may massages. Donut ewe? Thinks two spelt chequers its sew essay! [Hint: quote will pass spell checking even though every word is used incorrectly.](Roy Miller)