Selected development quotes

1. It is easier to write an incorrect program than understand a correct one.

2. Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress.

3. Man is the result of slow growth; that is why he occupies the position he does in animal life. What does a pup amount to that has gained its growth in a few days or weeks, beside a man who only attains it in as many years.

4. When you're dealing with someone who only has a pair of underpants on, if you take his underpants off, he has nothing left - he's naked. You're better off trying to find him a pair of trousers to complement him rather than change him.

5. Adolescence is just one big walking pimple.

6. The institutional scene in which American man has developed has lacked that accumulation from intervening stages which has been so dominant a feature of the European landscape.

7. An individual's self-concept is the core of his personality. It affects every aspect of human behavior: the ability to learn, the capacity to grow and change. A strong, positive self-image is the best possible preparation for success in life.

8. A people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood.

9. We work to become, not to acquire.

10. Human resources are the most valuable assets the world has. They are all needed desperately.

11. Why should society feel responsible only for the education of children, and not for the education of all adults of every age?

12. They talk about the failure of socialism but where is the success of capitalism in Africa, Asia and Latin America?

13. Even a minor event in the life of a child is an event of that child's world and thus a world event.

14. Precocious talents mature slowly if at all.

15. In the progress of personality, first comes a declaration of independence, then a recognition of interdependence.

16. Talent is only the starting point.

17. From lower to the higher next, Not to the top, is Nature's text; And embryo Good, to reach full stature, Absorbs the Evil in its nature.

18. The nurse of full-grown souls is solitude.

19. During the earliest stages of thought, accommodation remains on the surface of physical as well as social experience.

20. It is with children that we have the best chance of studying the development of logical knowledge, mathematical knowledge, physical knowledge, and so forth.

21. Once the product's task is known, design the interface first; then implement to the interface design.

22. One must always have in mind one simple fact - there is no literate population in the world that is poor, and there is no illiterate population that is anything but poor.

23. The learning process continues until the day you die.

24. Build up your weaknesses until they become your strong points.

25. And in the limiting case where the optimizer is completely broken because it's not implemented yet, we get to work around that too. Optionally...

26. It is my belief, based partly on personal experience but partly also arrived at by looking around at others, that childhood lasts considerably longer in the males of our species than in the females.

27. In short: just say NO TO DRUGS, and maybe you won't end up like the Hurd people.

28. I became a poet at the age of sixteen. I did not intend to do it. It was not my fault.

29. A city must be a place where groups of women and men are seeking and developing the highest things they know.

30. The solution to adult problems tomorrow depends on large measure upon how our children grow up today.

31. Lasting peace is sought, it is essential to adopt international measures to improve the lot of the masses. The welfare of the entire human race must replace hunger and oppression. People of the world must be taught to give up envy, avarice and rancour.

32. Most observers of the French Revolution, especially the clever and noble ones, have explained it as a life-threatening and contagious illness. They have remained standing with the symptoms and have interpreted these in manifold and contrary ways. Some have regarded it as a merely local ill. The most ingenious opponents have pressed for castration. They well noticed that this alleged illness is nothing other than the crisis of beginning puberty.

33. What is now reason was formerly impulse or instinct.

34. I start with the premise that the function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.

35. The psychic development of the individual is a short repetition of the course of development of the race.

36. Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis.

37. Thank God for giving you this world as a moral gymnasium to help your development, but never imagine you can help the world.

38. I try to build a full personality for each of our cartoon characters - to make them personalities.

39. In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word 'frustration'.

40. The African is my brother - but he is my younger brother by several centuries.

41. Keine Verbindungen pflegen dauerhafter zu sein als die, welche in der fruhen Jugend geschlossen werden. Man ist da noch weniger misstrauisch, weniger schwierig in Kleinigkeiten.

42. Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.

43. Those who do not industrialize become hewers of wood and haulers of water.

44. Step back in time; look closely at the child in the very arms of his mother; see the external world reflected for the first time in the yet unclear mirror of his understanding; study the first examples which strike his eyes; listen to the first words which arouse within him the slumbering power of thought; watch the first struggles which he has to undergo; only then will you comprehend the source of his prejudices, the habits, and the passions which are to rule his life. The entire man, so to speak, comes fully formed in the wrappings of his cradle.

45. Religion will not regain its old power until it can face change in the same spirit as does science. Its principles may be eternal, but the expression of those principles requires continual development.

46. Know thyself! A maxim as pernicious as it is ugly. Whoever observes himself arrests his own development. A caterpillar who wanted to know itself well would never become a butterfly.

47. In youth it is the outward aspect of things that most engages us; while in age, thought or reflection is the predominating quality of the mind. Hence, youth is the time for poetry, and age is more inclined to philosophy. In practical affairs it is the same: a man shapes his resolutions in youth more by the impression that the outward world makes upon him; whereas, when he is old, it is thought that determines his actions.

48. We have to regard art as the greater enhancement, the more perfect development of all this; for essentially it achieves just the same thing as is achieved by the visible world itself, only with greater concentration, perfection, intention and intelligence; and therefore, in the full sense of the word, it may be called the flower of life.

49. Increased means and increased leisure are the two civilizers of man.

50. If something's expensive to develop, and somebody's not going to get paid, it won't get developed. So you decide: Do you want software to be written, or not?

51. Unfortunately, many programs are so big that there is no one individual who really knows all the pieces, and so the amount of code sharing you get isn't as great. Also, the opportunity to go back and really rewrite something isn't quite as great, because there's always a new set of features that you're adding on to the same program.

52. Programs today get very fat; the enhancements tend to slow the programs down because people put in special checks. When they want to add some feature, they'll just stick in these checks without thinking how they might slow the thing down.

53. I do know that technologically humanity now has the opportunity, for the first time in its history, to operate our planet in such a manner as to support and accommodate all humanity at a substantially more advanced standard of living than any humans have ever experienced.

54. Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

55. I fancy that most people who think at all have done a great deal of their thinking in the first fourteen years.

56. If nature has been frugal in her gifts and endowments, there is the more need of art to supply her defects. If she has been generous and liberal, know that she still expects industry and application on our part, and revenges herself in proportion to our negligent ingratitude. The richest genius, like the most fertile soil, when uncultivated, shoots up into the rankest weeds; and instead of vines and olives for the pleasure and use of man, produces, to its slothful owner, the most abundant crop of poisons.

57. I grew up in Europe, where the history comes from. And, uh : oh yes. You tear your history down, man! Thirty years old, let's smash it to the floor and put a car park here!

58. You need at this time especially to know that you are fit for something better than slavery and cannon fodder. You need to know that you were not created to work and produce and impoverish yourself to enrich an idle exploiter. You need to know that you have a mind to improve, a soul to develop, and a manhood to sustain.

59. Think about every problem, every challenge, we face. The solution to each starts with education.

60. There are other letters for the child to learn than those which Cadmus invented.

61. The history of the human race, viewed as a whole may be regarded as the realization of a hidden plan of nature to bring about a political constitution, internally, and for this purpose, also externally perfect, as the only state in which all the capacities implanted by her in mankind can be fully developed.

62. If I accept you as you are, I will make you worse; however if I treat you as though you are what you are capable of becoming, I help you become that.

63. There are two things children should get from their parents: roots and wings.

64. I made all my generals out of mud.

65. Tomorrow, the entire ANC leadership and I will be back at our desks. We are rolling up our sleeves to begin tackling the problems our country faces. We ask you all to join us - go back to your jobs in the morning. Let's get South Africa working. For we must, together and without delay, begin to build a better life for all South Africans. This means creating jobs building houses, providing education and bringing peace and security for all.

66. The task at hand on will not be easy. But you have mandated us to change South Africa from a country in which the majority lived with little hope, to one in which they can live and work with dignity, with a sense of self-esteem and confidence in the future. The cornerstone of building a better life of opportunity, freedom and prosperity is the Reconstruction and Development Programme. This needs unity of purpose. It needs in action. It requires us all to work together to bring an end to division, an end to suspicion and build a nation united in our diversity.

67. We thank all our distinguished international guests for having come to take possession with the people of our country of what is, after all, a common victory for justice, for peace, for human dignity. We trust that you will continue to stand by us as we tackle the challenges of building peace, prosperity, non-sexism, non-racialism and democracy.

68. Education is the great engine of personal development. It is through education that the daughter of a peasant can become a doctor, that the son of a mineworker can become the head of the mine, that a child of farmworkers can become the president of a great nation. It is what we make out of what we have, not what we are given, that separates one person from another.

69. A great measure of world poverty today and African poverty in particular is due to the continuing dependence on foreign markets for manufactured goods, which undermines domestic production and dams up domestic skills, apart from piling up unmanageable foreign debts. Gandhi's insistence on self-sufficiency is a basic economic principle that, if followed today, could contribute significantly to alleviating Third World poverty and stimulating development.

70. Growth itself contains the germ of happiness.

71. 'As a country, we have not started to see how much we can achieve as a nation and we will not have any idea of our strength if we continue to deny ourselves the opportunity to come together as one people. We have not been able to pool the resources and talent of our people and exploit them for our common good. It will continue to evade us if we continue to stress our ethnicity and group differences.'

72. 'If this is neglected, any effort at development will fail, because factions will emerge with their own form of protest that would drive underground anyone seeking help. This will endanger whatever development has taken place.'

73. 'Whether some people like it or not, Fiji is already a multiracial society. We have different races, but that does not mean we should only work for the good of our own race. We have to truly understand one another, learn each other's languages, and truly work together. There is huge potential in Fiji, and we would be amazed to see what we will achieve, if we work together.'

74. Has it ever occurred to you...that parents are nothing but overgrown kids until their children drag them into adulthood? Usually kicking and screaming?

75. The war is relentless: it puts the alternative in a ruthless relief: either to perish, or to catch up with the advanced countries and outdistance them, too, in economic matters. The Impending Catastrophe and How to Fight It (1917)

76. Not everyone likes the stable, gradual rise of our country. There are some who are using the democratic ideology to interfere in our internal affairs.

77. Russia must realise its full potential in high-tech sectors such as modern energy technology, transport and communications, space and aircraft building.

78. The true end of Man, or that which is prescribed by the eternal and immutable dictates of reason, and not suggested by vague and transient desires, is the highest and most harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole.

79. The grand, leading principle, towards which every argument hitherto unfolded in these pages directly converges, is the absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity; but national education, since at least it presupposes the selection and appointment of some one instructor, must always promote a definite form of development, however careful to avoid such an error. And hence it is attended with all those disadvantages which we before observed to flow from such a positive policy; and it only remains to be added, that every restriction becomes more directly fatal, when it operates on the moral part of our nature,-that if there is one thing more than another which absolutely requires free activity on the part of the individual, it is precisely education, whose object it is to develop the individual.

80. Nations, like men, have their infancy.

81. As one looks at the millions of acres in this country that have been taken out of agricultural production; and at the millions of additional acres that have never been cultivated; and at the millions of people who have moved off the farm to rot and decay in the ghettoes of our big cities; and at all the millions of hungry people at home and abroad; does it not seem that all these people and things were somehow made to come together and serve one another? If we could bring them together, we could stem the mass exodus of rural poor to the big city ghettoes and start it going back the other way; teach them how to operate new farm equipment; and put them to work on those now uncultivated acres to raise food for the hungry. If a way could be found to do this, there would be not only room but positive need for still more machinery and still more productivity increase. There would be enough employment, wages, profits, food and fiber.

82. In front of this distinguished audience, we commit the new South Africa to the relentless pursuit of the purposes defined in the World Declaration on the Survival, Protection and Development of Children. The reward of which we have spoken will and must also be measured by the happiness and welfare of the mothers and fathers of these children, who must walk the earth without fear of being robbed, killed for political or material profit, or spat upon because they are beggars. They too must be relieved of the heavy burden of despair which they carry in their hearts, born of hunger, homelessness and unemployment. The value of that gift to all who have suffered will and must be measured by the happiness and welfare of all the people of our country, who will have torn down the inhuman walls that divide them. These great masses will have turned their backs on the grave insult to human dignity which described some as masters and others as servants, and transformed each into a predator whose survival depended on the destruction of the other.

83. The incapacity for freedom can only arise from a want of moral and intellectual power; to elevate this power is the only way to counteract this want; but to do this presupposes the exercise of that power, and this exercise presupposes the freedom which awakens spontaneous activity. Only it is clear we cannot call it giving freedom, when fetters are unloosed which are not felt as such by him who wears them. But of no man on earth-however neglected by nature, and however degraded by circumstances-is this true of all the bonds which oppress and enthral him. Let us undo them one by one, as the feeling of freedom awakens in men's hearts, and we shall hasten progress at every step. There may still be great difficulties in being able to recognize the symptoms of this awakening. But these do not lie in the theory so much as in its execution, which, it is evident, never admits of special rules, but in this case, as in every other, is the work of genius alone.

84. If we would indicate an idea which, throughout the whole course of history, has ever more and more widely extended its empire, or which, more than any other, testifies to the much-contested and still more decidedly misunderstood perfectibility of the whole human race, it is that of establishing our common humanity - of striving to remove the barriers which prejudice and limited views of every kind have erected among men, and to treat all mankind, without reference to religion, nation, or color, as one fraternity, one great community, fitted for the attainment of one object, the unrestrained development of the physical powers. This is the ultimate and highest aim of society, identical with the direction implanted by nature in the mind of man toward the indefinite extension of his existence. He regards the earth in all its limits, and the heavens as far as his eye can scan their bright and starry depths, as inwardly his own, given to him as the objects of his contemplation, and as a field for the development of his energies. Even the child longs to pass the hills or the seas which inclose his narrow home; yet, when his eager steps have borne him beyond those limits, he pines, like the plant, for his native soil; and it is by this touching and beautiful attribute of man - this longing for that which is unknown, and this fond remembrance of that which is lost - that he is spared from an exclusive attachment to the present. Thus deeply rooted in the innermost nature of man, and even enjoined upon him by his highest tendencies, the recognition of the bond of humanity becomes one of the noblest leading principles in the history of mankind.

85. ?Que inventen ellos!