My Favourite Quotations

"Shit happens."
— Universal Truth (with a touch of Tao)

"Let me take you down | 'Cause I'm going to | Strawberry Fields |
Nothing is real | And nothing to get hung about | Strawberry Fields forever."
— John Lennon / Paul McCartney

"Leute, freßt Scheiße —
Millionen Fliegen können nicht irren!"
— Geflügeltes Wort

"He who feeds peanuts will get monkeys."
— Geflügeltes Wort

"Keiner merkt's, alle sind dabei"
— Graffito sprayed on the walls of subway station "Hügelstraße", Frankfurt am Main, North (197x)

"Repent – The End is extremely fucking nigh"
— Church staircase wall graffito in "28 Days Later" (2002)

Tom: "I didn't go to the moon, I went much further —
for time is the longest distance between two places — "
— Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

Captain Willard (Martin Sheen): "Saigon.
Shit. I'm still only in Saigon. — I wanted a mission,
and for my sins they gave me one, brought it up to me like room service."
— Francis Ford Coppola, Apocalypse Now

"No, I'm not interested in developing a powerful brain. All I'm after is just a mediocre brain, something like the President of the AT&T."
— Alan Turing ()

"Some of my unmathematical friends have incautiously urged me to include a note about the origin of modern calculating machines. … What I shall say about these marvelous aids to the feeble human intelligence will be little indeed, for two reasons: I have always hated machinery, and the only machine I ever understood was a wheelbarrow, and that but imperfectly."
— James R. Newman, The World of Mathematics, volume 1 (1956)

"One small decimal consolation: a unit of brightness [cd/m²] in the metre-kilogramme-seconds system is called a 'nit'."
— Fritz Spiegl, The Joy of Words

"Scientists and engineers do not want it. They can use the metric system in their technical work without disturbing the lives of ordinary people — and their own. I have certainly never met the most abstruse scientist or the most aloof mathematician who refused a pint of beer."
— A.J.P. Taylor in the Sunday Express: "This Metric Madness" (1970)

"And what, after all, are we adopting? We are adopting a system created in the late 18th century for no better reason than the discovery, by some nameless Frenchman, that he had five fingers on each hand and could thus count up to 10. It's worth noting that his forbear, an ancient Gaul, used a system of measurement based on the figure 20, almost certainly because he wore no boots and could thus count higher. I for one am ready to say firmly that things would have been a lot better for us all had the Gauls stayed barefoot."
— The Bulletin [Australia] on metrication: "We're halfway to lunacy" (1975-01-25)

"The thing about Linux is, you can talk about a free, open operating system all you want, but you can't take that idea of free and open and put it into a capitalist system and maintain it as though it is some kind of hippie commune or ashram, because if you can do it like that, at that point I'm like, 'Pass the hookah please'."
— Laura DiDio, Senior Analyst (in a phone interview)

"640 K ought to be enough for anybody."
— Bill Gates (1981, the days of the IBM PC and the Apple II+)

"Win·dows n [ME: Windoze] 1 : A thirty-two bit extension and graphical shell to a sixteen-bit patch to an eight-bit operating system originally coded for a four-bit microprocessor which was written by a two-bit company that can't stand one bit of competition"
— Picked up from Wikipedia's Bad Jokes section (200x)

"I may have invented control-alt-delete, but Bill Gates made it really famous."
— David J. Bradley, IBM engineer (2003, at the 20th anniversary of the PC, while sitting next to him)

"Perfekt für den Profi-Einsatz. … • Windows^® XP Pro OEM …"
— Advertisement for BenQ Joybook S72 (manager magazin 3/2006, p. 83)

"Perfekt für den Profi-Einsatz. … • Legales Windows^® XP Pro …"
— Advertisement for BenQ Joybook S72 (manager magazin 7/2006, p. 55)

"Die Angabe, daß einzelne Test-PC zusammengesetzt werden, um die Lauffähigkeit von Hard- und Software zu testen, bevor ein tatsächlicher Einsatz beim Kunden erfolgt, entbehrt nach Auffassung der Bp jeglicher Logik, da eine tatsächliche mangelhafte Funktionalität von Hard- und Softwarekomponenten nicht dem Regelfall entspricht."
— Hr Hartmann, Prüfer beim Finanzamt Frankfurt am Main II, im Rahmen der Betriebsprüfung bei einem EDV-Berater (2001)

"If you can't beat them, confuse them."
— Geflügeltes Wort

"A friend of mine described UNIX as the only operating system where you could throw the manual onto the keyboard and get a real command."
— James (Jim) Mohr, Supporting Windows NT & 2000 Workstation & Server (2000)

"π approximately equals... (good to 4 digits)"
— Eric W. Weisstein , Pi Approximations (M. Joseph, pers. comm., May 3, 2006)
From Mathworld – A Wolfram Web Resource.
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/PiApproximations.html
nb:
LaT_EX code: \pi \approx (\ln 6)^{(\ln 5)^{(\ln 4)^{(\ln 3)^{\ln 2}}}}
PNG rendering managed with Online Equation Editor (http://www.codecogs.com/latex/eqneditor.php)

I. Kings, chap. vii " …
₂₃ ¶ And he made a molten ſea ten cubites
wide from brim to brim, round in com-
paſſe, and fiue cubites hie, and a line of              וקו                                 וקוה וקו
thirtie cubites did compaſſe it about.
₂₄ And vnder the brim of it were knoppes
like wilde cucumers compaſsing it roűde
about, ten in one cubite, compaſsing the
ſea rounde about : and the two rowes of
knoppes were caſt, when it was molten.
₂₅ It ſtode on twelue bulles, thre loking
towarde the North, and thre towarde the
West, and thre towarde the South, & thre
towarde the East : and the ſea ſtode aboue
vpon them, & all their hinder partes were
inwarde.
₂₆ It was an hand breadth thicke, and the
brim thereof was like the worke of the
brim of a cup with flowres of lilies : it cő-
teined two thousand Baths."
 
— The Bible And Holy Scriptures Conteyned In The Olde And Newe Testament.
… At Geneua … MDLX
(π_Hebrew = π₀ × 111 / 106 = 3 + 15 / 106 = [3;7,15] ≈ 3,14151)

II. Chronicles, chap. iiii " …
₂ And he made a molten Sea of ten cubi-
tes from brim to brim, rounde in cőpaſſe,
and fiue cubites hie : and a line of thirtie
cubites did compaſſe it about.
₃ And vnder it was the facion of oxen
which did compaſſe it round about, ten
in a cubite compaſsing the Sea about : two
rowes of oxen were caſt when it was mol-
ten.
₄ It ſtode vpon twelue oxen : thre loked
toward the North, and thre loked toward
the West, & thre loked toward the South,
and thre loked toward the East, and the
Sea ſtode about vpon them, and all their
hinder partes were inwarde.
₅ And the thickenes thereof was an hand
breadth, and the brim thereof was like the
worke of the brim of a cup, with floures
of lilies : it conteined thre thousand
baths."

"It's given Europe more pleasure than
The Folies Bergère, Bayern Munich and Wagner put together."
— Sign advertising
"Kronenbourg, The great lager of Europe"
atop a bar in Cornwall (1976)

"Nothing is going according to plan —
maybe there wasn't a plan in the first place."
— Sign atop the bar at Cinque Ports Flying Club, Lydd, Kent (1978)