“Rivers,” Publilius Syrus reminds us with an epigram, “are easiest to cross at their source.”
“He was an old Drag man with his bit getting short. He was the first to attempt to teach me to control my emotions. He would say, “Always remember whether you be sucker or hustler in the world out there, you’ve got that vital edge if you can iron-clad your feelings. I picture the human mind as a movie screen. If you’re a dopey sucker, you’ll just sit and watch all kinds of mindwrecking, damn fool movies on that screen.” He said. “Son, there is no reason except a stupid one for anybody to project on that screen anything that will worry him or dull that vital edge. After all, we are the absolute bosses of that whole theatre and show in our minds. We even write the script. So always write positive, dynamic scripts and show only the best movies for you on that screen whether you are pimp or priest.” His rundown of his screen theory saved my sanity many years later. He was a twisted wise man and one day when he wasn’t looking, a movie flashed on the screen. The title was “Death For an Old Con.”
― Pimp: The Story of My Life
― Pimp: The Story of My Life
“The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.”
― Meditations
― Meditations
“Professor Johnston often said that if you didn’t know history, you didn’t know anything. You were a leaf that didn’t know it was part of a tree.”
― Timeline
― Timeline
“Once launched into production, our software will continue to evolve as the way it is used changes. For most things we create, we have to accept that once the software gets into the hands of our customers we will have to react and adapt, rather than it being a never-changing artifact. Thus, our architects need to shift their thinking away from creating the perfect end product, and instead focus on helping create a framework in which the right systems can emerge, and continue to grow as we learn more.”
― Building Microservices: Designing Fine-Grained Systems
― Building Microservices: Designing Fine-Grained Systems
“But I have to warn you that this is the word—‘politics’—that nerds use whenever they feel impatient about the human realities of an organization.”
― Seveneves
― Seveneves
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