Oleksiy Kovyrin > Oleksiy's Quotes

“If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as a Michaelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, 'Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“Here’s to books, the cheapest vacation you can buy.”
― Charlaine Harris

“Always demand proof of nirvana before you start following messiahs who’re selling it to you. Those guys don’t exactly have the greatest track record in the universe.”
― Peter F. Hamilton, The Abyss Beyond Dreams

“You don't stop running because you get old, you get old because you stop running.”
― Christopher McDougall, Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen

“What would they do to me," he asked in confidential tones, "if I refused to fly them?"
We'd probably shoot you," ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen replied.
We?" Yossarian cried in surprise. "What do you mean, we? Since when are you on their side?"
If you're going to be shot, whose side do you expect me to be on?" ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen retorted”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“HR?'
'Human Resources.'
'In Brussels that kind of department is referred to as the Office for Personkind Enablement. Resources sounds like something you dig out of the ground.”
― Peter F. Hamilton, Great North Road

“This is the age of total digitalisation; everything is online always.'
'Uh huh, and that's why our politicians are pure and clean, and the world works so well, is it? Because everybody knows everything and there's no hiding place.”
― Peter F. Hamilton, Great North Road

“You cannot impose ideologies on people who do not embrace it wholeheartedly.”
― Peter F. Hamilton

“How you humans survive so much experience is something I shall never understand. To do so much and react to it all in the way you do is as much a curse as a blessing. You never take time to digest and appreciate what happens to you.”
― Peter F. Hamilton, Pandora's Star

“Alien Affairs. Bad name I always thought, makes it sound like they're shagging them rather than investigating them.”
― Peter F. Hamilton, Great North Road

“The military do so love shiny new technology, there's always so many ways to abuse it.”
― Peter F. Hamilton, Great North Road

“I believe that intelligence and rationality will always be primary no matter what shape sentient creatures take. To not think that would be to doubt the value of life itself.”
― Peter F. Hamilton, Pandora's Star

“Think of it as an eight-dimensional onion.’ Justine straightened her back and gave her father an exasperated look. ‘Thanks, Dad. That’s helpful. I always think in those terms, it really helps a lot.”
― Peter F. Hamilton, The Temporal Void

“Societies only have waste products while acquiring fresh raw material remains a cheaper option than recycling.”
― Peter F. Hamilton, The Naked God

“Perfection,” Inigo said, “is what we strive for; it is never what we should achieve. There is no such thing as utopia. Life by its nature is a struggle. Take that away and you take away any reason to exist.”
― Peter F. Hamilton, The Evolutionary Void

“He never did understand why people admired or even collected art. The greatest human artist could never hope to match what nature did with a single flower.”
― Peter F. Hamilton, Pandora's Star

“People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.”
― Saul Bellow

“In high-performing organizations, everyone within the team shares a common goal—quality, availability, and security aren’t the responsibility of individual departments, but are a part of everyone’s job, every day.”
― Gene Kim, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

“You can’t ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“It might seem that security should gradually improve over time as security problems are discovered and corrected, but unfortunately this does not seem to be the case. System software is growing ever more complicated, hackers are becoming better and better organized, and computers are connecting more and more intimately on the Internet. Security is an ongoing battle that can never really be won.”
― Evi Nemeth, Unix and Linux System Administration Handbook

“Everybody going to be dead one day, just give them time.”
― Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys

“Each person who ever was or is or will be has a song. It isn't a song that anybody else wrote. It has its own melody, it has its own words. Very few people get to sing their song. Most of us fear that we cannot do it justice with our voices, or that our words are too foolish or too honest, or too odd. So people live their song instead.”
― Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys

“It is a small world. You do not have to live in it particularly long to learn that for yourself. There is a theory that, in the whole world, there are only five hundred real people (the cast, as it were; all the rest of the people in the world, the theory suggests, are extras) and what is more, they all know each other. And it's true, or true as far as it goes. In reality the world is made of thousands upon thousands of groups of about five hundred people, all of whom will spend their lives bumping into each other, trying to avoid each other, and discovering each other in the same unlikely teashop in Vancouver. There is an unavoidability to this process. It's not even coincidence. It's just the way the world works, with no regard for individuals or for propriety.”
― Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys

“I am frightened of nothing."
"Nothing?"
"Nothing."
"Are you extremely frightened of nothing?"
"Absolutely terrified of it."
"I have nothing in my pockets. Would you like to see it?"
"No, I most definitely would not.”
― Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys

“Of course, everyone's parents are embarrassing. It goes with the territory. The nature of parents is to embarrass merely by existing, just as it is the nature of children of a certain age to cringe with embarrassment, shame, and mortification should their parents so much as speak to them on the street. ”
― Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys

“The important thing about songs is that they're just like stories. They don't mean a damn unless there's people listenin' to them.”
― Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys

“Pain shared, my brother, is pain not doubled but halved. No man is an island”
― Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys

“Songs remain. They last...A song can last long after the events and the people in it are dust and dreams and gone. That's the power of songs.”
― Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys

“That's the trouble with you young people. You think because you ain't been here long, you know everything. In my life I already forgot more than you ever know.”
― Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys

“Anyone who calls you "little lady" has already excluded you from the set of people worth listening to.”
― Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys