"The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him."So, feel free to make a monkey of me -- with attribution, please, so that my simian nature is fully exposed -- by making use of any of these quotes of mine:
1. "There are four kinds of lies: Lies, Damn Lies, Statistics, and Visualizations"
Origin: I made this up for an internal IBM blog post on 12/29/06. Obviously it is an extension of a much older saying of uncertain origin.
2. "Spam is bad. The amazing degree of unanimity that greets such a simple declaration is, paradoxically, the biggest impediment to progress in anti-spam standards."
Origin: Presentation to NIST/FCC on the spam problem, 2004. Redistributed by Andy Newton.
3. "The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals. We cause accidents."
Origin: Offhand comment while teaching a Software Engineering course at CMU, circa 1985. Redistributed by Bob Glickstein, later illustrated by Greg Joens and quoted widely.
4. "...No ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter."
Origin: This was a footnote in a very old paper I published about computational email.
5. "Andrew is so incredibly reliable that almost any printing command will work, as long as it is long and complex enough."
Origin: Uncertain
6. "If you hadn't dropped out of school before you were qualified to TAKE software engineering, you would undoubtedly have learned that the standard software engineering curriculum heavily recommends comments, formal design methodology, and all sorts of other totally useless bullshit."
Origin: Apparently I said this to Zalman Stern and he wrote it down.
7. "Lawyers, like many primitive animals, have a deep-seated need to mark their territory."
Origin: Uncertain
8. "To believe in synchronicity is to believe in the ability of the universe, on rare occasions, to spontaneously generate goodness, beauty, and joy."
Origin: Uncertain
9. "All bits live forever, and all bits eventually become public."
Origin: Uncertain
10. "If I believed in God, I would admire His wisdom in making us mortal, and thus placing an upper bound on our destructiveness."
Origin: Uncertain