'Landryisms' and other Quotes


Landryisms:

The first 90% of any given project takes 90% of the allocated time. The last 10% of that project takes the other 90% of the allocated time.
    • TWL

Company, like bread, grows stale after three days.
    • TWL

Lotteries are the fairest form of taxation, because you get to decide whether or not you pay.
    • TGFL

You can’t teach experience.
    • PCWL

Life is like playing a video game. There’s action, watching TV, and you can hunt.
    • JIL (well, he’s only 9--how profound can a Landry really be at 9?)
Quotes of the Day:






Some of my Favorite Quotes:


I have found it an amusing strategy, when asked whether I am an atheist, to point out that the questioner is also an atheist when considering Zeus, Apollo, Amon Ra, Mithras, Baal, Thor, Wotan, the Golden Calf and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I just go one god further.
    • Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Houghton Mifflin 2006) at page 53

Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.
    • Thomas Jefferson, In a letter to his nephew, Peter Carr, August 10, 1787

I prefer perilous liberty to quiet servitude.
    • Thomas Jefferson, In a letter to James Madison, January 30, 1787

Pray, v. To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled on behalf of single petitioner, confessed unworthy.
    • Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" [originally a newspaper serialization (1881-1906)]

Christian, n. i. One who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor; ii. One who follows the teachings of Christ in so far as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin.
    • Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" [originally a newspaper serialization (1881-1906)]

Religion is an insult to human dignity. Without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
    • Steven Weinberg, Nobel-prize winning theoretical physicist

If Microsoft were a lean, mean, fighting machine, they might stand a chance at fighting on two fronts. However, fifteen threat-free years of delivering crap at high profit margins has not resulted in a nimble, competitive company. It's also interesting to consider Microsoft's spectacular failure to profitably execute any strategies outside of Windows and Office.
    • Daniel Eran, roughlydrafted.com

Saying condoms make teenagers have sex is like saying the headlights on my car make the sun go down.
    • Bengt Washburn on The Bob & Tom Show, Wednesday, August 16, 2006

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
    • Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future (1961) [Clarke's Third Law]

All science is either physics or stamp collecting.
    • Ernest Rutherford, British chemist and Nobel laureate

My karma ran over my dogma.
    • unknown (but funny as hell!)

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.
    • Sherlock Holmes in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's A Scandal in Bohemia

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
    • Dr. Carl Sagan, Astronomer and Pulitzer Prize winning author of "Cosmos" (the best-selling science book in the history of the English language)

It's better to act on the basis of what is true than to maintain that it has no right to be true.
    • John Stossel, Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media...

Everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not his own facts.
    • Daniel Patrick Moynihan

There are two kinds of cryptography in this world: cryptography that will stop your kid sister from reading your files, and cryptography that will stop major governments from reading your files. This book is about the latter.
    • Bruce Schneier, Applied Cryptography: Protocols, Algorithms, and Source Code in C

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur. (Whatever is said in Latin sounds profound)
    • unknown

What does it mean to be a skeptic? Some people believe that skepticism is rejection of new ideas, or worse, they confuse "skeptic" with "cynic" and think that skeptics are a bunch of grumpy curmudgeons unwilling to accept any claim that challenges the status quo. This is wrong. Skepticism is a provisional approach to claims. It is the application of reason to any and all ideas--no sacred cows allowed. In other words, skepticism is a method, not a position.
    • Skeptic, Vol. 12 No.1 2005, "What is a Skeptic?", p. 5

As a pastor at a Lutheran church in Salina, Kansas, I find the attempts by the Kansas school board and others to insert the teaching of intelligent design alongside the teaching of evolution to be a threat to science and perhaps even a bigger threat to faith. In essence, what the proponents of intelligent design and creationism are trying to do is make children and others believe that the existence of God can be proven. This is and would be the death of faith. Faith is not knowing. Faith is belief in what cannot be known.
    • Pastor R. Kevin Kline, quoted in 'Cosmic Log' by Alan Boyle on msnbc.com

A proclivity for science is embedded deeply within us, in all times, places and cultures. It has been the means of our survival. It is our birthright. When, through indifference, inattention, incompetence, or fear of skepticism, we discourage children from science, we are disengranchising them, taking from them the tools needed to manage their future.
    • Dr. Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

There are two sides to a trumpeter's personality: there is the one that lives only to lay waste to the woodwinds and strings, leaving them lying blue and lifeless along the swath of destruction that is a trumpeter's fury; then there's the dark side...
    • Anonymous

Evolution by natural selection, the central concept of the life's work of Charles Darwin, is a theory. It's a theory about the origin of adaptation, complexity, and diversity among Earth's living creatures. If you are skeptical by nature, unfamiliar with the terminology of science, and unaware of the overwhelming evidence, you might even be tempted to say that it's "just" a theory. In the same sense, relativity as described by Albert Einstein is "just" a theory. The notion that Earth orbits around the sun rather than vice versa, offered by Copernicus in 1543, is a theory. Continental drift is a theory. The existence, structure, and dynamics of atoms? Atomic theory. Even electricity is a theoretical construct, involving electrons, which are tiny units of charged mass that no one has ever seen. Each of these theories is an explanation that has been confirmed to such a degree, by observation and experiment, that knowledgeable experts accept it as fact. That's what scientists mean when they talk about a theory: not a dreamy and unreliable speculation, but an explanatory statement that fits the evidence. They embrace such an explanation confidently but provisionally—taking it as their best available view of reality, at least until some severely conflicting data or some better explanation might come along.
    • "Was Darwin Wrong?" by David Quammen, National Geographic Magazine, November 2004