Corrige al sabio y lo harás más sabio.
Corrige al necio y lo harás tu enemigo.
Proverbio chino
Pertenezco a una generación que ha perdido por igual la fe en los dioses de las antiguas religiones y la fe en los de las modernas.
Fernando Pessoa
No puedo aceptar a Jehová, ni a la humanidad. Cristo y el progreso son para mí mitos del mismo mundo.
Fernando Pessoa
Señor Boot, soy un periodista de doscientos cincuenta dólares a la semana. Se me puede contratar por cincuenta. Conozco los periódicos por delante y por detrás, de arriba abajo. Sé escribirlos, publicarlos, imprimirlos, empaquetarlos y venderlos. Puedo encargarme de las grandes noticias y de las pequeñas. Y, si no hay noticias, salgo a la calle y muerdo a un perro. Dejémoslo en cuarenta y cinco.
Kirk Douglas, en El gran carnaval (Ace in the Hole)
There is an ancient Celtic axiom that says: ‘Good people drink good beer’. Wich is true, then as now. Just look around you in any public barroom, and you will quickly see: Bad people drink bad beer. Think about it.
Hunter S Thompson
Puto es el hombre que de putas fía,
y puto el que sus gustos apetece;
puto es el estipendio que se ofrece
en pago de su puta compañía.
Puto es el gusto, y puta la alegría
que el rato putaril nos encarece;
y yo diré que es puto a quien parece
que no sois puta vos, señora mía.
Mas llámenme a mí puto enamorado,
si al cabo para puta no os dejare;
y como puto muera yo quemado
si de otras tales putas me pagare,
porque las putas graves son costosas,
y las putillas viles, afrentosas.
Francisco de Quevedo, Desengaño de las mujeres
El pensamiento productivo no es ver lo que nadie ha visto, sino pensar lo que nadie ha pensado sobre aquello que todos ven.
Erwin Schrödinger
Una de las lecciones más tristes de la historia es esta: si se está sometido a un engaño demasiado tiempo, se tiende a rechazar cualquier prueba de que lo es. Encontrar la verdad deja de interesarnos. El engaño nos ha engullido. Simplemente es demasiado doloroso reconocer, incluso ante nosotros mismos, que hemos caído en un engaño. Cuando se da poder a un charlatán sobre uno mismo, casi nunca se puede recuperar.
Carl Sagan, El mundo y sus demonios
If you want total security, go to prison.
There you’re fed, clothed, given medical care and so on.
The only thing lacking is freedom.
Dwight D Eisenhower
Si un gato negro se cruza en tu camino, significa que el bicho va a algún sitio.
Groucho Marx
In democracies, simple arguments beat accurate arguments every time.
Will Spencer
It takes nothing to join the crowd.
It takes everything to stand alone.
Hans F Hansen
Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.
Martin Heidegger
When a man assumes a public trust, he should consider himself as public property.
Thomas Jefferson
Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late.
Jonathan Swift
No one spends someone else’s money as wisely as he spends his own.
Dick Armey
Language is to the mind more than light is to the eye.
William Gibson
I decline utterly to be impartial as between the fire brigade and the fire
Winston Churchill
El lado más inexorable de nuestro destino humano es que terminamos cansándonos de todo
Henry James
Each of you, for himself, by himself and on his own responsibility, must speak.
Mark Twain
Science never tells a man how he should act; it merely shows how a man must act if he wants to attain definite ends.
Ludwig von Mises
I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man
Thomas Jefferson
La pedantería es el arma con que el profesional protege sus intereses gremiales
Nicolás Gómez Dávila
Si hacerlo te divierte, hazlo. Si no, no. Vive por la sensación, no por el resultado.
Fernando Múgica
Why is it that when one man builds a wall, the next man immediately needs to know what’s on the other side?
George RR Martin
So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot
George Orwell
If wealth were the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire
George Monbiot
A newspaper is a device unable to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization
George Bernard Shaw
La gente ignora el diseño que ignora a la gente.
Frank Chimero
La única función de la predicción en la economía, es hacer que la astrología parezca respetable.
Ezra Solomon
Los políticos son como los cines de barrio, primero te hacen entrar y después te cambian el programa.
Enrique Jardiel Poncela
Cuando alguien convierte su religión en ideología, nace un monstruo. Cuando la ideología se convierte en religión, nace un tirano.
Francisco Pou
A different language is a different vision of life
Federico Fellini
Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.
Edward Abbey
Clutter and confusion are failures of design, not attributes of information.
Edward Tufte
Political correctness is tyranny with manners.
Charlton Heston
Even in literature in art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.
CS Lewis
But for a moment Dirk had a sense of infinite loss and sadness that somewhere amongst the frenzy of information noise that daily rattled the lives of men he thought he might have heard a few notes that denoted the movements of gods.
Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
There are some people you like immediately, some whom you think you might learn to like in the fullness of time, and some that you simply want to push away from you with a sharp stick.
Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.
Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
‘It seemed to me,’ said Wonko the Sane, ‘that any civilization that had so far lost its head as to need to include a set of detailed instructions for use in a package of toothpicks, was no longer a civilization in which I could live and stay sane’.
Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
I’m a scientist and I know what constitutes proof. But the reason I call myself by my childhood name is to remind myself that a scientist must also be absolutely like a child. If he sees a thing, he must say that he sees it, whether it was what he thought he was going to see or not. See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting. Most scientists forget that.
Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
We also live in strange places: each in a universe of our own. The people with whom we populate our universes are the shadows of whole other universes intersecting with our own.
Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless
One of the extraordinary things about life is the sort of places it’s prepared to put up with living.
Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless
You see, the quality of any advice anybody has to offer has to be judged against the quality of life they actually lead.
Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless
He had got himself a life. Now he had to find a purpose in it.
Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless
A beach house isn’t just real estate. It’s a state of mind.
Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless
You live and learn. At any rate, you live.
Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless
Nothing travels faster than the speed of light, with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.
Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless
A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless
We can’t win against obsession. They care, we don’t. They win.
Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything
The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
Frederick Douglass
Si no estáis prevenidos ante los Medios de Comunicación, os harán amar al opresor y odiar al oprimido
Malcolm X
Sólo salgo para renovar la necesidad de estar solo.
Lord Byron
La ‘verdad’ es lo que es, lo que debería ser es una fantasía
Lenny Bruce
The function of the independent press (besides being essentially dissident) is still to discover, to find the new voices and give voice to them
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Lack of self-confidence is, more often than not, simple laziness. We feel confused and uncertain because we do not know. But instead of making the effort to investigate, we procrastinate and worry. We tell ourselves we can’t instead of learning how we can. If we used the mental energy we expend in worry and fear to get out and find out about what we do not know, we would see our self-confidence grow. Lack of self-confidence is not overcome by faith, but by action. It is a lack, not of certainty, but of effort. Too often we are certain that we can’t before we give ourselves a fair chance.
Laurence G Boldt
La historia es la suma total de todas aquellas cosas que hubieran podido evitarse.
Konrad Adenauer
The idea that Earth is humanity’s cradle … is part of why we trashed Earth in the first place.
Kim Stanley Robinson
The world would be such a peaceful place without Gods. Every day the bad news is about how one bunch of believers hates or kills another.
Karl Gude
Pretensión: los artificios horadarán las necesidades de mi ánimo; con cada rasguño, con cada anomalía, liberaré mis paradojas.
Julio Rey
Para mi la innovación no es imitación, no es incremental, es total reinvención del concepto madre
Juan Señor
La envidia de los españoles no es aspirar al coche del otro, sino a que el otro se quede sin coche
Julio Camba
Muero para que vuestros hijos sean mejores que vosotros.
Ramiro de Maeztu (antes de que le asesinara el bando republicano)
En el periodista el escepticismo no es una característica particular; sino parte de su ADN.
Miguel Ángel Bastenier
Is there life after death? Of course there is. It just doesn’t include you
Louie CK
Men who try to do something and fail are infinitely better than those who try to do nothing and succeed.
Lloyd Jones
Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.
Vladimir Nabokov
People are never so completely & enthusiastically evil as when they act out of religious conviction
Umberto Eco
Intelligence is knowing the right answer. Wisdom is knowing when to say it.
Tim Fargo
When you find yourself in a hole, quit digging.
Tim Crawford
Siempre me he agarrado a creer que la práctica de crear diseño gráfico convincente sucede no empleando los principios de la democracia, sino más bien, los de la monarquía.
Thomas Vasquez
We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a featherbed.
Thomas Jefferson
My country is the world. My religion is to do good.
Thomas Paine
The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it
Terry Pratchett, World Federation of the Right-to-Die Societies Congress, Zurich, 2012
Inspirations sleet through the universe continuously. Their destination, as if they cared, is the right mind in the place at the right time. They hit the right neuron, there’s a chain reaction, and a little while later someone is blinking foolishly in the TV lights and wondering how the hell he came up with the idea of pre-sliced bread in the first place.
Terry Pratchett, Men at arms
The IQ of a mob is the IQ of its most stupid member divided by the number of mobsters.
Terry Pratchett, Maskerade
She knew about old money, wich was somehow hallowed by the fact that people had hung on to it for years, and she knew about new money, wich seemed to be made by all these upstarts that were flooding into the city these days. But under her powdered bosom she was an Ankh-Morpork shopkeeper, and knew that the best kind of money was the sort that was in her hand rather than someone else’s. The best kind of money was mine, not yours.
Terry Pratchett, Maskerade
Good and Evil were quite superfluous when you’d grown up with a highly developed sense of Right and Wrong.
Terry Pratchett, Maskerade
Hate is a force of attraction. Hate is just love with its back turned.
Terry Pratchett, Maskerade
No matter how hard a thing is to do, once it has been done it’ll become a whole lot easier and wil therefore be done a lot. A huge mountain might be scaled by strong men only after many centuries of failed attempts, but a few decades later grandmothers will be strolling up it for tea and then wandering back afterwards to see where thy left their glasses.
Terry Pratchett, Maskerade
People remember badly. But societies remember well, the swarm remembers, encoding the information to slip it past the censors of the mind, passing it on from grandmother to grandchild in little bits of nonsense they won’t bother to forget. Sometimes the truth keeps itself alive in devious ways despite the best efforts of the official keepers of information.
Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies
Shoot the dictator and prevent the war? But the dictator is merely the tip of the whole festering boil of social pus from wich dictators emerge; shoot one, and there’ll be another one along in a minute. Shoot him too? Why not shoot everyone and invade Poland? In fifty years’, thirty years’ ten years’ time the world will be very nearly back on its old course. History always has a great weight of inertia.
Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies
The universe doesn’t much care if you tread on a butterfly. There are plenty more butterflies. Gods might note the fall of a sparrow but they don’t make any effort to catch them.
Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies
The study of invisible writings was a new discipline made available by the discovery of the bi-dimensional nature of Library-Space. The thaumic mathematics are complex, but boil down to the fact that all books, everywhere, affect all other books. This is obvious: books inspire other books written in the future, and cite books written in the past. But the General Theory of L-Space suggest that, in that case, the contents of books as yet unwritten can be deduced from books now in existence.
Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies
Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges.
The more corrupt the state, the more laws.
Tacito
Es realmente difícil diseñar productos por grupos de interés. Muchas veces, las personas no saben lo que quieren hasta que se lo muestras.
Steve Jobs
Do what you love, and do it often. If you don’t like something, change it. If you don’t like your job, quit.
Steve Jobs
Mankind have a great aversion to intellectual labor; but even supposing knowledge to be easily attainable, more people would be content to be ignorant than would take even a little trouble to acquire it.
Samuel Johnson
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
Robert A Heinlein
In the absence of clearly-defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing daily trivia until ultimately we become enslaved by it.
Robert A Heinlein
The America of my time line is a laboratory example of what can happen to democracies, what has eventually happened to all perfect democracies throughout all histories. A perfect democracy, a ‘warm body’ democracy in which every adult may vote and all votes count equally, has no internal feedback for self-correction. It depends solely on the wisdom and self-restraint of citizens… which is opposed by the folly and lack of self-restraint of other citizens. What is supposed to happen in a democracy is that each sovereign citizen will always vote in the public interest for the safety and welfare of all. But what does happen is that he votes his own self-interest as he sees it… which for the majority translates as ‘Bread and Circuses.’
‘Bread and Circuses’ is the cancer of democracy, the fatal disease for which there is no cure. Democracy often works beautifully at first. But once a state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state. For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader—the barbarians enter Rome.
Robert A Heinlein
Sin lies only in hurting others unnecessarily. All other ‘sins’ are invented nonsense.
Robert A Heinlein
Secrecy is the keystone to all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy and censorship. When any government or church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, «This you may not read, this you must not know,» the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man who has been hoodwinked in this fashion; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, whose mind is free. No, not the rack nor the atomic bomb, not anything. You can’t conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.
Robert A Heinlein
If your Personal Beliefs deny what’s objectively true about the world, then they’re more accurately called Personal Delusions.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
No intento describir el futuro. Intento prevenirlo.
Ray Bradbury
La biblioteca, por otro lado, no tiene límites. La información está ahí para que la interpretes. No hay nadie que te diga que pensar, que te diga si eres bueno o no. Lo descubres por ti mismo.
Ray Bradbury
No pienses. Pensar es el enemigo de la creatividad. Es auto consciente, y cualquier cosa auto consciente es terrible. No debes intentar hacer cosas. Simplemente debes hacerlas.
Ray Bradbury
Sin bibliotecas, ¿que nos quedaría?; no tendríamos pasado ni futuro.
Ray Bradbury