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Software Development and Computer Science

"Software is like sex — it's better when it's free!" — Linus Torvalds "The real problem is that programmers have spent far too much time worrying about efficiency in the wrong places and at the wrong times; premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." — Donald Knuth "Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp." — Greenspun's tenth rule "Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler." — often attributed to Albert Einstein "An idiot admires complexity; the genius admires simplicity." — Terry Davis "Give someone state and they'll have a bug one day, but teach them how to represent state in two separate locations that have to be kept in sync and they'll have bugs for a lifetime." — Fabien Giesen

Superheros

"With great power comes great responsibility." — Spiderman

Mathematics

"A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems." — Alfréd Rényi (1921-1970) "Mathematics is the art of giving the same names to different things." — Henre Poincaré "To a mind of sufficient intellectual power, the whole of mathematics would appear trivial, as trivial as the statement that a four-footed animal is an animal." — Bertrand Russell "The pure mathematician, like the musician, is a free creator of his world of ordered beauty." — Bertrand Russell 'Pure Mathematics is the class of all propositions of the form "p implies q".' — Bertrand Russell

Douglas Adams

'Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.' — Douglas Adams, from Mostly Harmless

Monarchy

"The only thing known to go faster than ordinary light is monarchy, according to the philosopher Ly Tin Wheedle. He reasoned like this: you can't have more than one king, and tradition demands that there is no gap between kings, so when a king dies the succession must therefore pass to the heir instantaneously. Presumably, he said, there must be some elementary particles – kingons, or possibly queons – that do this job, but of course succession sometimes fails if, in mid-flight, they strike an anti-particle, or republicon. His ambitious plans to use his discovery to send messages, involving the careful torturing of a small king in order to modulate the signal, were never fully expanded because, at that point, the bar closed." — Terry Pratchett, Mort