Back in the 90s I wrote some skunkworks software for work. Since I find computer languages bland and inexpressive, I included some poetry (Pablo Neruda and Alan Chong Lau) and some quotes. We stopped using the software a few years back, but I found the source code is still out there on an old machine at the data center. Here are the quotes.

• “The only people worthy of consideration in this world are the unusual ones. For
  the common folks are like the leaves of a tree, and live and die unnoticed.”

  -Scarecrow, The Land of Oz, L. Frank Baum

• “Your knowledge of what is going on can only be superficial and relative.”

  -William Seward Burroughs

• “We know only a single science, the science of history. One can look at history
  from two sides and divide it into the history of nature and the history of men.
  However, the two sides are not to be divided off; as long as men exist the
  history of nature and the history of men are mutually conditioned.”

  -Karl Marx

• “In my life, I have prayed only one prayer in asking for divine favor: ‘O Lord,
  make my enemies ridiculous.’ And God granted it.”

  – Voltaire

• “If there ever was in the history of humanity an enemy who was truly universal,
  an enemy whose acts and moves trouble the entire world, threaten the entire
  world, attack the entire world in any way or another, that real and really
  universal enemy is precisely Yankee imperialism.”

  -Fidel Castro

• “Rationalists, like Euclidean geometers, based their case on a few ‘self-evident
  truths.’ But Einstein convinced the world that there was no such thing as a
  self-evident truth. A few things were self-evident all right; but they were not
  true. The shortest way between two points is not the straight line; Time and
  Length are not absolute notions. This seemed to be the death-knell of
  Rationalist philosophy. If there is no self-evident truth, there is no
  Rationalism. But Rationalism refused to lie down and die. Luckily, Rationalism
  was not quite as rational as all that.”

  –George Mikes

• “A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its
  analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical
  subtleties and theological niceties.”

  -Karl Marx

• “Everything you’ve learned in school as ‘obvious’ becomes less and less
  obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no
  solids in the universe. There’s not even a suggestion of a solid. There
  are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight
  lines.”

  -R. Buckminster Fuller

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