Hacker Folklore Quotes & Sayings

I'm proud of it. Apart from marking the first occasion when I used my talent on behalf of other people without being asked and without caring whether I was rewarded
which was a major breakthrough in itself
the job was a pure masterpiece. Working on it, I realized in my guts how an artist or an author can get high on the creative act. The poker who wrote Precipice's original tapeworm was pretty good, but you could theoretically have killed it without shutting down the net
that is, at the cost of losing thirty or forty billion bits of data. Which I gather they were just about prepared to do when I showed up. But mine ... Ho, no! That, I cross my heart, cannot be killed without DISMANTLING the net. — John Brunner

To not to have entirely wasted one's life seems to be a worthy accomplishment, if only for myself. — Charles Bukowski

At Lockwood & Co., George was famous for not being able to throw or catch with any accuracy. Back in the kitchen at Portland Row, even the casual passing out of fruit or bags of chips became an exercise fraught with danger. — Jonathan Stroud

If you don't think baseball is a big deal, don't do it. But if you do, do it right. — Tom Seaver

(...) he was beginning to be himself. And now he wanted madly to be free to go on. A home, his work, and absolute freedom to move and to be, in her, with her, this was his passionate desire. He thought in a kind of ecstasy, living an hour of painful intensity. — D.H. Lawrence

People spend entire lifetimes trying to avoid the things that have already happened. — Silvia Hartmann

I watched from the raft as the beautiful deep began to swallow the massive boat of steel.
In one large gulp." Emilia p341 — Ruta Sepetys

We have seen numerous instances in which American businesses have brought in foreign skilled workers after having laid off skilled American workers, simply because they can get the foreign workers more cheaply. It has become a major means of circumventing the costs of paying skilled American workers or the costs of training them. — Ronald Reagan

When laced into his clothing, Laurent's dangerous grace lent him an almost androgynous quality. Or perhaps it was more accurate to say that it was rare to associate Laurent with a physical body at all: you were always dealing with a mind. — C.S. Pacat

We don't like death. We'd rather produce seeds another way. But death to ourselves, our agendas, our expectations, our hopes is necessary to find deep joy that comes when we fully relinquish ourselves to the gospel. — Mary E. DeMuth

Unix is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic: a living body of narrative that many people know by heart, and tell over and over again - making their own personal embellishments whenever it strikes their fancy. The bad embellishments are shouted down, the good ones picked up by others, polished, improved, and, over time, incorporated into the story. [ ... ] Thus Unix has slowly accreted around a simple kernel and acquired a kind of complexity and asymmetry about it that is organic, like the roots of a tree, or the branchings of a coronary artery. Understanding it is more like anatomy than physics. — Neal Stephenson

Idiots emit bogons, causing machinery to malfunction in their presence. System administrators absorb bogons, letting machinery work again. — Charles Stross

She gets on her tippy-toes and kisses him. Long, slow, deep. The kind of kiss where you can feel little pieces of your soul trading places as mouths open and breath mingles. — Chuck Wendig

All knowledge that the world has ever received comes from the mind; the infinite library of the universe is in our own mind. — Swami Vivekananda