Massively Open Quotes & Sayings

The stock exchanges have converted from "open outcry" where wild traders face each other, yelling and screaming as in a souk, then go drink together. Traders were replaced by computers, for very small visible benefits and massively large risks. While errors made by traders are confined and distributed, those made by computerized systems go wild - in August 2010, a computer error made the entire market crash (the "flash crash"); in August 2012, as this manuscript was heading to the printer, the Knight Capital Group had its computer system go wild and cause $10 million dollars of losses a minute, losing $480 million. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The Pythagoreans... were fascinated by certain specific ratios, ...The Greeks knew these as the 'golden' proportion and the 'perfect' proportion respectively. They may well have been learned from the Babylonians by Pythagoras himself after having been taken prisoner in Egypt. Ratios lay at the heart of the Pythagorean theory of music. — Graham Flegg

She was the girl growing up that other girls stared at, making her feel different and inadequate.

She was the woman that stared at them, she made them feel inadequate, as she could be her own true self. Free from the social conformity, that imprisons them.

They were now jealous. — Tina J. Richardson

She was incompetent. Incompetent for life. She had never figured out how to figure things out. She was only vaguely beginning to know the kind of absence she had of herself inside her. — Clarice Lispector

The light in that room was a kind of malpractice. — Adam Haslett

That's one of the things we learn as we grow older
how to forgive. It comes easier at forty than it did at twenty. — L.M. Montgomery

Why are doors more difficult to open
as if some sadness were leaning against them?
Why do windows darken and trees bend
when there is no wind? You call that occasional
roar the roar of a plane and I imagine
a time when I might have believed that. But now the darkness has been going on
for too long, and I have accustomed myself
to the pleasure of thinking that soon
there will be no reason to hold on in this place
where rocks are like water and it's so difficult
to find something solid to hold on to. — Stephen Dobyns

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings. — Gerard Manley Hopkins

Were you born in a barn? I must have been, mom asked me so often... You would've thought she would know if anyone did! — Justin Matott

I try to write in the first person - the first person not of a journalist but of a carnivore, an eater, a gardener, someone trying to figure out what to feed his family. — Michael Pollan

In Paris, everybody wants to be an actor; nobody is content to be a spectator. — Jean Cocteau

I always found it rather pathetic that as a photographer I would be dependent to such a large extent on sheer luck ... So the moment I was offered [digital] tools to bend the shape of the image into my choices, and not those of lady luck, I was hooked. — Pedro Meyer

On the Gallows Once
Kofi Awoonor

I crossed quite a few
of your rivers, my gods,
into this plain where thirst reigns
I heard the cry of mourners
the long cooing of the African wren at dusk
the laughter of the children at dawn
had long ceased
night comes fast in our land
where indeed are the promised vistas
the open fields, blue skies, the singing birds
and abiding love?
History records acts
of heroism, barbarism
of some who had power
and abused it massively
of some whose progenitors
planned for them
the secure state of madness
from which no storm can shake them;
of some who took the last ships
disembarked on some far-off shores and forgot
of some who simply laid down the load
and went home to the ancestors — Kofi Awoonor

When Arab apologists wring their hands over an Israeli military incursion, they never mention what the Israelis are reacting to, or else diminish and distort it. — Jack Schwartz

The strategic marketing paradigm of Open Source is a massively-parallel drunkard's walk filtered by a Darwinistic process. — Bruce Perens