What are your favorite sayings?

Here are four of my favorite sayings, all of which are mine:

  1. "You don't have to be the smartest person in the world on a subject. You just have to be smart enough to figure out who the smartest person in the world is, and then copy him."
  2. "If you look at what people do, rather than what they say, you will have a clarity of insight that few people have ever achieved."
  3. "What's the point of being intelligent if you act stupid?"
  4. "Every prediction about artificial intelligence made, no matter how pessimistic, turns out in retrospect to be wildly optimistic."

As for other people's sayings:

  1. "Some people learn from their mistakes. I prefer to learn from the mistakes of others." — Bismarck
  2. "It's better to ask for forgiveness than for permission."
  3. "The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made." — Groucho Marx
  4. "One should always aim at being interesting rather than exact." — Tadpole
  5. "The pessimist complains about the wind. The optimist expects it to change. The realist adjusts the sails." — William Arthur Ward
  6. "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." — George Bernard Shaw
  7. "It's better to keep your mouth shut and give the impression that you're stupid than to open it and remove all doubt." — Ranis Belson
  8. "That which does not kill us makes us stronger." — Nietzsche
  9. "Forecasting is hard, particularly when the future is involved." — Yogi Berra
  10. "The efficient market hypothesis is the most remarkable error in the history of economic theory." — Lawrence Summers
  11. "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." — John Maynard Keynes
  12. "Tragedy is when I cut my little finger. Comedy is when you fall into a sewer and die." — Mel Brooks
  13. "Well, I'm not gonna quit drinking, I'm not gonna quit smoking, and maybe you're not the doctor for me." — Frank Sinatra, reminding us that the customer is king.

There are some sayings in the software industry that I'm particularly fond of:

  1. The Ninety-Ninety Rule — "The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the time it takes to develop a software product. The remaining 10 percent accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time." — Tom Cargill of Bell Labs
  2. "The first release of Intuit's QuickBooks was supposed to be a nine-month project. We were correct in estimating that the development project would be the same as a gestation period, but we picked the wrong species: It took almost two-and-a-half years, the gestation period for the elephant." — Ridgely Evers of Intuit.
  3. "The Paradox of Standards — Even though you may assume that rigid standards and flexibility are opposed to each other, sometimes rigid standards at one level of a system promote more freedom and flexibility at other levels of the system.

    The best example of this is the Internet itself, where the IP protocol is an extremely rigid standard. It is absolutely the same everywhere in the world, anywhere anyone connects to the Internet. It's particularly because of the rigidity of the definition of that standard that all the other flexibility and all the other decentralization that we associate with the Internet are possible." — Thomas W. Malone, MIT Sloan School of Management

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Cite as “Total Cost of Interaction” by James Mitchell. November 10, 2006, version 1.3.
www.BostonConvivium.com/jm_essays/total_cost_of_interaction.