"However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it's worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter." Clay Shirky

"The greatest advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur." Whitehead

Prophets

"Being a prophet is nice work if you can get it, but sooner or later you have to mention God."
Saul Bellow

Reading

My mother, of course, was right. Mothers are always right. Reading is dangerous. But not reading is even more dangerous.
Theodora J. Kalikow

Wild Ducks

Former IBM Chairman Thomas J. Watson, Jr., wrote, "In IBM we frequently refer to our need for 'wild ducks.' The moral is drawn from a story by the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, who told of a man who fed the wild ducks flying south in great flocks each fall. After a while some of the ducks no longer bothered to fly south; they wintered in Denmark on what he fed them. In time they flew less and less. After three or four years they grew so lazy and fat that they found difficulty in flying at all. Kierkegaard drew his point: you can make wild ducks tame, but you can never make tame ducks wild again. One might also add that the duck who is tamed will never go anywhere any more. We are convinced that any business needs its wild ducks. And in IBM we try not to tame them."