All Quotes

"It is truly a marvelous thing to consider to what greatness Athens arrived in the space of one hundred years after she freed herself from the tyranny of Pisistratus; but, above all, it is even more marvelous to consider the greatness Rome reached when she freed herself from her kings. The reason is easy to understand, for it is the common good and not private gain that makes cities great. Yet, without a doubt, this common good is observed only in republics, for in them everything that promotes it is practised, and however much damage it does to this or that private individual, those who benefit from the said common good are so numerous that they are able to advance in spite of the inclination of the few citizens who are oppressed by it."

"The end of the republic is to enervate and to weaken all other bodies so as to increase its own body."

"Cunning and deceit will every time serve a man better than force to rise from a base condition to great fortune."

"I assert once again as a truth to which history as a whole bears witness that men may second their fortune, but cannot oppose it; that they may weave its warp, but cannot break it. Yet they should never give up, because there is always hope, though they know not the end and more towards it along roads which cross one another and as yet are unexplored; and since there is hope, they should not despair, no matter what fortune brings or in what travail they find themselves."

"This return of Republics back to their principles also results from the simple virtue of one man, without depending on any law that excites him to any execution: none the less, they are of such influence and example that good men desire to imitate him, and the wicked are ashamed to lead a life contrary to those examples."

"Titus Livius... observes, “Most wholesome is it that in affairs of great moment, supreme authority be vested in one man.” Very different, however, is the course followed by the republics and princes of our own days, who, thinking to be better served, are used to appoint several captains or commissioners to fill one command; a practice giving rise to so much confusion, that were we seeking for the causes of the overthrow of the French and Italian armies in recent times, we should find this to be the most active of any. Rightly, therefore, may we conclude that in sending forth an army upon service, it is wiser to entrust it to one man of ordinary prudence, than to two of great parts but with a divided command."

"I don't believe I've ever cuddled my elses."

"Politics have no relation to morals."

"If you write something wrong enough, I'll be glad to make up a new witticism just for you."

"So far we've managed to avoid turning Perl into APL."

"Not that I have anything much against redundancy. But I said that already."

"They can always run stderr through uniq."

"I'd put my money where my mouth is, but my mouth keeps moving."

"Of course, I reserve the right to make wholly stupid changes to Perl if I think they improve the language."

"Call me bored, but don't call me boring."

"I think $[ is more like a coelacanth than a mastadon."

"We question most of the mantras around here periodically, in case you hadn't noticed."

"That could certainly be done, but I don't want to fall into the Forth trap, where every running Forth implementation is really a different language."

"Tcl long ago fell into the Forth trap, and is now trying desperately to extricate itself (with some help from Sun's marketing department)."

"The whole intent of Perl 5's module system was to encourage the growth of Perl culture rather than the Perl core."

"Randal can write one-liners again. Everyone is happy, and peace spreads over the whole Earth."

"Life gets boring, someone invents another necessity, and once again we turn the crank on the screwjack of progress hoping that nobody gets screwed."

"No prisoner's dilemma here. Over the long term, symbiosis is more useful than parasitism. More fun, too. Ask any mitochondria."

"P.S. Perl's master plan (or what passes for one) is to take over the world like English did. Er, *as* English did..."

"You can prove anything by mentioning another computer language."

"I think you didn't get a reply because you used the terms 'correct' and 'proper', neither of which has much meaning in Perl culture."

"I'm sure a mathematician would claim that 0 and 1 are both very interesting numbers."

"True, it returns ' ' for false, but ' ' is an even more interesting number than 0."

"Any false value is gonna be fairly boring in Perl, mathematicians notwithstanding."

"We didn't put in ^^ because then we'd have to keep telling people what it means, and then we'd have to keep telling them why it doesn't short circuit. :-/"

"Anybody want a binary telemetry frame editor written in Perl?"

"Perhaps I'm missing the gene for making enemies."

"Perl has a long tradition of working around compilers."

"Personally, I like to defiantly split my infinitives."

"Real theology is always rather shocking to people who already think they know what they think. I'm still shocked myself."

"The computer should be doing the hard work. That's what it's paid to do, after all."

"The following two statements are usually both true: There's not enough documentation. There's too much documentation."

"Of course, this being Perl, we could always take both approaches."

"The random quantum fluctuations of my brain are historical accidents that happen to have decided that the concepts of dynamic scoping and lexical scoping are orthogonal and should remain that way."

"At many levels, Perl is a 'diagonal' language."

"I'm serious about thinking through all the possibilities before we settle on anything. All things have the advantages of their disadvantages, and vice versa."

"Part of language design is perturbing the proposed feature in various directions to see how it might generalize in the future."

"Sometimes we choose the generalization. Sometimes we don't."

"I wouldn't ever write the full sentence myself, but then, I never use goto either."

"It's appositival, if it's there. And it doesn't have to be there. And it's really obvious that it's there when it's there."

"Oh, get ahold of yourself. Nobody's proposing that we parse English."

"As with all the other proposals, it's basically just a list of words. You can deal with that..."

"I hope I'm not getting so famous that I can't think out load [sic] anymore."

"It would be possible to optimize some forms of goto, but I haven't bothered."

"A 'goto' in Perl falls into the category of hard things that should be possible, not easy things that should be easy."