All Quotes

"I suppose one could claim that an undocumented feature has no semantics. :-("

"Yes, we have consensus that we need 64 bit support."

": - cut in regexps I don't think we reached consensus on that. We're still backtracking..."

"Boss: You forgot to assign the result of your map! Hacker: Dang, I'm always forgetting my assignations... Boss: And what's that 'goto' doing there?!? Hacker: Er, I guess my finger slipped when I was typing 'getservbyport'... Boss: Ah well, accidents will happen. Maybe we should have picked APL."

"Perhaps they will have to outlaw sending random lists of words. fee fie foe foo"

"Hey, if pi == 3, and three == 0, does that make pi == 0?"

"(Never thought I'd be telling Malcolm and Ilya the same thing..."

"And other operators aren't so special syntactically, but weird in other ways, like 'scalar', and 'goto'."

"Portability should be the default."

"If this were Ada, I suppose we'd just constant fold 1/0 into die 'Illegal division by zero"

"Are you perchance running on a 64-bit machine?"

"Almost nothing in Perl serves a single purpose."

"There's some entertainment value in watching people juggle nitroglycerin."

"Reserve your abuse for your true friends."

"Er, Tom, I hate to be the one to point this out, but your fix list is starting to resemble a feature list. You must be human or something."

"It's hard to tune heavily tuned code."

"Perl will always provide the null."

"It's easy to solve the halting problem with a shotgun."

"Well, I think Perl should run faster than C."

"To Perl, or not to Perl, that is the kvetching."

"I suppose you could switch grammars once you've seen 'use strict subs'."

"Well, you know, Hubbard had a bunch of people sworn to commit suicide when he died. So of course he never officially died..."

"Even the White House has a press agent."

"That's a valid argument. I just don't think it's valid enough."

"Perl should remain fast and intuitive (to the extent that it is :-)"

"I would estimate that the number of programs it breaks in the world will be less than 10. As long as one of those 10 isn't CGI.pm, we're probably okay."

"Just put in another goto, and then it'll be readable."

"I'm reminded of the day my daughter came in, looked over my shoulder at some Perl 4 code, and said, 'What is that, swearing?"

"Y'know, there are other possibilities if we assume that filenames are UTF-8...yikes...wait, put down that meat cleaver! Aieeee!!!"

"print rand rand rand 1, '\n'; # interesting distribution"

": I could understand principles of Perl source in 2-3 days [. . .] Gee, it took me about eleven years."

"There's often more than one correct thing. There's often more than one right thing. There's often more than one obvious thing."

"I've always maintained a cordial dislike for indent, because it's usually right."

"I'd make people say 'use Fork;' if I thought I could get away with it."

"The way I see it, if you declare something portable, you'll always be wrong, and if you declare it non-portable, you'll always be right."

"Perhaps you should compile your Perl with long doubles one of these megaseconds."

": Why Bible quotes exclusively? What happened to the Eastern religions?<BR> I'm still working on the Unicode mods."

"Maybe we should take a clue from FTP and put in an option like 'print hash marks on every 1024 iterations'."

"To be liberated, woman must feel free to be herself, not in rivalry to man but in the context of her own capacity and her personality."

"We make no discrimination against the adherent of any religion. All faiths are entitled to equal protection and equal respect. This we have named "Secularism", which entitles each Indian to pursue his own belief and learn more about his own creed. But it also requires him to extend the same right to persons of other religions."

"I am not interested in a long life. I am not afraid of these things. I don't mind if my life goes in the service of this nation. If I die today, every drop of my blood will invigorate the nation."

"I am here today, I may not be here tomorrow. But the responsibility to look after national interest is on the shoulder of every citizen of India. I have often mentioned this earlier. Nobody knows how many attempts have been made to shoot me, lathis have been used to beat me. In Bhubaneswar itself, a brickbat hit me. They have attacked me in every possible manner. I do not care whether I live or die. I have lived a long life and I am proud that I spend the whole of my life in the service of my people. I am only proud of this and nothing else. I shall continue to serve until my last breath and when I die, I can say, that every drop of my blood will invigorate India and strengthen it."

"My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those who do the work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was much less competition there."

"They say that [I am icy, hard] because I’m sincere. Even too sincere. And because I don’t waste time in flowery small talk, as people do in India, where the first half hour is spent in compliments: »How are you, how are your children, how are your grandchildren, and so forth.« I refuse to indulge in small talk. And compliments, if at all, I save for after the job is done. But in India people can’t stomach this attitude of mine, and when I say, »Hurry up, let’s get to the point,« they feel hurt. And think I’m cold, indeed icy, hard. Then there’s another reason, one that goes with my frankness: I don’t put on an act. I don’t know how to put on an act; I always show myself for what I am, in whatever mood I’m in. If I’m happy, I look happy; if I’m angry, I show it. Without worrying about how others may react. When one has had a life as difficult as mine, one doesn’t worry about how others will react. And now go ahead. You can ask anything you like."

"But we couldn’t do otherwise. We couldn’t keep ten million refugees on our soil; we couldn’t tolerate such an unstable situation for who knows how long. That influx of refugees would have stopped—on the contrary. It would have gone on and on and on, until there would have been an explosion. We were no longer able to control the arrival of those people, in our own interest we had to stop it! That’s what I said to Mr. Nixon, to all the other leaders I visited in an attempt to avert the war. However, when you look at the beginning of the actual war, it’s hard not to recognize that the Pakistanis were the ones to attack. They were the ones who descended on us with their planes, at five o’clock that afternoon when the first bombs fell on Agra. I can prove it to you by the fact that we were taken completely by surprise."

"I made the trip knowing I was like the child putting his finger into the hole in the dike. And there are things that ... I don’t know ... one can’t ... oh, why not! The truth is that I spoke clearly to Mr. Nixon. And I told him what I had already told Mr. Heath, Mr. Pompidou, Mr. Brandt. I told him without mincing words that we couldn’t go on with ten million refugees on our backs, we couldn’t tolerate the fuse of such and explosive situation any longer. Well, Mr. Heath, Mr. Pompidou, and Mr. Brandt had understood very well. But not Mr. Nixon. The fact is that when the others understand one thing, Mr. Nixon understands another. I suspected he was very pro-Pakistan. Or rather I knew that the Americans had always been in favor of Pakistan—not so much because they were in favor of Pakistan, but because they were against India."

"However, I had recently had the impression they were chang­ing—not so much by becoming less pro-Pakistan as by becoming less anti-India. I was wrong. My visit to Nixon did anything but avert the war. It was useful only to me. The experience taught me that when people do something against you, that something always turns out in your favor. At least you can use it to your advantage. It’s a law of life—check it and you’ll see it holds true in every situation of life. ... And do you know why I won this war? Because my army was able to do it, yes, but also because the Americans were on the side of Pakistan."

"As for the position they held in this war ... well, I think they’ve been more skillful than the Americans. Certainly they’ve had a lighter touch—had they wanted to, they could have done more for Pakistan. Isn’t that so? It was the Americans who sent the Seventh Fleet into the Bay of Bengal, not the Chinese."

"India had barely become independent, in 1947, when Pakistan invaded Kashmir, which at the time was ruled by a maharajah. The mahara­jah fled, and the people of Kashmir, led by Sheikh Abdullah, asked for Indian help. Lord Mountbatten, who was still governor general, replied that he wouldn’t be able to supply aid to Kashmir unless Pakistan declared war, and he didn’t seem bothered by the fact that the Pakistanis were slaughtering the population. So our leaders decided to sign a document by which they bound themselves to go to war with Pakistan. And Mahatma Gandhi, apostle of nonviolence, signed along with them. Yes, he chose war. He said there was noth­ing else to do. War is inevitable when one must defend somebody or defend oneself."

"Look, I don’t see the world as something divided between right and left. And I don’t at all care who’s on the right or left or in the center. Even though we use them, even though I use them myself, these expressions have lost all meaning. I’m not interested in one label or the other—I’m only interested in solving certain problems, in getting where I want to go. I have certain objectives."