Gates is the ultimate programming machine. He believes everything can be defined, examined, reduced to essentials, and rearranged into a logical sequence that will achieve a particular goal.

One of the questions asked by al-Balkhi, and often repeated to this day, is this: Why do the children of Israel continue to suffer? My grandmother Dodo thought it was because the were jealous. The seder for Passover (which is a shame-faced simulacrum of a Hellenic question-and-answer session, even including the wine) tells the children that it's one of those things that happens to every Jewish generation. After the or or Holocaust, many rabbis tried to tell the survivors that the immolation had been a punishment for 'exile,' or for insufficient attention to the Covenant. This explanation was something of a flop with those whose parents or children had been the raw material for the 'proof,' so for a time the professional interpreters of god's will went decently quiet. This interval of ambivalence lasted until the war of 1967, when it was announced that the divine purpose could be discerned after all. How wrong, how foolish, to have announced its discovery prematurely! The exile and the Shoah could now both be understood, as part of a heavenly if somewhat roundabout scheme to recover the Western Wall in Jerusalem and other pieces of biblically mandated real estate.I regard it as a matter of self-respect to spit in public on rationalizations of this kind. (They are almost as repellent, in their combination of arrogance, masochism, and affected false modesty, as Edith Stein's 'offer' of her life to expiate the regrettable unbelief in Jesus of her former fellow Jews.) The sage Jews are those who have put religion behind them and become in so many societies the leaven of the secular and the atheist.

Christopher Hitchens

Life is not fair get used to it.

Bill Gates

Science is better than sympathy, if only it is science.

E.M. Forster

Some people go to priests others to poetry I to my friends.

Virginia Woolf

Without initiative, leaders are simply workers in leadership positions.

Bo Bennett

Do you not see, first, that

Auberon Herbert

We travel to learn and I have never been in any country where they did not do something better than we do it, think some thoughts better than we think, catch some inspiration from heights above our own.

Maria Mitchell

You will be a failure, until you impress the subconscious with the conviction you are a success. This is done by making an affirmation which 'clicks.'

Florence Scovel Shinn

Medicine sometimes snatches away health, sometimes gives it.

Ovid

If you can't be in awe of Mother Nature, there's something wrong with you.

Alex Trebek

Each of us, even the lowliest and most insignificant among us, was uprooted from his innermost existence by the almost constant volcanic upheavals visited upon our European soil and, as one of countless human beings, I can

Stefan Zweig, Die Welt von Geste

In terms of work I've always had a Bad Attitude in that I won't work anywhere which requires me to work strict hours or follow a dress code. I don't know if that's an Asperger's thing or not, I think it's just being reasonable.

Bram Cohen