When you give people too much information, they instantly resort to pattern recognition to structure the experience. The work of the artist is to find patterns

— Marshall McLuhan

Over a hundred years ago, the German poet Heine warned the French not to underestimate the power of ideas: philosophical concepts nurtured in the stillness of a professor’s study could destroy a civilization.

— Isaiah Berlin, The Power of Ideas

Leadership is solving problems. The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help or concluded you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership.

— Colin Powell

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.

— Martin Luther King Jr.

Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

— William Faulkner

The space between the lessons and practice is where the learning is made permanent.

— Kathy Sierra

On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], ‘Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’ I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

— Charles Babbage

You have to write down what you’re going to abandon, you’ve got to see how it works in the whole thing, and then throw it away.

— Leonard Cohen