Too Profound for a Title

"We don't know much about God. In fact, we are probably not yet wired to know much about God. If the Smart Monkey survives itself, evolution (Great and brilliant tool of God that it is) will probably finish the deeper neural nets of our brains at some point in the aeons to come, and we will slowly come to a clue."

"For the most part, God lets the Evolution Factory handle reality. The Evolution Factory is one of his better projects. Brilliant really. After all, if you were God and were going to create and run an entire universe, you wouldn't really want to be running around it all the time doing hands-on alterations on everything from quarks to galaxies. [...] It's much better just to create a process that will essentially hunt and peck along for order across billions of years and, sooner or later, come up with a life form that can both [appreciate] You and make a hot-fudge sundae at the same time. So You come up with light, touch it off with a crisp "Let there be...," and take a break for ten billion years or so."

"But I'll also note that God did leave one small backdoor into his universal code, prayer. [...] Prayer seems to be a need hard-wired into our limited cortex. If you doubt this, please go out and sit under an artillery barrage for an hour or two and then come back to continue this discussion."

-Gerard Van der Leun

"Intelligence [is] knowing what you don't know."
-Neal Boortz

"[There is] no contradiction between the idea that the universe, life, and human beings evolved according to natural processes, and the idea that a divine being or beings can be credited with the existence of everything, having set those natural processes going in the first place."
-Frederick Turner

"of the vast increase in the well-being of hundreds of millions of people that has occurred in the 200-year course of the industrial revolution to date, virtually none of it can be attributed to the direct redistribution of resources from rich to poor. The potential for improving the lives of poor people by finding different ways of distributing current production is nothing compared to the apparently limitless potential of increasing production."
-Robert Lucas

Programming as Art

"The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures."
-Fred Brooks

"I was taught in college that one ought to figure out a program completely on paper before even going near a computer. I found that I did not program this way. I found that I liked to program sitting in front of a computer, not a piece of paper. Worse still, instead of patiently writing out a complete program and assuring myself it was correct, I tended to just spew out code that was hopelessly broken, and gradually beat it into shape.
For a long time I felt bad about this, just as I once felt bad that I didn't hold my pencil the way they taught me to in elementary school. If I had only looked over at the other makers, the painters or the architects, I would have realized that there was a name for what I was doing: sketching. As far as I can tell, the way they taught me to program in college was all wrong. You should figure out programs as you're writing them, just as writers and painters and architects do."
-Paul Graham

"We have had 50 years of Bretton Woods Keynesianism, i.e. the policy founded on the false notion that macro-economic wizards and central planners could grow Africa "like a garden." Nothing has grown since."
-Max Borders