My favourite Quotes

... But if we laugh with derision we will never understand. Human intellectual capacity has not altered for thousands of years so far as we can tell. If intelligent people invested intense energy in issues that now seem foolish to us then the failure lies in our understanding of their world not in their distorted perceptions. Even the standard example of ancient nonsense -- the debate about angels on pinheads -- makes sense once you realize that theologians were not discussing whether five or eighteen would fit but whether a pin could house a finite or an infinite number.
-- S. J. Gould "Wide Hats and Narrow Minds"

Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.
--  Mark Twain

The primary purpose of the DATA statement is to give names to constants; instead of referring to pi as 3.141592653589793 at every appearance the variable PI can be given that value with a DATA statement and used instead of the longer form of the constant. This also simplifies modifying the program should the value of pi change.
-- FORTRAN manual for Xerox Computers

Q: How many IBM types does it take to change a light bulb?
A: 100. Ten to do it and 90 to write document number GC7500439-0001 Multitasking Incandescent Source System Facility of which 10% of the pages state only "This page intentionally left blank" and 20% of the definitions are of the form "A ...... consists of sequences of non-blank characters separated by blanks".

On a paper submitted by a physicist colleague: "This isn't right. This isn't even wrong."
-- Wolfgang Pauli

Preudhomme's Law of Window Cleaning: It's on the other side.