Frank's Quote Page

Calamity is a ruffling breeze
That glances through a thousand shifting forms;
Nor there anywhere on earth a place
Where thou could'st point and say "Here
sorrow's wing
Keeps darkly constant to its native hue."

Justice champions those that fight for her.

Search deep and then rise up more strong
For justice: be the minister
That reverentially protects from wrong
The stranger and the sojourner,
Resolves never to yield while thou stand'st by
An exile driven so far in godless outlawry
The Suppliant Maidens - Aeschylus, Translated by G.M. Cookson

The three quotes above, each separated by a blank new line, are lines from Aeschylus 's The Suppliant Maidens translated by GM Cookson. I am trying to read the Greak Books of the Western World, and I am currently on the plays of Aeschylus.

Context

Aeschylus the poet was born at Elusis around the year 525 B.C. His father belonged to the old nobility of Athens, the . It is not known whether he was initiated into the Elusinian Mysteries, but he was accused osf divulging the secrets of Demeter. Aeschylus fought against the Persian invader at Marathon in 490, and the epitaph on his headstone reads: This memorial stone covers Aeschylus the Athenian, Euphorion's son, who died in wheat-baring Gela. His famed valor the precinct of Marathon could tell and long-haired Mede, who knows it well. Aeschylus is considered to be the founder of tragedy, and according to Aristotle, he first introduced a second actor, diminished the importance of the chorus, and assigtned a leading part to the dialog. He won the tragedy contest of the city Dionysia multiple times in his life.

The Suppliant Maidens is the oldest of his plays. It is the story of the Danaids fleeing a forced marraige to their Egyptian cousins, and King Pelasgus's choice to defend the travelers against an Egyptian force pursuing them, which would likely cause a war with Egypt.

About the Quotes

1. The first wuote is a well-translated verse, and it is a good reminder that bad things will never be constant to a time or place.
2. The second quote I feel like I have heard before, but my internet search returned no results. I would be interested to see if Justice here is translated from a reference to the goddess Themis.
3. The third quote I liked because it sounds like something that would be in the Old Testament, but without an appeal to God. Instead, it appears to hint a little to the importance of the state and social order.

Efficiency is doing the thing right. Effectiveness is doing the right thing.
Peter F. Drucker

Peter Drucker was an Austrian American management consultant, educator, and author, whose writings contributed to the philosophical and practical foundations of modern management theory. He was also a leader in management education and invented the conceptes known as management by objectives and self=control, and he has been described as the champion of management as a serious discipline.

While I'm not sure that the increase in management and administration has been a good thing for business, I think that learning how to manage could be useful in modern society with a greater amount of tools available to any one person. I am currently reading Effective DevOps: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done, and after reading the preface / forwards, unsure of whether to continue a expository work that is not immediately beneficial to me, I thought about management and its renewed importance in a time when one person is extremely leveraged.

Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider.
Francis Bacon, the Essays

I came across this quote when reading How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren, and I liked it because I took it as a good reminder to not believe most of what you see online. Online, there is a constant sensationalism that tries to make you believe what often turns out to be false (or only partially true), and I took this as a good reminder to take what you read with a grain of salt.

Francis Bacon was an English philosopher and statesman who served as Attorney General and Lord Chancellor of England under King James I. Bacon argued the importance of natural philosophy, and his works remained influential throughout the Scientific Revolution.

One thing that should be learned from the bitter lesson is the great power of general purpose methods, of methods that continue to scale with increased computation even as the available computation becomes very great. The two methods that seem to scale arbitrarily in this way are search and learning.
The Bitter Lesson, Rich Sutton

I first saw this quote reading George Hotz's blog, and I liked it because it gave me some certain idea about the future.

This quote tracks what I have seen when reading about technology in general as well; oftentimes, you see that a method of doing something related to technology was proposed 30-50 years before the thing was even created because of manufacturing limitations.

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
"If—" - by Rudyard Kipling

"If—" is a poem by English poet Rudyard Kipling, written around 1895.
I was watching an episode of Boardwalk Empire when the character Eddie, while on his deathbed, started reciting the beginning of this poem and since I remembered hearing it in Apocalypse Now , I decided to look it up.
The beginning of the poem, If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, is the most popular way to reference the poem in media I think, and these first two lines really summarize the stoic theme of the poem - the reason why I like it and included it here.

The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly
go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out
to be impossible to get at or repair.
Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless (1992)

I liked this quote because you can run into the trap of making a lot of assumptions when developing a software application, assumptions which can result in hard to find errors.
It is a good reminder to write code intentionally.