2008 Quotes
248 quotes
"Try to be a rainbow in someone's cloud."
"Balanced emotions are crucial to intuitive decision making."
"...a clear lesson I learned in the museum was that outside forces that tend to divide people up inside their country are unbelievably counterproductive. In other words, people came from other countries — I guess you'd call them colonialists — and they pitted one group of people against another."
"Wait, what did you just say? You're predicting $4 a gallon gasoline? ... That's interesting. I hadn't heard that."
"I hadn't heard that.... I, frankly, have been focused elsewhere, like on gasoline prices."
"The bill Congress sent me would take away one of the most valuable tools in the war on terror -- the CIA program to detain and question key terrorist leaders and operatives."
"I must say, I'm a little envious. If I were slightly younger and not employed here, I think it would be a fantastic experience to be on the front lines of helping this young democracy succeed. It must be exciting for you ... in some ways romantic, in some ways, you know, confronting danger. You're really making history, and thanks."
"It's viewed as an anti-Russian device. Well, it's not."
"And yes, I'm aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved.... I told the country we did that. And I also told them it was legal. We had legal opinions that enabled us to do it."
"I'll be long gone before some smart person ever figures out what happened inside this Oval Office."
"Goodbye, from the world's biggest polluter."
"On a day when buildings fell, heroes rose: Pentagon employees ran into smoke-filled corridors to guide their friends to safety. Firefighters rushed up the stairs of the World Trade Center as the towers neared collapse. Passengers aboard Flight 93 charged the cockpit and laid down their lives to spare countless others. One of the worst days in America's history saw some of the bravest acts in Americans' history. We'll always honor the heroes of 9/11. And here at this hallowed place, we pledge that we will never forget their sacrifice."
"If money isn't loosened up, this sucker could go down."
"I suspected there would be a good-size crowd once the word got out about my hanging."
"I think Leopard is a much better system [than Windows Vista] … but OS X in some ways is actually worse than Windows to program for. Their file system is complete and utter crap, which is scary."
"And what's the Internet without the rick-roll?"
"Security people are often the black-and-white kind of people that I can't stand. I think the OpenBSD crowd is a bunch of masturbating monkeys, in that they make such a big deal about concentrating on security to the point where they pretty much admit that nothing else matters to them."
"It's what I call "mental masturbation", when you engage is some pointless intellectual exercise that has no possible meaning."
"Real quality means making sure that people are proud of the code they write, that they're involved and taking it personally."
"The fact is, there aren't just two sides to any issue, there's almost always a range of responses, and "it depends" is almost always the right answer in any big question."
"Your problem has nothing to do with git, and everything to do with emacs. And then you have the gall to talk about "Unix design" and not gumming programs together, when you yourself use the most gummed-up piece of absolute sh*t there is!"
"Unlike the current occupant of the White House, he has no difficulty in orally extemporising a series of grammatical English sentences, each containing a main verb."
"[On attempting to find any reason to oppose Barack Obama] In the end I gave up, goggle-eyed and exhausted, having trolled the wilds of the Neocon internet without finding anything remotely approaching a smoking gun."
"Had it been us staging the Games, I don't think we would necessarily have done the switcheroo with the girl with the braces"
"My policy on cake is still pro having it and pro eating it!"
"They'll walk up, and they'll flip their top, and they'll flip their panties."
"Hillary Clinton said she'd consider naming Barack Obama as her vice president when she gets the nomination, but she's nowhere near a shoo-in."
"For his part, Obama said he's just focused on winning the nomination although at least one member on his team said Clinton would make a good vice president. Well, I know her and she'd make a good president or good vice president."
"It's very exciting we have a new president. It would have been nice if he ended with a 500 point up instead of down. It's certainly very exciting. His speech was great last night. I thought it was inspiring in every way. And, hopefully he's going to do a great job. But the way I look at it, he cannot do worse than Bush."
"The progress that's made … in any argument or in any discussion is by confrontation. That's a dialectical fact. People say "oh let's have less heat and more light," fatuously. There's only one source of light. It happens to be heat."
"If you're looking at substance rather than whether it's an R or D after his name, manifestly, if he's our candidate, then Hillary's gonna be our girl, Sean, because she's more conservative than he is. I think she would be stronger on the war on terrorism. I absolutely believe that. … I will campaign for her if it's McCain."
"The man responsible for keeping Americans safe from another terrorist attack on American soil for nearly seven years now will go down in history as one of America's greatest presidents."
"Russia doesn't negotiate with terrorists. It destroys them."
"Don't you know that Ukraine is not even a real country? Part of it is really East European, and part is really Russian."
"You do understand, George, that Ukraine is not even a state. What is Ukraine? Part of its territories is Eastern Europe, but the greater part is a gift from us. (Ты же понимаешь, Джордж, что Украина — это даже не государство! Что такое Украина? Часть ее территорий — это Восточная Европа, а часть, и значительная, подарена нами!)"
"At least the state figure should have a head."
"Crimea is not a disputed territory. There has been no ethnic conflict there, unlike the conflict between South Ossetia and Georgia. Russia has long recognized the borders of modern-day Ukraine. On the whole, we have completed our talks on borders. The issue of demarcation still stands, but this is just a technicality. (Крым не является никакой спорной территорией. Там не было никакого этнического конфликта, в отличие от конфликта между Южной Осетией и Грузией. И Россия давно признала границы сегодняшней Украины. Мы, по сути, закончили в общем и целом наши переговоры по границе. Речь идет о демаркации, но это уже технические дела.)"
"I have worked like a galley slave throughout these eight years, morning till night, and I have given all I could to this work. I am happy with the results."
"I want Saakashvili's head."
"They [Georgian military forces] launched their attacks at 23:30 [on August 7]. I learned about it the following morning. I spoke to Bush. He said 'No one wants war.' We expected something would happen, I met him again at the stadium. I can't tell you in detail the content of the conversation, but I had the feeling that his administration wouldn't do anything about stopping the conflict, It's a court which makes a king. Maybe the court thought the king shouldn't intervene."
"Enemies are right in front of you, you are at war with them, then you make an armistice with them, and all is clear. A traitor must be destroyed, crushed."
"But why only by one part?"
"Given enough time humans will screw up Wikipedia just as they have screwed up everything else, but so far it's not too bad."
"I don't really agree that most academics frown when they hear Wikipedia. Most academics I find quite passionate about the concept of Wikipedia and like it quite a bit. [...] The number of academics who really really don't like Wikipedia is really quite small and we find that they get reported on in the media far out of proportion to the amount they actually exist."
"We are a passionate community of volunteers who are trying to create a free encyclopedia for every single person on the planet. So we don't often think in terms of competition. We are going to do what we do and we hope Google does wonderful things as well. … If we were approaching this as a business we would think always: Oh, how can we position ourselves on the market... We just don't do any of that stuff."
"I know you didn't do this for me. You did this—you did this because you believed so deeply in the most American of ideas—that in the face of impossible odds, people who love this country can change it."
"Years from now, you'll look back and you'll say that this was the moment, this was the place where America remembered what it means to hope. For many months, we've been teased, even derided for talking about hope. But we always knew that hope is not blind optimism. It's not ignoring the enormity of the tasks ahead or the roadblocks that stand in our path. It's not sitting on the sidelines or shirking from a fight. Hope is that thing inside us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us if we have the courage to reach for it and to work for it and to fight for it."
"Hope is the bedrock of this nation. The belief that our destiny will not be written for us, but by us, by all those men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is, who have the courage to remake the world as it should be."
"We know the battle ahead will be long, but always remember that no matter what obstacles stand in our way, nothing can stand in the way of the power of millions of voices calling for change."
"We have been told we cannot do this by a chorus of cynics who will only grow louder and more dissonant in the weeks to come. We've been asked to pause for a reality check. We've been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope. But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope. For when we have faced down impossible odds; when we've been told that we're not ready, or that we shouldn't try, or that we can't, generations of Americans have responded with a simple creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes we can."
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