Critics are the owls of Minerva, flying around at dusk.
– Hegel via Morgan Meis

We have a blueprint for a state machine that writes a blueprint for another state machine. So we are looking at a blueprint of a state machine that makes blueprints and we are trying to predict the behaviour of the state machines it builds.

This is roughly like looking at Bach’s DNA and hearing the Little Fugue in your head.
– Reg Braithwaite

This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
– Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections

The way SICP looks at things, a procedure is a dead thing, a list of instructions for the computer to execute. A process is the magic that happens when a procedure is run. A procedure “evolves” a process in the sense that the static content of the procedure causes the dynamic things in the process to happen.
– C2

Photographs turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed.
– Susan Sontag

Supermarkets and shoe stores often go into new buildings; good bookstores and antique dealers seldom do.
–  Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Where did these three battles occur? In a park and in the park-like grounds of the project. After outbreaks of this kind, one of the remedies invariably called for is more parks and playgrounds. We are bemused by the sound of symbols.
–  Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

The trouble with paternalists is that they want to make impossibly profound changes, and they choose impossibly superficial means for doing so.
– Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities