Life experience

"Every experience brings its bad luck"

"ogni esperienza fa sfiga a sè"

-- I.C.

MMFFNN

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-- Anonimo

Mancherebbe l'approccio di un biologo ma facciamo finta di nulla...

France

No, France is a country you have to drive trought to get to Italy. That's all it is for.

-- James May

Autorevolezza

Postulato del Rinoceronte Scorrevole:
La vera misura dell'autorevolezza è la quantità di stronzate che posso scrivere impunemente, prima che si sappia che sono un cretino.

- gaspartorriero

Programming

" If you want to trick a pointy-haired boss into letting you write software in Lisp, you could try telling him it's XML."

Elections

“per un elettore italiano assistere alle primarie americane è come per un ausiliario del traffico guardarsi serpico tutte le sere.”

Via Indizi dell'avvenuta catastrofe

"For an Italian voter watching USA primary elections is like for a traffic cop watching serpico every night"

Kicks and spits

"Calci e sputi in faccia, risse e malori nell'emiciclo parlamentare: torna la Prima Repubblica. Finalmente! Vuol dire che c'è ancora speranza per questo nostro Paese..."

-- Cossiga

"Kicks and spits in face, rough-and-tumbles and illness in parliamentary semi cycle: the Frist Republic comes back! It means that there is still hope for this our Country"

Today, and only today, I like him

"If I were running for office at this point I'd be saying, 'Vote for me, I'm -- I'm gonna be an agent of change.'"
-- George W. Bush

The Capital of the Empire

New York is just like Istanbul - except that people speak English.
-- Etel Menda

The loving general

Throw them where they cannot leave.
Facing death, they will not be routed.
Officers and men facing death,
How could one not obtain their utmost strength?
-- Sun Tzu

Frying countries

Govern a great country as you would fry a small fish: do not poke at it too much.
-- Lao Tzu

Animal Spirits!

Most, probably, of our decisions to do something positive, the full consequences of which will be drawn out over many days to come, can only be taken as the result of animal spirits - a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities.

-- Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money

Libertas

LIBERTATEM QUAM PEPERERE MAIORES DIGNE STUDEAT SERVARE POSTERITAS
Posterity should strive to preserve the freedom that the ancestors won.
-- Hamburg Town Hall inscription

Marriage

N.C.: Non ce la faccio, ogni volta che apro bocca dico una nuova bugia.
M.C.: Smettila di piagnucolare, basta, si chiama matrimonio.
N.C.: I can't take it anymore, every time I open my mouth I tell a new lie.
M.C.: Stop whining, enough, this is what they call marriage.
-- Frasier

The other way around

Creativity is the sudden cessation of stupidity
-- Edwin Land

Two quotations by physicist Feynman

"The next question was - what makes planets go around the sun? At the time of Kepler some people answered this problem by saying that there were angels behind them beating their wings and pushing the planets around an orbit. As you will see, the answer is not very far from the truth. The only difference is that the angels sit in a different direction and their wings push inward."
-- Richard Feynman, Character Of Physical Law, p. 8

What I am going to tell you about is what we teach our physics students in the third or fourth year of graduate school... It is my task to convince you not to turn away because you don't understand it. You see my physics students don't understand it... That is because I don't understand it. Nobody does.
-- Richard Feynman, Nobel Lecture, 1966

La penisola del Tesoro

È caduto l'Impero romano, può cadere anche Mediobanca. Ma le Generali mai, esse sono il vero tesoro di questo Paese e non devono cadere.
The Roman Empire is fallen, Mediobanca can fall. But Generali Insurance cannot, they are the true treasure of our country and they shall never fall.
-- Enrico Cuccia

The essence of perfection

The qualities of a pure soul are intelligence devoid of envy, ambition free from malice, and unceasing love for the Lord of glory.
-- St Diadochos of Photiki

Office politics

It's better to have the right person ask the wrong question than to have the wrong person ask the right question.
-- Dilbert comic

The whole point with science

The issue of how confident we are in the [...] answer is a subtle one which cannot be resolved by computing some measure of how well the model mimics historical data. The degree of confidence in the answer depends on the confidence that is placed in the economic theory being used.
-- Kydland and Prescott, 1991 AD

Every downwards movement of a body made of gold or lead, or any other material, is faster inasmuch the body is larger.
-- Aristotle, 300 BC