Jamie Zawinski Quotes

We call the fates of the Titanic and the Concordia - as well as those of the space shuttles Challenger and Columbia - 'accidents.' Foreseeing such undesirable events is what engineers are expected to do. However, design trade-offs leave technological systems open to failings once predicted, but later forgotten.

Spaceflight will never tolerate carelessness, incapacity, and neglect. Somewhere, somehow, we screwed up. It could have been in design, build, or test. Whatever it was, we should have caught it. We were too gung ho about the schedule and we locked out all of the problems we saw each day in our work. Every element of the program was in trouble and so were we. The simulators were not working, Mission Control was behind in virtually every area, and the flight and test procedures changed daily.

The mantra of any good security engineer is: "Security is a not a product, but a process." It's more than designing strong cryptography into a system; it's designing the entire system such that all security measures, including cryptography, work together.

To eliminate the concept of waste means to design things-products, packaging, and systems-from the very beginning on the understanding that waste does not exist.

Thoughtfulness for others, generosity, modesty, and self-respect are the qualities which make a real gentleman or lady.

The greatest trick the rich - and their cheerleaders on the right - ever pulled was convincing the world that class didn't exist. Out here in the real world, it is more real and more rigid than it has been for a century.

One of the symptoms of a declining social order is that its members have to give most of their time to politics, rather than to the real tasks of economic production, in an attempt to patch up the cracks already appearing from the 'inner contradictions' of such a system.

The middle class is both real and aspirational. And I want to make sure that it remains strong and it gives people a sense of security and confidence and optimism about their futures.

Zombies are the real lower-class citizens of the monster world and that's why l like them.

Individuality will always be one of the conditions of real elegance

The facts and techniques or whatever they teach you in class isn't going to be veryuseful in the real world, that's for sure.

The systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature, and not its growth and development.

Of all the actresses ... to me, only Faye Dunaway has the talent and the class and the courage it takes to make a real star.

When the gap between ideal and real becomes too wide, the system breaks down.

I buy mainly Beatles bootlegs and stuff like that. I'm hoping I can go there today. My dad buys my drawings and he re-sells them for quite a bit more and then he puts the money in my savings. I just draw all the time and he buys and I get a lot money [laughs]. It's great. My dad's my best manager I ever had. If I get richer, I'd like to be able to buy more of the real collectible Beatles things. I just need a little more money to be a higher class collector [laughs].

I think on all the debate on immigration, and all of that, the class of person that should be given the benefit of the doubt is the genuine refugee that is just in real desperate strait. Some of them are in the United States illegally because of [human] trafficking. They were caught up in trafficking, and you can argue to what extent it's their fault, to what extent they didn't know what they were getting into.

It is only the working class at the head of the masses, it is only the working class headed by its real Marxist-Leninist party, it is only the working class through armed revolution, through violence, that can and must bury the traitorous revisionists.

Modern capitalism is just as subversive as Marxism. The materialistic view of life on which both systems are based is identical. As long as we only talk about economic classes, profit, salaries, and production, and as long as we believe that real human progress is determined by a particular system of distribution of wealth and goods, then we are not even close to what is essential.

The real tight interface is between the book and the reader-the world of the book is plugged right into your brain, never mind the [virtual reality] bodysuit.

I don't think generally speaking, there are a lot of innovators and inventors. Many of the designers take what exists already and update it or make it relevant for today. But true inventors have never been seen before. Bill Gates is a real inventor. I don't think fashion designers invent anything new. They innovate new ways to make fashion.

The Unexpected stalks a farm in big boots like a vagrant bent on havoc. Not every farmer is an inventor, but the good ones have the seeds of invention within them. Economy and efficiency move their relentless tinkering and yet the real motive often seems to be aesthetic. The mind that first designed a cutter bar is not far different from a mind that can take the intractable steel of an outsized sickle blade and make it hum in the end. The question is how to reduce the simplicity that constitutes a problem ("It's simple; it's broke.") to the greater simplicity that constitutes a solution.

A pattern is either right or wrong...it is no stronger than its weakest point.

Every strategy for real social change - land reform, education, public health, the equitable distribution of natural resources ... - has been cleverly, cunningly, and consistently scuttled and rendered ineffectual by those castes and that class of people which has a stranglehold on the political process.

When you want to know how things really work, study them when they're coming apart.

Our leadership class's real accomplishment is résumé padding.