"Bullshit is everywhere.  (Are the kids still in here?  We'll deal with that later.)

Bullshit is everywhere.  There is very little that you will encounter in life that has not been, in some ways, infused with bullshit.  Not all of it bad!  Your general, day-to-day, organic free-range bullshit is often necessary, or, at the very least, innocuous.  "Oh, what a beautiful baby.  I'm sure it'll grow into that." That kind of bullshit in many ways provides important social-contract fertilizer.  It keeps people from making each other cry all day.  But then there's the more pernicious bullshit.  Your premeditated, institutional bullshit, designed to obscure and distract.  Designed by whom?  The bullshitocracy.

"Don't worry kids, being an adult is mostly just Googling how to do stuff."
- Bill Murray, October 27, 2014

 

"Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution."
- Clay Shirky, March 14, 2010.
Quoted and dubbed "The Shirky Principle" by Kevin Kelly from a speech delivered at the South by Southwest conference.

"Nothing is more powerful than a community of talented people working on related problems."
- Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age by Paul Graham, 2009

"Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don't."
- Bill Nye in a Reddit AMA, July 27, 2012.

"depression is like trying to peel a potato with another potato its not fun it doesn't work and you just wanna cry"
- Birdpear

"... and then people are like God! Why don't you just get a peeler!? And then they HAND YOU ANOTHER FUCKING POTATO."
- Osointricate

"…why is this such a good metaphor what the fuck"
- Shorm

"Fill your heart with bees. If someone breaks your heart, then they have to deal with the bees."
- Sir Bombalot, August 28, 2013

Resource: The Best Commencement Speeches

The fine folks over at NPR have hand-picked the best commencement speeches available to read, listen to, or watch on the web.  There are three hundred in total, dating all the way back to 1774. There are some truly awe-inspiring words of wisdom contained in this archive.  Search the speeches by name, school, date, or theme

Best wishes to everyone out there in my readership who is graduating this spring, be it from high school or university!

"Your mobile phone has more computing power than all of NASA in 1969. NASA launched a man to the moon. We launch a bird into pigs."
- George Bray, March 22, 2011

"the magical thing about books is you can never know which one is going to change your life"
- Tahereh Maf, February 6, 2014

"Chance favors the connected mind." - Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation by Steven Johnson, 2010.

"Ones and zeroes in the clean environment of a computer chip can be controlled absolutely. When you write a reasonably self-contained program, everything that goes right and everything that goes wrong is entirely your fault. It is not a metaphor; programming simply is small-scale godhood."

- Response from  Eliezer on Hacker News.

"Programmers are the Gods of their tiny worlds. They create something out of nothing. In their command-line universe, they say when it’s sunny and when it rains. And the tiny universe complies."
- "Programmers are Tiny Gods" by Derek Powazek, January 15, 2009.

"Do you mind a little advice? Starfleet captains are like children. They want everything right now and they want it their way. But the secret is to give them only what they need, not what they want."
- Scotty in "Relics," written by Ronald D. Moore.
Star Trek: The Next Generation, October 12, 1992

Scotty may have spent his life being rushed through cleaning up messes that were other people's fault, but he did always did it with a passion.  There was never any doubt that, though the Enterprise could explode into a million pieces at any given moment, there was no other place he'd rather be, and the crew love him for it.

Meanwhile, James Doohan may have spent his career shouting gibberish in a bad Scottish accent, but can you name another man who single-handly inspired so many people to become engineers?  That's a solid life's work.

Martin Luther King, Jr. on Technology

This evening I would like to use this lofty and historic platform to discuss what appears to me to be the most pressing problem confronting mankind today. Modern man has brought this whole world to an awe-inspiring threshold of the future. He has reached new and astonishing peaks of scientific success. He has produced machines that think and instruments that peer into the unfathomable ranges of interstellar space. He has built gigantic bridges to span the seas and gargantuan buildings to kiss the skies. His airplanes and spaceships have dwarfed distance, placed time in chains, and carved highways through the stratosphere. This is a dazzling picture of modern man’s scientific and technological progress.

Yet, in spite of these spectacular strides in science and technology, and still unlimited ones to come, something basic is missing. There is a sort of poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance. The richer we have become materially, the poorer we have become morally and spiritually. We have learned to fly the air like birds and swim the sea like fish, but we have not learned the simple art of living together as brothers.

- The Nobel Prize acceptance speech of Martin Luther King, Jr., December 11, 1964.

"The things you own end up owning you."
- Tyler Broden

“Simplicity is the key to brilliance.”
- Bruce Lee

Yes, I quoted Bruce Lee. I do it quite often. His quotations are surprisingly relevant to the world of technology.

"Never memorize what you can look up in books."
- Albert Einstein

I can't pinpoint an exact source for this quote, but I love it. I can only imagine that, if he were alive today, Einstein might have said, "Never memorize what you can Google."

"After a time, you may find that having is not so pleasing a thing after all as wanting. It is not logical, but it is often true."
- Spock in "Amok Time,"written by Theodore Sturgeon.
Star Trek: The Original Series, September 15, 1967

(Yeah, I learned that lesson from Star Trek, but honestly, what did you expect from a geek?)

Role Model: Albert Einstein

"The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity."

- Albert Einstein, quoted in Personal Memoir of William Miller
Quoted in Life magazine, May 2, 1955.