I had a quote on the wall of my cube back when I worked for the university. Even though it was an old quote, I thought it offered a lot of insight into computer and information sciences. I lost the quote when I left the university position and I have been keeping an eye out for it ever since. I finally found it again in, of all places, a copy of the 1931 edition of The Joy of Cooking.
“Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.”
— Samuel Johnson
As long as I am posting quotes, I may as well add this one. It really had a chilling effect on me when I first read it. It always makes me wonder when I drive through the back roads of Wisconsin.
“Good heavens!” I cried. “Who would associate crime with these dear old homesteads?”
“They always fill me with a certain horror. It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.”
“You horrify me!”
“But the reason is very obvious. The pressure of public opinion can do in the town what the law cannot accomplish. There is no lane so vile that the scream of a tortured child, or the thud of a drunkard’s blow, does not beget sympathy and indignation among the neighbours, and then the whole machinery of justice is ever so close that a word of complaint can set it going, and there is but a step between the crime and the dock. But look at these lonely houses, each in its own fields, filled for the most part with poor ignorant folk who know little of the law. Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the wiser.”
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892)
— Sherlock Holmes in “The Copper Beeches” (Doubleday p. 323)
