The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears this is true.
- James Branch Cabell

With Google Inc. likely to file for an initial public offering in 2004, industry watchers are rushing to sort out what this means -- both for the lackluster IPO market and, more important, for Web users.

Google has remained a true good guy among Web businesses, hanging on to the magical aura that the early Netscape browser and Yahoo directory had, but lost. There has been no misdirection, no jerking users around, no coerced "stickiness." It hasn't tried to fool users into thinking ads were agnostic results, or junked up its services by selling whole sections, at bubble-inflated prices, to the highest bidder. Along with Overture, now a unit of Yahoo, it proved Web advertising could work for buyer, seller and consumer.

There are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe everything or to doubt everything; both ways save us from thinking.
- Alfred Korzybski

"No one can be perfectly happy till all are happy."
—Herbert Spencer

"The rapid progress true science now makes occasions my regretting sometimes that I was born so soon. It is impossible to imagine the Height to which may be carried, in a thousand years, the Power of Man over Matter...Agriculture may diminish its Labour and double its Produce; all Diseases may, by sure means, be prevented or cured, not even excepting that of Old Age, and our Lives lengthened at pleasure even beyond the antediluvian Standard. O that moral Science were in as fair a way of Improvement, that Men would cease to be Wolves to one another, and that human Beings would at length learn what they now improperly call Humanity."
- Benjamin Franklin

"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex and more violent. It takes a touch of genius-and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction."
- Albert Einstein

The important thing is not to be human but to be humane.
- Eliezer Yudkowsky

The brain is wider than the sky,
For, put them side by side,
The one the other will contain,
With ease, and you, beside.
- Emily Dickinson

Be happy. It is a way of being wise.
- Unknown

It is easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
- Alfred Adler

This Is To Have Succeeded

To laugh often and much;

To win the respect of intelligent people and
the affection of children;

To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure
the betrayal of false friends;

To appreciate beauty;

To find the best in others;

To leave the world a bit better whether by a healthy child,a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition;

To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived.

This is to have succeeded.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil
is for good men to do nothing.
- Edmund Burke

Always do right. This will gratify some people, and astonish the rest.
- Mark Twain