Gates is the ultimate programming machine. He believes everything can be defined, examined, reduced to essentials, and rearranged into a logical sequence that will achieve a particular goal.

My name, my origins, my background and my experiences are what leveraged my success. The angle of the immigrant, through which I examined the reality in France, distinguished me.

It is, I find, in zoology as it is in botany: all nature is so full, that that district produces the greatest variety which is the most examined.

I could heartily wish that every commission officer was to be previously examined; for, to my certain knowledge, there are persons who have already crept into commission without abilities or fit qualification: I am myself far from desiring to be excused.

The whole macho thing has to be reexamined. Because in my view, the Bush administration was weak, not strong. To engage in a policy of torture is a weak policy. Because ultimately, it encourages the terrorists. It undermines our own values. It corrupts our system. And it doesn't get good intelligence.

To have or not to have kids, when to have them, and whether we working women can 'have it all' has been debated, discussed, and examined since the washing machine and the TV dinner began to free up many mothers to even consider leaving the home as a viable option.

Nigeria has had a complicated colonial history. My work has examined that part of our story extensively.

We live trapped, between the churned-up and examined past and a future that waits for our work.

I think a lot of self-importance is a product of fear. And fear, living in sort of an un-self-examined fear-based life, tends to lead to narcissism and self-importance.

An unexamined faith is not worth having, for fundamentalism and uncritical certitude entail the rejection of one of the great human gifts: that of free will, of the liberty to make up our own minds based on evidence and tradition and reason.

The position I took at the time was that we hadn't really examined any of the potential environmental consequences of introducing genetically modified organisms.

It is dangerous for mortal beauty, or terrestrial virtue, to be examined by too strong a light. The torch of Truth shows much that we cannot, and all that we would not, see.

Psychologists, for reasons of clinical necessity or vagaries of temperament, have chosen to dissect and catalog the morbid emotions - depression, anger, anxiety - and to leave largely unexamined the more vital, positive ones.

All things must be examined, debated, investigated without exception and without regard for anyone's feelings.

See now the power of truth; the same experiment which at first glance seemed to show one thing, when more carefully examined, assures us of the contrary.

If truth is what you seek, then the examined life will only take you on a long ride to the limits of solitude and leave you by the side of the road with your truth and nothing else.

My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences.

"I examined the poets, and I look on them as people whose talent overawes both themselves and others, people who present themselves as wise men and are taken as such, when they are nothing of the sort.

The unexamined life is not worth living.

Anybody who thinks there's nothing wrong with this world needs to have his head examined. Just when things are going all right, without fail someone or something will come along and spoil everything. Somebody should write that down as a fundamental law of the Universe. The principle of perpetual disappointment. If there is a God who created this world, he should scrap it and try again.

Progress has always been achieved by probing well-entrenched and well-founded forms of life with unpopular and unfounded values. This is how man gradually freed himself from fear and from the tyranny of unexamined systems.

For where is the man that has incontestable evidence of the truth of all that he holds, or of the falsehood of all he condemns; or can say that he has examined to the bottom all his own, or other men's opinions? The necessity of believing without knowledge, nay often upon very slight grounds, in this fleeting state of action and blindness we are in, should make us more busy and careful to inform ourselves than constrain others.

"He examined the chess problem and set out the pieces. It was a tricky ending, involving a couple of knights.

Plato says that the unexamined life is not worth living. But what if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well?