My colleague’s response to this quote, which is not for the faint-hearted researcher. It contains no profanity, but you might swear after you have read it.

“We dangle our three magic letters before the eyes of these predestined victims, and they swarm to us like moths to an electric light. They come at a time of life when failure can no longer be repaired easily and when the wounds it leaves are permanent … ”

– William James, “The Ph.D. Octopus”, 1903

Found on Philip Greenspun’s home page. He’s also the author of Greenspun’s Tenth Rule of Programming:

“Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.”

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