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Quotes of the Day for 18 January 2005 - Assistants

Thomas A. Watson was born at Salem, Massachusetts on this day in 1854. At age 16 he took a job as a bookkeeper, but found it didn't suit him so he hired on at a machine shop. A customer was taken by his skill and enthusiasm and hired him away at age 20, but at age 27 Watson had made enough money that he took a long European vacation, got married, and bought a farm. It only took two years for him to learn that this didn't suit him either, so he started a machine shop and specialized in building engines for small ships. By 1901, he was running the largest shipyard in the US, but was fired by his own company in 1903. He took up geology, and though he never found any commercially valuable ore, there is a fossil species named for him. And if all of that wasn't enough, he then took to the stage in 1910 playing Shakespeare and Dickens. A century later, we remember him only as an assistant to that customer who stole him away from the machine shop. And we don't remember his words, we remember the words Alexander raham Bell said to him: "Mr Watson, come here, I want you."

I don't like to work with assistants. I'm already one too many; the camera alone would be enough.
     - Alfred Eisenstaedt, 1898 - 1995

No sociologist ... should think himself too good, even in his old age, to make tens of thousands of quite trivial computations in his head and perhaps for months at a time. One cannot with impunity try to transfer this task entirely to mechanical assistants if one wishes to figure something, even though the final result is often small indeed.
     - Max Weber, 1864 - 1920

Man cannot produce a single work without the assistance of the slow, assiduous, corrosive worm of thought.
     - Eugenio Montale, 1896 - 1981

If men had to do their vile work without the assistance of woman and the stimulant of strong drink they would be obliged to be more divine and less brutal.
     - Caroline Nichols Churchill, 1833 - 1926

He is no more than the chief officer of the people, appointed by the laws, and circumscribed with definite powers, to assist in working the great machine of government erected for their use, and consequently subject to their superintendence.
     - Thomas Jefferson, 1743 - 1826

A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians.
     - Frank Zappa, 1940 - 1993

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