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I plead contemporary insanity.
"In all our searching, the only thing we found that makes the emptiness bearable, is each other" (Contact)
Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.-- Susan Sontag
"The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions."-- Susan Sontag
I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy
Landing: a controlled mid-air collision with a planet.
Bullshit, in contrast to mere nonsense, is something that implies, but does not contain, adequate meaning or truth.
Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds.-- Susan Sontag
"Tact is the art of making a point without making an enemy."
QUOTE OF THE DAY: `
Economics exists merely to employ economists.
"He who establishes his argument by noise and command shows that his reason is weak."
-- Michel de Montaigne
Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.-- Calvin (Calvin & Hobbes)
Hindsight is an exact science.
Language and its absurd conjunctions;
Constellations and crustaceans rhyme.
"Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man."-- Francais Bacon
"The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed."-- Carl Gustav Jung
"The Ten Commandments contain 297 words. The Bill of Rights is stated in 463 words. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address contains 266 words. A recent federal directive to regulate the price of cabbage contains 26,911 words." (Atlanta Journal)
Study the past, if you would divine the future.-- Confucius
Brought to you by the people who made "out of context" a household word.
Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without.-- Confucius
Practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty.
Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance.-- Confucius
Fungus is actually alive. Be afraid.
Tact is the ability to tell a man he has an open mind when he has a hole in his head.
I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.-- Confucius
Dublin University contains the cream of Ireland: Rich and thick.-- Samuel Beckett
There is a superstition in avoiding superstition.-- Francis Bacon
Fanaticism consists of redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.-- George Santayana
If practice makes perfect and nobody's perfect, why practice?
Absent, adj: Exposed to the attacks of friends and acquaintances; defamed; slandered.
Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.-- Confucius
"Familiarity breeds contempt--and children."-- Mark Twain
Lies, damned lies and user documentation.
In case of doubt, make it sound convincing.
Come, let us retract the foreskin of misconception and apply the wire brush of enlightenment.
Acute Angle: A very attractive early Briton.
"Men have fiendishly conceived a heaven only to find it insipid, and a hell only to find it ridiculous."-- George Santayana
All that glitters has a high refractive index.
Headline: Drunk Gets Nine Months in Violin Case
"Being a woman is a terribly difficult trade since it consists principally of dealing with men."-- Joseph Conrad
"Those who control their passions do so because their passions are weak enough to be controlled."-- William Blake
Newton's Fourth Law: Every action has an equal and opposite satisfaction.
I need more tact. I never say anything I want to say very well. I'm even worse at what I don't want to say.
There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as moral indignation, which permits envy or hate to be acted out under the guise of virtue.-- Erich Fromm
2, 3, 3, 37 - the prime factorization of the beast.
Consciousness: that annoying time between naps.
In art, as in no other form of endeavor, there is meaning apart from success.-- Joseph Conrad
"She says control it, then she says don't control it, then she says you're controlling the way she makes you crawl."-- Tori Amos ("She's Your Cocaine")
You will continue to suffer if you have an emotional reaction to everything that is said to you. True power is sitting back and observing things with logic. True power is restraint. If words control you that means everyone else can control you. Breathe and allow things to pass.
Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; a sense of humor to console him for what he is.-- Francis Bacon
If you're not confused you're not paying attention.
Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.-- George Santayana
"Conviction is a luxury for those on the sidelines."
"If there is anything the nonconformist hates worse than a conformist it's another nonconformist who doesn't conform to the prevailing standards of nonconformity."
Books: A controlled hallucinogen known to regularly cause people to imagine things that are not really there.
Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable.
The fewer clear facts you have in support of an opinion, the stronger your emotional attachment to that opinion.
"Psychoanalysis is confession without absolution."
They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.-- Francis Bacon
Ban the bomb. Save the world for conventional warfare.
The question is not so much whether there is life on Mars as whether it will continue to be possible to live on Earth.
'Impossible' tends to be an opinion rather than a fact.
War on common sense - I think we actually won that one...
I'm not a perfectionist. That would be a character flaw.
The difference between theory and practice is greater in practice than it is in theory.
There's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.-- Flannery O'Connor
Only the good die young. Note the average age in Congress.
"It's 5:50 a.m., Do you know where your stack pointer is?"
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
Destinesia: The act of entering a room and forgetting why.
Keep emotionally active. Cater to your favorite neurosis.
"Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self."-- Cyril Connolly
"To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love."-- George Santayana
A conscience is what hurts when everything else feels good.
The right half of the brain controls the left half of the body. This means that only left handed people are in their right mind.
Nowadays, originality is the art of concealing your source.
Headline: Killer Sentenced to Die for Second Time in 10 Years
Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves.-- Abraham Lincoln
Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.
My opinions may have changed, but not the fact that I am right.
Baby-sitter, n: A teenager acting like an adult, while the adults are out acting like teenagers.
Politics: strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.-- Ambrose Bierce
"If everything seems under control, you're just not going fast enough."-- Mario Andretti
All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value.-- Carl Sagan
"When you are content to be simply yourself and don't compare or compete, everybody will respect you."-- Lao-Tzu
Vizzini: Inconceivable.
Inigo Montoya: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. (The Princess Bride)
Very few profundities can be expressed in less than 80 characters.
A mathematician is a machine for converting coffee into theorems.
"It's been reported that John Bobbitt's porno movie grossed over 10 million. I'm not sure whether that's dollars or people."-- Conan O'Brien
Hartley's second law: Never sleep with anyone crazier than yourself.
PMS, n: the short period of time when women act like men do all the time.
On the sexes:
Brains times Beauty times Availability = Constant.
"The need of exercise is a modern superstition, invented by people who ate too much and had nothing to think about."-- George Santayana
"Success consists of doing the common things of life uncommonly well."
"Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated."-- George Santayana
When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than any talent for abstract, positive thinking.-- Albert Einstein
Conservative: a man who believes nothing should be done for the first time.
Rule of Feline Frustration: When your cat has fallen asleep on your lap and looks utterly content and adorable, you will suddenly have to go to the bathroom.
In the end, man is not entirely guilty — he did not start history. Nor is he wholly innocent — he continues it.-- Albert Camus
We are continually faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems.-- John Gardner
Q: Why did the tachyon cross the road?
A: Because it was on the other side.
"Truman's Law - If you can't convince them, confuse them."-- Harry S. Truman
Accountant - someone who can put two and two together and make a living from it.
Skinner's Constant (or Flannagan's Finagling Factor): That quantity which, when multiplied by, divided by, added to, or subtracted from the answer you get, gives you the answer you should have gotten.
Arnold's First Law of Documentation
If it should exist, it doesn't.
Arnold's Second Law of Documentation
If it does exist, it's out of date.
Arnold's Third Law of Documentation
Only useless documentation transcends the first two laws.
"A conservative is someone who admires radicals a century after they're dead."
"Many a man's reputation would not know his character if they met on the street."
The herd instinct among economists makes sheep look like independent thinkers.
Anti-paranoia is that eerie feeling that nothing is connected to anything else.
"The most merciful thing in the world...is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents."-- H.P. Lovecraft
If the pen is mightier than the sword then how can actions speak louder than words?
"It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress."-- Mark Twain
The game of Monopoly is a lot like life, except you don't get $200 for going through a green light, and you don't drive a thimble. But wouldn't it be cool if you did?-- Craig Stacey
It's only by NOT taking the human race seriously that I retain what fragments of my once considerable mental powers I still possess.-- Roger Noe
The moral of the story is that with a contrived example, you can prove anything. Oops. No, that's not what I meant to say.-- Joel Spolsky
Computer literacy is a contact with the activity of computing deep enough to make the computational equivalent of reading and writing fluent and enjoyable. As in all the arts, a romance with the material must be well under way. If we value the lifelong learning of arts and letters as a springboard for personal and societal growth, should any less effort be spent to make computing a part of our lives?-- Alan Kay (``Computer Software'', Scientific American)
Bees are very busy souls
They have no time for birth controls
And that is why in times like these
There are so many Sons of Bees.
Sign seen on an automatic restroom hand dryer:
"Do no activate with wet hands"
Every four seconds a woman has a baby. Our problem is to find this woman and stop her.
"Are you queer? Maybe just for tonight? 20 minutes? You don't have to be conscious."
Never run from anything immortal. It only attracts their attention. (The Last Unicorn)
Arithmetic: An obscure art no longer practiced in the world's developed countries.
"Confronted with the choice, the American people would choose the policeman's truncheon over the anarchist's bomb.-- Spiro T. Agnew
Sign in a hotel elevator in Paris:
"Please leave your values at the front desk."
"Men show their character in nothing more clearly than by what they find laughable."
People do not seem to realize that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.-- Goethe
Rule of Defactualization: Information deteriorates upward through bureaucracies.
For practical purposes we have agreed that sanity consists in sharing the hallucinations of our neighbors.-- Evelyn Underhill
It is always easy to see both sides of an issue we are not particularly concerned about.
Circumpopulate (sur kum pop' yew layt'), v: To finish off a popsicle "laterally" because the "frontal" approach causes one to gag.-- Rich Hall ("Sniglets")
Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on.-- Winston Churchill
"Mankind will someday realize that we are actually in contact with the dead and with the other world, whatever it is; right now we could predict, if we only exerted enough mental will, what is giong to happen within the next hundred years and be able to take steps to avoid all kinds of catastrophes. When a man dies he undergoes a mutation in his brain that we know nothing about now but which will be very clear someday if scientists get on the ball. The bastards right now are only interested in seeing if they can blow up the world."-- Bull (On the Road)
"The essence of intelligence is skill in extracting meaning from everyday experience."
The probability of someone watching you is proportional to the stupidity of your action.
People must think I'm a mushroom. They constantly keep me in the dark and feed me bullshit.
I'm always highly irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system.-- Flannery O'Connor
"I wanted to make a little spot in the context of the record where there was this break in the action. In the midst of this buildup of these ever-growing, terrible machines, I just wanted to remember that there is somewhere... else."-- Trent Reznor
"I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours."
What is inconceivable about the universe is that it is at all conceivable.-- Albert Einstein
Practical people would be more practical if they would take a little more time for dreaming.-- J. P. McEvoy
Chicken Soup, n.:
An ancient miracle drug containing equal parts of aureomycin, cocaine, interferon, and TLC. The only ailment chicken soup can't cure is neurotic dependence on one's mother.-- Arthur Naiman ("Every Goy's Guide to Yiddish")
Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young.-- W. Somerset Maugham
What really matters is the name you succeed in imposing on the facts -- not the facts themselves.-- Cohen's Law
Among economists, the real world is often a special case.-- Horngren
One of the problems with learning that many teachers fail to see is that until you really understand something, any argument made out of that understanding context tends to be pretty useless.
Sodd's Second Law: Sooner or later, the worst possible set of circumstances is bound to occur.