Quotes

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Morris dancing is an exercise in fertility.

I'm not tense, just terribly, terribly alert.

He was as shy as a newspaper is when referring to its own merits.

I don't suffer from stress. I'm a carrier.

The time to relax is when you don't have time for it.
-- Sidney J. Harris

"She who has the biggest sword gets to be the biggest bitch."
-- Kymberli Morris

Cornflakes are not the innocent critters they seem!
-- Sterling Morrison

To err is human. And stupid.

Baby orang-otans look like surprised coconuts.
-- Terry Pratchett

To err is human, to moo bovine.

ERROR: Hit any user to continue

Non sequitur is Latin for "w'uh huh?"
-- Chris Isaak

No Risk Lifestyle, n:
Death

Terror: A female Klingon with PMS.

Tourist, Rincewind decided, meant "idiot".
-- Terry Pratchett ("The Colour of Magic")

The average, healthy, well-adjusted adult gets up at seven-thirty in the morning feeling just plain terrible.
-- Jean Kerr

This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with RAISINS in it.
-- Dorothy Parker

The key to faking out the parents is the clammy hands. It's a good non-specific symptom. I'm a big believer in it. A lot of people will tell you a good phoney fever is a deadlock, but you get a nervous mother, you could wind up in a doctor's office - that's worse than school. You fake a stomach cramp, and when you're bent over, moaning and wailing, you lick your palms. It's a little childish and stupid, but then so is high school.
-- Ferris (Ferris Bueller's Day Off)

Maturity is only a short break in adolescence.
-- Jules Feiffer

I'm not into working out. My philosophy: No pain, no pain.
-- Carol Leifer

Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life.
-- Eric Hoffer

Dogmatism is puppyism come to its full growth.
-- Douglas Jerrold

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act, but a habit.
-- Aristotle

Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.
-- Thomas Jefferson

"I'd probably be famous now if I wasn't such a good waitress."
-- Jane Siberry

The trouble was that he was talking in philosophy, but they were listening in gibberish.
-- Terry Pratchett (Small Gods)

If you're not part of the freaks, you're part of the boredom.
-- Perry Farrell

This suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.
-- Oscar Wilde

"Every murderer is probably somebody's old friend."
-- Agatha Christie

May your future be limited only by your dreams.
-- Christa McAuliffe

"And then the world went mad. All right, madder."
-- Terry Pratchett (Pyramids)

Enjoy yourself. If you can't enjoy yourself, enjoy somebody else.
-- Jack Schaefer

"When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other."
-- Eric Hoffer

May you get to Heaven a half hour before the Devil knows you're dead.
-- Irish Proverb

"Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind."
-- Terry Pratchett

Too many errors on one line (make fewer).
(Apple MPW C compiler error message)

Wreckless Driving -- You'd think that would be a good thing.
-- Chris Sampson

"Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success."
-- Christopher Lasch

If stupidity was a crime, honey, you'd get a life sentence.
-- Chris Stephenson

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
-- Aristotle

"When people are bored, it is primarily with their own selves that they are bored."
-- Eric Hoffer

"Most bad government has grown out of too much government."
-- Thomas Jefferson

Technology is a way of organizing the universe so that man doesn't have to experience it.
-- Max Frisch

Being called a poetess brings out the terroristress in me.
-- Audre Lorde

"Wit is educated insolence."
-- Aristotle (284-322 B.C.)

Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.
-- Terry Pratchett (Hogfather)

Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday.

"You can best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it."
-- Wendell Berry

Emacs is a good operating system, but I prefer Unix.

"In the Beginning there was nothing, which exploded."
-- Terry Pratchett (Lords and Ladies)

Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness.
-- Terry Pratchett

"For flavor, instant sex will never supercede the stuff you have to peel and cook."
-- Quentin Crisp

"You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you."
-- Eric Hoffer

Quality without creativity is pompous;
Creativity without quality is infantile.
-- John Cerruti

"Guilt was the grease in which the wheels of the authority turned."
-- Terry Pratchett (Small Gods)

A typedef name was a complete surprise to me at this point in your program.

(Apple MPW C compiler error message)

Love will find a way. Indifference will find an excuse.

"If there is one thing that always comes out of a terrible tragedy, it is really dumb legislation."
(Esquire magazine)

"Real poetry doesn't say anything, it just ticks off the possibilities, opens all doors; you can walk through any one that suits you. If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it's to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel."
-- Jim Morrison

Dickens, as you know, never got round to starting his home page.
-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)

Don't you talk to me about progress. Progress just means bad things happen faster.
-- Terry Pratchett

Marriage means commitment. Of course, so does insanity.

High heels were invented by a woman who had been kissed on the forehead.
-- Christopher Morley

'He says gods like to see an atheist around. Gives them something to aim at.'
-- Terry Pratchett (Small Gods)

This isn't life in the fast lane, it's life in the oncoming traffic.
-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)

It's a joke. Like the funny kind, but different.

I try to make computers say things like "You have 60 seconds to achieve safe distance".
-- Terry Pratchett

"A giant woman carrying a screaming ape up a tall building," sighed Dibbler.
-- Terry Pratchett (Moving Pictures)

"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground."
-- Thomas Jefferson

Take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: No one to blame.
-- Erica Jong

It wasn't a dark and stormy night. It should have been, but that's the weather for you.
-- Terry Pratchett (Good Omens)

Lunatic Asylum, n: The place where optimism most flourishes.

The best way to get rid of worries is to let them die of neglect.

"If you risk nothing, then you risk everything."
-- Geena Davis

"Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life."
-- Terry Pratchett

The duke had a mind that ticked like a clock and, like a clock, it regularly went cuckoo.
-- Terry Pratchett (Wyrd Sisters)

'If you put butter and salt on it, it tastes like salty butter.'
-- Terry Pratchett (concerning popcorn, Moving Pictures)

That's, uh, quite a dress you almost have on.
(An American in Paris)

"...everyone else here is likely as stressed as you are, though much more competent and cynical."

-- Chris Johnson (a.s.r)

"I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That's deep enough. What do you want, an adorable pancreas?"
-- Jean Kerr

Christ: A man who was born at least 5,000 years ahead of his time.

Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow they may cancel your VISA.

"Those who would sacrifice a little freedom for a little order, will lose both, and deserve neither."
-- Thomas Jefferson

There's a difference between knowing something and realizing it.

"See?" said the cat. "Give them an opposed thumb and they think they're something special."
-- Terry Pratchett (Moving Pictures)

"Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday."
-- Donald Robert Perry Marquis

"He'd never realized that, deep down inside, what he really wanted to do was make things go splat."
-- Terry Pratchett (Reaper Man)

I think it's adorable that our fans call me Shirl. It's preferrable to asshole.
-- Shirley Manson

If I heeded all the advice I've had over the years, I'ld have written 18 books about Rincewind.
-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)

‘You,’ he said, ‘are a terribly real thing in a terribly false world, and that, I believe, is why you are in so much pain.’
-- Emilie Autumn (The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls)

I didn't go to university. Didn't even finish A-levels. But I have sympathy for those who did.
-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)

Before I came here I was confused about this subject. Having listened to your lecture I am still confused, but on a higher level.
-- Enrico Fermi

"There's very little advice in men's magazines, because men think, 'I know what I'm doing. Just show me somebody naked.'"
-- Jerry Seinfeld

The sun is like breasts - risky to look at unless you've got sunglasses.

"Congress is so strange. A man gets up to speak and says nothing. Nobody listens, and then everybody disagrees."

-- Boris Marshalov

Every procedure for getting a cat to take a pill works fine -- once.
Like the Borg, they learn...
-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)

"When the people fear their government there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty."
-- Thomas Jefferson

The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.
-- Terry Pratchett

I have had solemnly explained to me the audible differences between digital data (S/PDIF) carried over coax and carried over optical (coax is bassier, apparently).

-- Tag

Indifference is the key when dealing with a narcissistic megalomaniac.

I'm tired of being this pristine little socially acceptable monstrosity

NASA doesn't have any live weapons; we can only drop management paperwork on those who peeve us--but with a B-52 we can drop a lot of it!
-- Mary Shafer

"This was, apparently, beyond her ken. So far beyond her ken that she was well into barbie territory."
-- J.D. Baldwin

"Being a woman is a terribly difficult trade since it consists principally of dealing with men."
-- Joseph Conrad

For animals, the entire universe has been neatly divided into things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks.
-- Terry Pratchett

Government of the people
By a corrupt subset of the people
For the people who can afford the corrupt subset of the people.

-- Chris Newport

Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.
-- Thomas Jefferson

I'm offering you my body, and you're offering me semantics.
-- Caitlin Bree (Clerks)

To succeed in politics, it is often necessary to rise above your principles.

"I'll fight for you, but I will not compete for you... There's a difference."

The singing wasn't particularly good. The only word the singer appeared to know was "la," but she was making it work hard.
-- Terry Pratchett (Wyrd Sisters)

The senior wizard in a world of magic had the same prospects of long-term employment as a pogo stick tester in a minefield.
-- Terry Pratchett (Moving Pictures)

Don't try to be different. Just be good. To be good is different enough.
-- Arthur Freed

Have a bit more patience with newbies. Of course some of them act dumb--they're often students, for heaven's sake.
-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)

To err is human, to purr feline.
-- Robert Byrne

"I read somewhere that 77% of all the mentally ill live in poverty. Actually, I'm more intrigued by the 23% who are apparently doing quite well for themselves."
-- Jerry Garcia

"God created sex. Priests created marriage."
-- Voltaire

They both savoured the strange warm glow of being much more ignorant than ordinary people, who were only ignorant of ordinary things.
-- Terry Pratchett ("Equal Rites")

When I see a jogger I swerve my car towards him and pretend I passed out while I was driving. I miss him at the last minute but I bet it adds some excitement to his workout.
-- Chris Smith

That seems to point up a significant difference between Europeans and Americans. A European says: "I can't understand this, what's wrong with me?" An American says: "I can't understand this, what's wrong with him?"
-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)

The principle difference between a cat and a lie is that the cat has only nine lives.

"The I.S.O. standard unit of female pulchritude is the milli-Helen. This is the amount of beauty capable of causing the launching of a single ship."
-- Terry Pratchett

I reckon that Stonehenge was build by the contemporary equivalent of Microsoft, whereas Avebury was definitely an Apple circle.
-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)

Usenet is like Tetris for people who still know how to read.
(Computer Museum (Boston))

Behaviorism is the art of pulling habits out of rats.
-- O'Neill

I'm sure we can arrange an academic scholarship for Detritus. Troll cheerleaers would be nice: 'Two... four.... er.. many... lots'.
-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)

Imagine a world in which generations of human beings come to believe that certain films were made by God or that specific software was coded by him. Imagine a future in which millions of our descendants murder each other over rival interpretations of Star Wars or Windows 98. Could anything -- anything -- be more ridiculous? And yet, this would be no more ridiculous than the world we are living in.
-- Sam Harris

"You don't have to suffer to be a poet. Adolescence is enough suffering for anyone."
-- John Ciardi

Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.
-- Thomas Jefferson

The difference between theory and practice is greater in practice than it is in theory.

One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.
-- Bertrand Russell

First law of debate: Never argue with a fool. People might not know the difference.

To err is human but to really foul things up requires a computer.
(Farmer's Almanac for 1978)

It wouldn't matter a jot if Christina Aguilera claimed she loved Garbage. I'd still think she was a horrid little squirt.
-- Shirley Manson

Marriage has no guarantees. If that's what you're looking for, go live with a car battery.

It's surprising how many persons go through life without ever recognizing that their feelings toward other people are largely determined by their feelings toward themselves, and if you're not comfortable within yourself, you can't be comfortable with others.
-- Sydney J. Harri

Mort isn't fashionable UK movie material -- there's no parts in it for Hugh or Emma, it's not set in Sheffield, and no one shoves drugs up their bum...
-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)

T.V. is the only wet nurse that would create a cripple
-- The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy (Television, the Drug of the Nation)

It's summer and some people head for the woods.
Canoe wild streams to show they've got the goods,
Hiking and biking and running outdoors;
I think I'll just go out and lie on my porch.

Give me two pillows and a bottle of Pabst.
I once was a traveller, but my interest lapsed;
I went thousands of miles, natives to see
They were sitting on porches, laughing at me.
-- Garrison Keillor

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
-- Anais Nin

Frisbeetarianism: the belief that when you die, your soul goes up on the roof and gets stuck.

"[The] human mind was like a compass. No matter how much you shook it up, no matter what happened to it, sooner or later it'd carry on pointing the same way."
-- Terry Pratchett (Johnny and the Dead)

"Indifference is isolation. In difference is texture and wonder."
-- Edwin Schlossberg

APHORISM, n. Predigested wisdom.
-- Ambrose Bierce

She wanted a holiday in Australia, she said, and if I turned it into work she'd hit me--so I gave in, because I did not want to be beaten about the Bush.
-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)

You can't remember the plot of the Dr. Who movie because it didn't have one, just a lot of plot holes strung together. It did have a lot of flashing lights, though.
-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)

What you have here is an example of that well known phenomenon, A Bookshop Assistant Who Knows Buggerall But Won't Admit It (probably some kind of arts graduate).
-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)

Quality Of Life: What an industrialized nation is said to offer when enough of its citizens are suffering from terminal stress.
(Cynic's Dictionary)

Rincewind rather enjoyed times like this. They convinced him that he wasn't mad because, if he was mad, that left no word at all to describe some of the people he met.
-- Terry Pratchett (Sourcery)

"The class was learning about some revolt in which some peasants had wanted to stop being peasants and, since the nobles had won, had stopped being peasants really quickly."
-- Terry Pratchett (Soul Music)

"We all know god invented liquor to keep the Irish from ruling the world."
(The Ghost and The Darkness)

Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.
-- Will Rogers

Early to rise, early to bed, makes a man healthy but socially dead.
-- Wakko (Animaniacs)

"I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing."
-- Agatha Christie

A psychiatrist is a person who will give you expensive answers that your wife will give you for free.

I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
-- Mark Twain

Love me or hate me, but spare me your indifference.
-- Libbie Fudim