902 hits
"And I'm not all that decent and honorable. I'm merely well-bred, which I hope is a tolerable substitute."-- Anne Rice (Ramses the Damned)
The day after tomorrow is the third day of the rest of your life.
Lies, damned lies and user documentation.
A real leader faces the music, even when he doesn't like the tune.
"All the people stared as if we were both quite insane."-- The Hollies
Renning's Maxim: Man is the highest animal. Man does the classifying.
Life is cheap. It's the accessories that kill you.
Love thine enemies... it really pisses them off.
QUOTE OF THE DAY: `
In the beginning was the word, and the word was "aardvark".
Monday is the root of all evil.
Music soothes the savage beast. ...unless it's polka.
A bird in the hand is the best way to eat chicken.
Eat a live toad in the morning, and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.
Of all the truths in the world, humor is the most satisfying and often the healthiest.
"The first 80% of software development is the easy part. The hard part is the next 80%"
Domestication is the enemy of romance.
The art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while Nature cures the disease.-- Voltaire
He who hesitates is a damned fool.-- Mae West
Q: Why did the germ cross the microscope?
A: To get to the other slide.
Cloning is the sincerest form of flattery.
"Must... defy... laws... of... physics!"-- The Tick
The elephant is the only mammal that can't jump.
Kisses are like tears. The only ones that are real are the ones you can't hold back.
There are three sorts of despots. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the body. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul and body alike. The first is called the Prince. The second is called the Pope. The third is called the People.-- Oscar Wilde
He who laughs last found the dirty meaning.
Old friends pass away, new friends appear. It is just like the days. An old day passes, a new day arrives. The important thing is to make it meaningful: a meaningful friend--or a meaningful day.-- The Dalai Lama ("Time," 11 April 1988)
Q: Why did the tachyon cross the road?
A: Because it was on the other side.
Proof by omission: The reader may easily supply the details. The other 253 cases are analogous.
"Well, to be fair I did have a couple of gadgets he probably didn't, like a teaspoon and an open mind."-- The Doctor
Decafalon, n.: The grueling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.
Quantum mechanics: The dreams stuff is made of.
"Sometimes the need to mess with their heads outweighs the millstone of humiliation."-- Fox Mulder (The X-Files)
The standard you walk past is the standard you accept.
Television: the bland leading the bland.
The Pet Principle:
No matter which side of the door your dog or cat is on, it is the wrong side.
Law of diminishing IQ:
The IQ of the group is the lowest IQ of a member of the group divided by the number of people in the group.
Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.
Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday.
Hope is the feeling you have that the feeling you have isn't permanent.
"The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug."-- Mark Twain
The problem with reality is the lack of background music.
The bigger they are, the harder they hit.
"In all our searching, the only thing we found that makes the emptiness bearable, is each other" (Contact)
Beauty lies in the hands of the beer holder.
"The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out the conservative adopts them."-- Mark Twain
The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.-- Steven Wright
"Remember the Golden Rule: Those who have the gold make the rules."
People must think I'm a mushroom. They constantly keep me in the dark and feed me bullshit.
America was founded by drug smugglers -- rum was the drug, but smugglers nonetheless.
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.
Sometimes you have more perspective than the situation, sometimes the situation has more perspective than you.
It is man's natural sickness to believe that he possesses the Truth.-- Blaise Pascal
I like the kind of people that can hold on to the the feeling they have after the song or movie ends.
If the mind were exercised as much as the mouth, we would be a race of geniuses.
Nowadays, originality is the art of concealing your source.
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.
Half of the people in the world are below average.
Democracy is the form of government where everyone gets what the majority deserves.
If you can't be kind, at least have the decency to be vague.
No one can feel as helpless as the owner of a sick goldfish.
"Tact is the art of making a point without making an enemy."
2, 3, 3, 37 - the prime factorization of the beast.
America is like a melting pot. The people at the bottom get burned, and the scum floats to the top.
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
How do you know if honesty is the best policy unless you've tried some of the others?
It's not the men in my life, it's the life in my men.-- Mae West
Lecture, n: Where the notes of the professor become the notes of the student without passing through the mind of either one.
Just as the whole is more than the sum of parts, the forest more than the tree and birds, so is mankind greater than the wanking of its nerds on slashdot.org.
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its de-evolution into the shiny things network.-- The Onion
More to be feared than ignorance is the pretense of knowledge.
Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.
And the pickles frolicked with the waffles, joyously.
Those who speak by the yard and think by the inch should be kicked by the foot.
TCP_UP - The 16-bit TCP Urgent Pointer, encoded as the hex representation of the value of the field. The hex string MUST be capitalized since it is urgent. (RFC 3093)
The future exists first in the imagination, then in the will, then in reality.
Ban the bomb. Save the world for conventional warfare.
What really matters is the name you succeed in imposing on the facts -- not the facts themselves.-- Cohen's Law
I think it's a beautiful day to go to the zoo and feed the ducks.
To the lions.-- Brian Kantor (the SDM)
Shin: a device for finding furniture in the dark.-- Steven Wright
"I think all the boys that write the screaming stuff would write the best love songs... because they have the most to hide. The guys that are in the most pain are usually the ones with the biggest hearts."-- Tori Amos
I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.-- E. B. White
Ask not for whom the bell tolls, let the machine get it.
In order to become the master the politician poses as the servant.-- Charles De Gaulle
The voters have spoken, the bastards...
The law should make men free. The problem is making the law free.
The music is the magic carpet that the other things take naps on.-- Tori Amos
Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.-- Amy Lowell
"The thing that I'm into is the philosophy of the music. I love the surprise of things, the accidents--just the sound of a word, to try to express them in the best way, so that the emotion is totally revealed."-- Beth Gibbons
Science is the belief that we don't need belief to know most things.
Funny. All the wireless people seem to be the marionettes.
Only the good die young. Note the average age in Congress.
"I don't mind you coming here and wasting all my time, 'cause when you're standing oh so near, I kinda lose my mind."-- The Cars
"I'm not mad at the world... just at all the people in it."
Never put off till tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.-- Mark Twain
X.400 is the mail system of the future, and I hope it stays that way.-- Erik Fair
Diplomacy is the art of saying "nice doggy" until you can find a rock.
Indifference is the key when dealing with a narcissistic megalomaniac.
Just because you're not paranoid, doesn't mean they're not out to get you.-- The Register
In Taiwan, the translation of the Pepsi slogan "Come alive with the Pepsi Generation" came out as "Pepsi will bring your ancestors back from the dead."
The BeOS takes the best features from the major operating systems. It's got the power and flexibility of Unix, the interface and ease of use of the MacOS, and Minesweeper from Windows.-- Tyler Riti
Bathquake, n: The violent quake that rattles the entire house when the water faucet is turned on to a certain point.-- Rich Hall ("Sniglets")
Patience is something you admire greatly in the driver behind you but not in the one ahead of you.
"Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative."-- Oscar Wilde
I'd love to change the world, but they won't give me the source code.
Three Accounts for the Super-users in the sky,
Seven for the Operators in their halls of fame,
Nine for Ordinary Users doomed to crie,
One for the Illegal Cracker with his evil game
In the Domains of Internet where the data lie.
One Account to rule them all, One Account to watch them,
One Account to make them all and in the network bind them
In the Domains of Internet where the data lie.
"Opportunity may knock only once, but temptation leans on the doorbell."
Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.-- H. L. Mencken
The applied mathematician can find the solution to any difficulty, whilst the pure mathematician can find the difficulty to any solution.
It is possible to believe that all the past is but the beginning of a beginning, and that all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn. It is possible to believe that all the human mind has ever accomplished is but the dream before the awakening.-- H.G. Wells
Dessert is probably the most important stage of the meal, since it will be the last thing your guests remember before they pass out all over the table.-- The Anarchist Cookbook
Beware the fury of a patient woman.
If all the salmon caught in Canada in one year were laid end to end across the Sahara Desert, the smell would be absolutely awful.
Never run from anything immortal. It only attracts their attention. (The Last Unicorn)
Is not that the nature of men and women--that the pleasure is in the learning of each other?
Sometimes the appropriate response to reality is to go insane.-- Philip K Dick
Sarchasm (n): The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.-- Susan Sontag
If you can't take the heat, don't tickle the dragon.-- Scott Fahlman
"Love is not the dying note of a twisted violin - it's the triumphant twang of a bedspring."-- S.J. Perelman
Q. What's the difference between an aerobics instructor and a well-mannered professional torturer?
A. The torturer would apologize first.
"The decision to kiss for the first time is the most crucial in any love story. It changes the relationship of two people much more strongly than even the final surrender; because this kiss already has within it that surrender."-- Emil Ludwig
Auntie Em--Hate you. Hate Kansas. Taking the dog.-- Dorothy
Accuracy, n: The vice of being right.
Be alert. The world needs more lerts.
One can't proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.
Thinking: The talking of the soul with itself.-- Plato
Join the army: meet interesting people, then kill them.
I might repeat to myself slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound - if I can remember any of the damn things.-- Dorothy Parker
"Love doesn't make the world go 'round. Love is what makes the ride worthwile."-- Franklin P. Jones
"The conviction of the rich that the poor are happier is no more foolish than the conviction of the poor that the rich are."-- Mark Twain
Man is a Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion- several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn't straight.-- Mark Twain
We accept the love we think we deserve
"That's the trouble with women these days. They act like men and want to be treated like women" (An American in Paris)
The more we disagree, the bigger the chance that at least one of us is right.
"It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution."-- Oscar Wilde
A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us.-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Religion often gets credit for curing rascals when old age is the real medicine.
In the fight between you and the world, back the world.-- Franz Kafka
Behaviorism is the art of pulling habits out of rats.-- O'Neill
"It ain't the parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand."-- Mark Twain
"So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked what is the root of all money?"-- Ayn Rand
Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves.-- Abraham Lincoln
In America you can go on the air and kid the politicians, and the politicians can go on the air and kid the people.-- Groucho Marx
The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.-- Albert Einstein
"One good turn gets most of the blankets"
Microsoft: Re-inventing the square wheel.
Paul's Law: You can't fall off the floor.
Patageometry, n: The study of those mathematical properties that are invariant under brain transplants.
"They are wrong who say that love is blind. On the contrary, nothing - not even the smallest detail - escapes the eyes; one sees everything in the loved one, notices everything; but melts it all into one flame with the great and simple: �I love you.�"
The good critic is he who narrates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces.-- Anatole France
Cashtration, n.: The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period.
Tact is the ability to tell a man he has an open mind when he has a hole in his head.
PMS, n: the short period of time when women act like men do all the time.
Heller's Law: The first myth of management is that it exists.
"When the people fear their government there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty."-- Thomas Jefferson
Sixty minutes of thinking of any kind is bound to lead to confusion and unhappiness.-- James Thurber
If the pen is mightier than the sword then how can actions speak louder than words?
"Geologists know how to make the bedrock."
Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness.-- Terry Pratchett
"To describe the beating of Egg Whites is almost as cheeky as advising how to lead a happy life."-- The Joy of Cooking
A troll is someone who, finding that no-one likes them, decides to pretend that it's on purpose.
"Microsoft is not the problem. Microsoft is the symptom."-- Eric S. Raymond
"Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self-solicitude is the enemy of well-being."-- John Updike
"Alcohol is the cause and the solution to many of life's problems."-- Homer Simpson
Maybe love is letting people be just what they want to be. The door always must be left unlocked.
Aftermath, n: The period following algebra.
I get my kicks above the .sigline, Sunshine
The soul would have no rainbow had the eyes no tears.
And it came to pass that in the hands of the ignorant, the words of the Bible were used to beat plowshares into swords.-- Alan Watts
Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.-- E. B. White
"The most merciful thing in the world...is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents."-- H.P. Lovecraft
"Documentation is the castor oil of programming. Managers know it must be good because the programmers hate it so much."
If the pen is mightier than the sword, what happens when you run out of ink?
You must be the change you wish to see in the world.-- Gandhi
Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.
-- Oscar Wilde
"She who has the biggest sword gets to be the biggest bitch."-- Kymberli Morris
"*snort* I'm waiting for the day when people realise that mainstream is a subset of SF without the speculation..."-- Emmet O'Brien
we make happen the stuff we fear will happen
"Man gazing at the stars is proverbially at the mercy of the puddles in the road."-- Alexander Smith
Love is like an hourglass, with the heart filling up as the brain empties.-- Jules Renord
"To the world you may be one person, but to one person you may be the world."
First law of debate: Never argue with a fool. People might not know the difference.
I once talked a guy out of blowing up the Sears tower, but I can't talk my wife out of the bathroom or my daughter off the phone. (The Negotiator)
Serving drinks on aircraft causes turbulence.
"As long as the music's loud enough, we won't hear the world falling apart."-- Derek Jarman
"We are at times too ready to believe that the present is the only possible state of things."-- Marcel Proust
Is there anything safer than TV-style seriousness--i.e., delivering the conventional wisdom as if it were the deeply important truth?-- Pauline Kael
It is a good thing to in your mind be able to seperate the artist from the art.
"Love is the answer, but while you are waiting for the answer, sex raises some pretty good questions."-- Woody Allen
Advisor: The guy who told you how to screw up.
Idle hands are the air guitar's playground (Alas)
We shame outselves for the sake of simplicity.
"News" is just the stuff they use to fill up all the empty space they couldn't sell for advertising.
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?-- T. S. Eliot
The rain it raineth on the just
And also on the unjust fella,
But chiefly on the just, because
The unjust steals the just's umbrella.
What is wanted is not the will to believe but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.-- Bertrand Russell
Organic chemistry is the chemistry of carbon compounds.
Biochemistry is the study of carbon compounds that crawl.-- Mike Adams
Pedestrian, n: The variable (and audible) part of the roadway for an automobile.
If it wasn't for the optimist the pessimist would never know how happy he isn't.
Laugh, and the world laughs with you. But you know most of them didn't get the joke in the first place, the lying weasels.-- Wade Kwon
"Improvised be damned! I thought of it this morning in my bath and I wish now I hadn't wasted it on this little crowd."-- Winston Churchill
Be the person you needed when you were younger.
Life is like a dog-sled team; If you ain't the lead dog, the scene never changes.
Because these moments, as precious as they are, they're evil when they're gone.
The light at the end of a tunnel may be an oncoming train.
As the cheetah said to the chameleon:
You can hide, but you can't run!-- Alan Williams
Luxury is the main cause of boredom; Boredom is a main cause of extreme thoughts, eg. violence.
"Politics is the entertainment branch of industry."-- Frank Zappa
Men are like parking spaces: the good ones are taken and the rest are handicapped.
People often find it easier to be a result of the past than a cause of the future.
Weinberg's Second Law: If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.
"I'm the Queen of the nerds. I love nerds- by which I mean, not a cool, bitchin' person. I guess I was a cool nerd. I wasn't shuffling my feet in the corner of the playground, I was the homecoming queen, but then, all the nerds voted for me."-- Tori Amos
Don't worry; it only seems kinky the first time.
Know thyself. If you need help, call the C.I.A.
"I like to go to the beach and bury metal objects that say 'get a life' on them"
Study the past, if you would divine the future.-- Confucius
Do not go gentle into that good night... Rage, rage against the dying of the light.-- Dylan Thomas
Sir: Why did the chicken cross the road?
Andrew: One does not know, Sir. Possibly a predator was behind the chicken, or possibly there was a female chicken on the other side of the road if it was a male chicken; possibly a food source, or, depending on the season, it might be migrating. One hopes there's no traffic.
Sir: To get to the other side.
Andrew: "To get to the other side." Ah. Why is that funny? (Bicentennial Man)
Psychoanalysis is the mental illness it purports to cure.-- Karl Kraus
"One of the CIA's few endearing traits is its penchant for making headlines. It is the world's most fully headlined secret agency."
There is much to be said in favor of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.-- Oscar Wilde
Two guys walked into a bar. The third one ducked.
Make the most of yourself, because that's all the self you are going to get, buster.
"Making the simple complicated is easy. Making the complicated simple is brilliant."
The value of the Constitution depends on the good will of government itself. If the Supreme Court rules that the Bill of Rights should not interfere with the important business of government (which they have done on at least two occasions), then the Constitution is meaningless.-- John Kormylo
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought"-- Basho
Insecurity is comparing our behind the scenes to others highlight reel.
There's so much comedy on television. Does that cause comedy in the streets?-- Dick Cavett
Stenderup's law: The sooner you fall behind, the more time you will have to catch up.
"As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand."
-- Josh Billings
It's true that the French have a certain obsession with sex, but it's a particularly adult obsession. France is the thriftiest of all nations; to a Frenchman sex provides the most economical way to have fun. The French are a logical race.-- Anita Loos
The fact that I know I'm often a fool, but that I also have an IQ a fair bit over a hundred, scares me. What fools the rest of the world must be.
Music is the science of manipulating emotion through sound.-- Angus Gray
"Bother," said the Borg, "We've assimilated Pooh."
Adultery - two wrong people doing the right thing.
Don’t speak unless you can improve on the silence.
Guru, n: A computer owner who can read the manual.
pride is not the opposite of shame, but its source
"Pity the educated cynics who refuse to enjoy the fun, choosing instead to remain faithful to their numb anguish. Mourn for the humorless devotees who refuse to join in the juicy unpredictable game so that they might feed their spiritual greed, pretzeled up motionless on prayer mats with the torment of grave meditations. Have compassion for the imagination-dead heroes who cling so tightly to the masks they've forged for themselves that they're dead to the delight of molting."-- Rob Brezsny
I'm a daughter of a minister and I love chasing the dark. That which is hidden. I like licking it like ice cream.-- Tori Amos
"It is no coincidence that in no known language does the phrase 'as pretty as an airport' exist."-- Douglas Adams
Even if you're paranoid, maybe the guy with the chainsaw really is after you.
I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.
"And the heat goes on... where the hand has been."-- Byrne/Eno
"Picture the sun as the origin of two intersecting 6-dimensional hyperplanes from which we can deduce a certain transformational sequence which gives us the terminal velocity of a rubber duck ..."
I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.-- Douglas Adams
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
"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
Alimony: the fee a woman charges for name-dropping.
"Laugh alone and the world thinks you're an idiot."
God, as some cynic has said, is always on the side which has the best football coach.-- Heywood Broun
Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same.-- Oscar Wilde
The principle difference between a cat and a lie is that the cat has only nine lives.
98% of us Americans are hard-working people. It's the other 2% that give us a bad reputation. Then again, we did elect them.
A philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat which isn't there. A theologian is the one who finds it.
Sexuality does not "turn on" at puberty and "turn off" at menopause. It is not a thing external, no matter how hard our culture teaches us to push it away. It is every bit as integral and fundamental the day you're born as it is the day you die.-- David Casti
"Conviction is a luxury for those on the sidelines."
"Nothing in the world is friendlier than a wet dog."
A dark past creates a long path back to the surface.
Adventure: The land between entertainment and panic.
Eiffel Tower: The Empire State Building after taxes.
Boss, n.: According to the Oxford English Dictionary, in the Middle Ages the words 'boss' and 'botch' were largely synonymous, except that boss, in addition to meaning 'a supervisor of workers' also meant 'an ornamental stud.'
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 don't know who Jim Henson is but I've heard he has his hand in a lot of things around here."-- Kermit the Frog (in 1972)
I speak without reservation from what I know and who I am. I do so with the understanding that all people should have the right to offer their voice to the chorus whether the result is harmony or dissonance, the worldsong is a colorless dirge without the differences that distinguish us, and it is that difference which should be celebrated, not condemned.-- Ani Difranco
"Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished."-- Goethe
As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, diverted to consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome.-- Noam Chomsky
At the beginning and at the end of love, the two lovers are embarrassed to find themselves alone.-- La Bruyere
"That all men should be brothers is the dream of people who have no brothers."-- Charles Chincholles
"If men can run the world, why can't they stop wearing neckties? How intelligent is it to start the day by tying a little noose around your neck?"-- Linda Ellerbee
If truth is beauty, how come no one has their hair done in the library?-- Lily Tomlin
"In America--as elsewhere--free speech is confined to the dead."-- Mark Twain
The difference between theory and practice is greater in practice than it is in theory.
"If angst were a popsicle, I'd be suckin' the stick."
"Love makes you do the wacky"-- Willow
WARNING:
Reading this fortune can affect the dimensionality of your mind, change the curvature of your spine, cause the growth of hair on your palms, and make a difference in the outcome of your favorite war.
Gina: "Isn't it customary for the suspect to leave the scene of the crime?"
Debra: "Definitely an amateur" (Empire Records)
"The way I play is a bit torturous but... it's the only way I know how to play."-- Tori Amos
Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.-- H. L. Mencken
As I stare into the abyss of the toilet bowl I try hard to rememeber the reason why I felt the desperate need to mix vodka and red wine with whiskey and tequila.-- Shirley Manson
The liberal does not hope for a better world, because liberal ideology already that this is the best world it can be.
(as The Spice Girls play in background)
"What are they doing?"
"Psychological warfare." (Small Soldiers)
If there is no such thing as justice then the best we can hope for is revenge
I wouldn't touch the Metric System with a 3.048m pole.
Never send a monster to do the work of an evil genius.
Never underestimate the falseness of a generalisation.
The default Magic Word, Abracadabra, actually is a corruption of the Hebrew phrase ha-Bracha dab'ra which means "pronounce the blessing".
Anybody that wants the presidency so much that he would spend two years campaigning and organizing for it should not be trusted with the office.
You see, the conditional modifers depend on certain variables like the day of the week, the number of players, chair positions, things like that. [...] There can't be more than a dozen or two that are pertinent.-- Robert Asprin ("Little Myth Marker")
"Doesn't anyone remember one of the biggest problems the Super Conducting Super Collider project ran into during construction in Texas? It wasn't politics... It was the Mecca of fire ants in all the extremely high-voltage conduits, junctions, transformers, and other high-strength field areas. The ants would eat the insulating compounds off and sit there basking in the emf high they apparently got. Occasionally, an ant would offer itself as sacrifice, prompting some Damn Big Breakers to blow..." -- RISKS
Pedaeration, n: Achieving the perfect body heat by having one leg under the sheet and one hanging off the edge of the bed.-- Rich Hall ("Sniglets")
"Legend -- a lie that has attained the dignity of age."-- H. L. Mencken
Peace is not the absence of war. Peace is the presence of a system for resolving conflicts before war becomes necessary. War never creates peace.
"Evangelists say Halloween is the devil's holiday. What a lame-ass devil! Sitting down in the depths of hell, going, 'I've got control of the major corporations, churning out weapons and toxic waste, but how can I get candy? Let me think--I'll get the children of the world to dress up as hobos and Power Rangers--and then I'll have all the bite-size Three Musketeers I need! Buhahaha!'"
"Nothing in man is more serious than his sense of humor; it is the sign that he wants all the truth."-- Mark Van Doren
Adolescence, n: The stage between puberty and adultery.
He who laughs last probably didn't understand the joke.
Come, let us retract the foreskin of misconception and apply the wire brush of enlightenment.
Frisbeetarianism: the belief that when you die, your soul goes up on the roof and gets stuck.
The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech.-- George Bernard Shaw
Insanity is the exception in individuals. In groups, parties, people, and times, it is the rule.-- Friedrich Nietzsche
Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Whoever said women don't like porn just isn't talking to the right women. Or showing them the right porn.
If I asked for a cup of coffee, someone would search for the double meaning.-- Mae West
"...why do they always teach us that it's easy and evil to do what we want and that we need discipline to restrain ourselves? It's the hardest thing in the world--to do what we want. And it takes the greatest kind of courage. I mean, what we really want."-- Ayn Rand
"They say necessity is the mother of invention. And when the necessity is survival, she can be one mean mother. Of course, it's her child, invention, who's the real dangerous one."-- Darien Fawkes (The Invisible Man)
"Confronted with the choice, the American people would choose the policeman's truncheon over the anarchist's bomb.-- Spiro T. Agnew
"The disappearance of a sense of responsibility is the most far-reaching consequence of submission to authority."-- Stanley Milgram
The meek shall inherit the earth. The rest of us are going to the stars.-- Robert A. Heinlein
Everything has been thought of before, but the problem is to think of it again.-- Goethe
"God is my co-pilot, but the Devil is my bombardier."-- Bumper sticker
It is dangerous to let the public behind the scenes. They are easily disillusioned and then they are angry with you, for it was the illusion they loved.-- W. Somerset Maugham
The sooner you start to code, the longer the program will take.-- Roy Carlson
Deja moo: The feeling that you've heard this bull before.
It's a joke. Like the funny kind, but different.
If you're going to tell people the truth, you better make them laugh.
"Without freedom from the past, there is no freedom at all, because the mind is never new, fresh, innocent."
"A sense of humor is the only thing that keeps intelligent people from hanging themselves."-- Voltaire
The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away, I'm looking for the truth," and so it goes away. Puzzling.-- Robert Pirsig
Always behave like a duck: keep calm and unruffled on the surface but paddle like the devil underneath.-- Jacob Braude
"Reality is the leading cause of stress for those in touch with it."-- Jack Wagner
Destinesia: The act of entering a room and forgetting why.
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
"You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you."-- Eric Hoffer
"Simple pleasures are the last refuge of the complex."-- Oscar Wilde
Education, then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great machinery.-- Horace Mann
The cost of living is going up, and the chance of living is going down.
Drugs may lead to nowhere, but at least it's the scenic route.-- Steven Wright
No one will ever win the battle of the sexes; there's too much fraternizing with the enemy.-- Henry Kissinger
The guns and the bombs, the rockets and the warships, are all symbols of human failure.-- Lyndon B Johnson
Answer the phone naked. Callers will hear it in your voice.
"How many fingers am I holding up?" -- Kirk, making the Vulcan salute
"That's not very damn funny."-- McCoy (Star Trek III)
"Curiosity is the very basis of education and if you tell me that curiosity killed the cat, I say only the cat died nobly."-- Arnold Edinborough
"The Camden Aquarium, in defense of sharks, has a placard stating that the most lethal wild animal in the US is deer. (Their mode of attack is to stand in your headlights, and then launch their dead or crippled bodies through the windscreen into your lap)."
There are two ways spreading the light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.-- Edith Wharton
"If hackers ran the world, there'd be no war. Lots of accidents, maybe."
We think in language, therefore the quality of our thoughts can only ever be as good as the quality of our language.-- George Carlin
Love ceases to be a pleasure, when it ceases to be a secret.-- Aphra Behn
The only valid censorship of ideas is the right of people not to listen.-- Tommy Smothers
The experience of programming Windows vs the experience of programming NeXTStep is like going to the dentist and having a root canal without anaesthetic vs going to the dentist and having your gums cleaned with some nitrous oxide thrown in for the entertainment side of things.-- Bill Bumgarner
Five-step methods are the surest sign of an uninspired plan.
Lunatic Asylum, n: The place where optimism most flourishes.
Politics is storytelling. We just pick the one we like best.
"My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful."-- Hermann Weyl
Sniglet, n: Any word that doesn't appear in the dictionary, but should.-- Rich Hall ("Sniglets")
"Do not bend the spoon, instead realize the truth."
"The truth?"
"That the spoon effect will be added later by some sort of SGI workstation."
When a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric
I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.-- Voltaire
Life may seem unfair, but Life never cheats the way people do.-- Stewart Kramer
The business of the mind is first and foremost the pure joy of knowing and comprehending, the pure joy of consciousness.-- Anais Nin
I have just returned from Boston. It is the only thing to do if you find yourself up there.-- Fred Allen
What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. His course is the caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape. His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world. He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men, such balancing monsters of love.-- Leonard Cohen (Beautiful Losers (1966))
Strangely enough, this is the past that somebody in the future is longing to go back to.-- Ashleigh Brilliant
What is the nature of God? His nature is entirely dependent upon the age or culture that has reinvented him.-- Solomon Skink
This must be morning. I never could get the hang of mornings.
Artificial Intelligence: the art of making computers that behave like the ones in movies.-- Bill Bulko
"The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything. Once God (or Satan) is accepted as the first cause of everything which happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to chance...logic can be happily tossed out the window."-- Stephen King
Dublin University contains the cream of Ireland: Rich and thick.-- Samuel Beckett
If all the world's a stage, I want to operate the trap door.-- Paul Beatty
Q: How many lawyers does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Whereas the party of the first part, also known as "Lawyer", and the party of the second part, also known as "Light Bulb", do hereby and forthwith agree to a transaction wherein the party of the second part shall be removed from the current position as a result of failure to perform previously agreed upon duties, i.e., the lighting, elucidation, and otherwise illumination of the area ranging from the front (north) door, through the entryway, terminating at an area just inside the primary living area, demarcated by the beginning of the carpet, any spillover illumination being at the option of the party of the second part and not required by the aforementioned agreement between the parties.
The aforementioned removal transaction shall include, but not be limited to, the following. The party of the first part shall, with or without elevation at his or her option, by means of a chair, stepstool, ladder or any other means of elevation, grasp the party of the second part and rotate the party of the second part in a counter-clockwise direction, this point being tendered non-negotiable. Upon reaching a point where the party of the second part becomes fully detached from the receptacle, the party of the first part shall have the option of disposing of the party of the second part in a manner consistent with all relevant and applicable local, state and federal statutes. Once separation and disposal have been achieved, the party of the first part shall have the option of beginning installation. Aforesaid installation shall occur in a manner consistent with the reverse of the procedures described in step one of this self-same document, being careful to note that the rotation should occur in a clockwise direction, this point also being non-negotiable. The above described steps may be performed, at the option of the party of the first part, by any or all agents authorized by him, the objective being to produce the most possible revenue for the Partnership.
"It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end."-- Ursula K. Le Guin
So where are all the lust-crazed engineering groupies that my college recruiter talked about ?-- James Knowles
The direct use of physical force is so poor a solution to the problem of limited resources that it is commonly employed only by small children and great nations.-- David Friedman
The guests giggled, and floated down to the bottom of the garden to inspect the herbaceous borders, and snatch a quick snog before the crudities.-- Stephen Foster
"All modes of government are failures. Despotism is unjust to everybody, including the despot, who was probably made for better things. Oligarchies are unjust to the many, and ochlocracies [government by the masses] are unjust to the few. High hopes were once formed of democracy; but democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people, by the people, for the people."-- Oscar Wilde
May you get to Heaven a half hour before the Devil knows you're dead.-- Irish Proverb
Expecting something for nothing is the most popular form of hope.-- Arnold Glasgow
Life is like a beautiful melody, only the lyrics are messed up.
My opinions may have changed, but not the fact that I am right.
Given the pace of technology, I propose we leave math to the machines and go play outside. (Calvin & Hobbes)
Theists think all gods but theirs are false. Atheists simply don't make an exception for the last one.
The man who follows the crowd will usually get no further than the crowd. The man who walks alone is likely to find himself in places no one has ever been.-- Alan Ashley-Pitt
"The final delusion is the belief that one has lost all delusions."-- Maurice Chapelain
"Time goes by so fast, people go in and out of your life. You must never miss the opportunity to tell these people how much they mean to you." (Cheers)
"Dreams are the answers to questions that we haven't yet figured out how to ask."-- Fox Mulder (The X Files)
"I am not part of the problem; I am a Republican."-- Dan Quayle
The more things change, the more they stay insane.-- Tom Weller
"Anyone can give up, it's the easiest thing in the world to do. But to hold it together when everyone else would understand if you fell apart, that's true strength."
Never underestimate the human capacity for cognitive dissonance.
The definition of easy work is work that someone else has to do.
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.-- F. Scott Fitzgerald
Do you know the difference between involvement and commitment? Think of ham and eggs. The chicken is involved. The pig is committed.-- Martina Navratilova
Why am I so soft in the middle when the rest of my life is so hard?-- Paul Simon
I find "Yes, you _can_ do it that way, but the rest of the Internet community will point at you and giggle", followed by my walking out in a flurry of RFCs, tends to be quite effective-- Tanuki the Raccoon-Dog (a.s.r.)
Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression.-- Isaac Bashevis Singer
The BEST part of waking up? Hitting the snooze button and going back to sleep.
The public seems incapable of distinguishing between your garden variety idiot and your genuine lunatic. It is the same confusion the public has had over the last five Presidents.-- Mark Leeper
It is always the best policy to speak the truth, unless, of course, you are an exceptionally good liar.-- Jerome K. Jerome
The problem isn't that the victim can't fight, the problem is that they have to. Saying that self-defense classes are the answer to gay bashers is like saying that it would be good if the government stopped prosecuting rape cases and used the money saved to hand out free mace.-- Richard Caley
It seemed the world was divided into good and bad people. The good ones slept better... while the bad ones seemed to enjoy the waking hours much more.-- Woody Allen
I think perhaps the most important problem is that we are trying to understand the fundamental workings of the universe via a language devised for telling one another when the best fruit is.-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)
"Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know."-- Ernest Hemingway
As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.-- Albert Einstein
"Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed."-- Mark Twain
"Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt."-- Herbert Hoover
I want to die like my grandfather, peaceful and in my sleep - not screaming like the other people in the car.
"The imposition of stigma is the commonest form of violence used in democratic societies."-- R. A. Pinker
"The secret of the demagogue is to make himself as stupid as his audience so that they will believe they are as clever as he."-- Karl Kraus
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.-- Aristotle
Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.-- Albert Einstein
All New: The software is not compatible with any previous version.
I'm extraordinarily patient, provided I get my own way in the end.
Oh yeah? You wanna step out of the giant robot and say that again?
Commitment can be illustrated by a breakfast of ham and eggs. The chicken was involved; the pig was committed.
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.-- Oscar Wilde
Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.-- Aldous Huxley
"A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer."-- Robert Frost
Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.-- Kahlil Gibran
Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all kinds of directions. It's the only way to make progress.-- Havelock Vetinari
The time for action is past! Now is the time for senseless bickering!-- Ashleigh Brilliant
The first half of our life is ruined by our parents and the second half by our children.-- Clarence Darrow
"I wish I could drink like a lady
I can take one or two at the most.
Three and I'm under the table --
Four and I'm under the host!"
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.-- Bertrand Russell
"If houses were built the way software is built,
the first woodpecker would bring down civilization."
Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come.-- Matt Groening
"Many a man's reputation would not know his character if they met on the street."
You're probably the sort who would have Dorothy arrested for throwing water on the Wicked Witch of the West.-- Eric Holeman
Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.-- Samuel Butler
What luck for the rulers that men do not think.-- Adolf Hitler
"Do not the most moving moments of our lives find us without words?"
I do not like the man: he has all of the virtues I detest and none of the vices I admire.-- Winston Churchill
"Question Authority. They usually know where the bathroom is."-- Daria
If you're not part of the freaks, you're part of the boredom.-- Perry Farrell
"Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together."-- Anais Nin
The disarmament of fear, in ourselves and those that oppose, propels us. Every step forward brings the possibility of backlash. But forward we go.-- David G. Welton
"What is a committee? A group of the unwilling, picked from the unfit, to do the unnecessary."-- Richard Harkness
"In the old days, it was not called the Holiday Season; the Christians called it 'Christmas' and went to church; the Jews called it 'Hanukkah' and went to synagogue; the atheists went to parties and drank. People passing each other on the street would say 'Merry Christmas!' or 'Happy Hanukkah!' or (to the atheists) 'Look out for the wall!'"-- Dave Barry
Yakko: So we should go?
Picasso: Oui, oui.
Yakko: Pardon?
Picasso: Oui, oui.
Yakko: The stuff they're getting away with on kid's shows these days... (Animaniacs)
Being in a nudist colony probably takes all the fun out of Halloween.
You're just jealous because the voices are talking to me and not you.
Please do not duck the next time the clue-by-four swings your way.-- Ben Browning
"It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets."-- Voltaire
"I'd like to meet the person who invented sex and see what they're working on now."
The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. Instead of altering their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views ... which can be very uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering.-- Dr. Who ("Face of Evil")
I'm an apatheist. The question is no longer interesting, and the answer no longer matters.-- petro (a.s.r)
Never wrestle with a pig. You'll both get dirty, and the pig likes it.
"Success consists of doing the common things of life uncommonly well."
"Before you go and criticize the younger generation, just remember who raised them."
Every man is a damn fool for at least five minutes every day; wisdom consists of not exceeding the limit.-- Elbert Hubbard
The use of either 'PC' or 'lighten up' is usually enough to cause me to junk an article: the former indicates that the writer is a raving moron incapable of original thought, while the latter is a pretty clear indication that the writer is an insensitive clod.-- Melinda Shore
When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.-- Jonathan Swift
The goodness of morals depends upon what the morals say, not just the fact that they are morals.-- Rob Bernardo
...postmodernity, once the plaything of smarty-pants French guys, in truth belongs to the engagingly stupid. (Newsweek)
There has been opposition to every innovation in the history of man, with the possible exception of the sword.-- Benjamin Dana
You can tell how far we have to go when FORTRAN is the language of supercomputers.-- Steven Feiner
It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.-- Emerson
Before Xerox, five carbons were the maximum extension of anybody's ego.
On the sexes:
Brains times Beauty times Availability = Constant.
Occam's eraser: The philosophical principle that even the simplest solution is bound to have something wrong with it.
"Like its politicians and its wars, society has the teenagers it deserves."-- J. B. Priestley
"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
It will be a great day when our schools have all the money they need, and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a new bomber.
Who cares whether the glass is half full or half empty? Shouldn't the question be who's been drinking out of my glass?
Brought to you by the people who made "out of context" a household word.
C++, the language in which only friends can access your private members.
A Thaum is the basic unit of magical strength. It has been universally established as the amount of magic needed to create one small white pigeon or three normal sized billiard balls.-- Terry Pratchett (The Light Fantastic)
"Everything is convention, including law. When it is not the thought that led to the convention, but just the records of the convention that define morals, structural ethics are too dependant, and likely doomed."
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.-- Steven Wright
As the main says, it has yet to be proven intelligence has any survival value.
Whether it deserves some respect is another matter.
It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.-- Harry S. Truman
The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.-- H. L. Mencken
The Feynman Problem Solving Algorithm:
1. Write down the problem.
2. Think very hard.
3. Write down the answer.
The only thing I regret about my past is the length of it. If I had my life to live again, I'd make the same mistakes, only sooner.-- Tallulah Bankhead
Use the best: Linux for servers, Mac for graphics, Windows for Solitaire.
What's the matter, darling? Don't you recognize me with my clothes on?-- Tallulah Bankhead
And so, the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people.-- Terry Pratchett (Night Watch)
Karate is a form of martial arts in which people who have trained for years and years can, using only their hands and feet, make some of the worst movies in the history of the world.
What are we to make of a system that blames us for failing to procreate while refusing us custody of our children? That perpetuates the myth that we are weaklings while denying us the right to serve in the military? That regards us as incapable of forming stable relationships while forbidding us to marry?-- Richard Goldstein (in the "Gay Life 1991" segment of The Village Voice)
Learn from the mistakes of others. You won't live long enough to make them all yourself.
The probability of someone watching you is proportional to the stupidity of your action.
...problems continue in the South African black townships. Four people were killed in violent clashes yesterday. A black spokesman said - this situation is a tragedy for our people; we get no help from the government; blacks are dying and all the whites can do is talk about cricket. [very brief pause] last night at the Sydney Cricket Ground, the South African cricket team defeated Australia in the day-night match... (A(ustralian)BC-FM news)
People are always so boring when they band together. You have to be alone to develop all the idiosyncrasies that make a person interesting.-- Andy Warhol
Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.
-- Henry Brooks Adams
Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Kinky is when you use the whole chicken.
All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.-- Noam Chomsky
Do not meddle in the affairs of cats, for they are subtle and will piss on your computer.
Choconiverous, adj: Biting off the head of the chocolate Easter bunny first.-- Rich Hall ("Sniglets")
Sign in a Nairobi restaurant:
"Customers who find our waitresses rude ought to see the manager."
> 0C is freezing, 100C is boiling, 70F is a nice day, and 110C is a nice
> sauna.
This is the same logic that took out the Mars Polar Lander, I see.-- Peter da Silva
"The brain is a wonderful organ; it starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office."-- Robert Frost
Ninety percent of the time things turn out worse than you thought they would. The other ten percent of the time you had no right to expect that much.-- Augustine
"The bigger the information media, the less courage and freedom they allow. Bigness means weakness."-- Eric Sevareid
Progress, n: The process through which the Internet has evolved from smart people in front of dumb terminals to dumb people in front of smart terminals.
Conservative: a man who believes nothing should be done for the first time.
"Here's a horrible thought: You know how dumb the average person is? Well, half the human race is even dumber than that..."
A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.-- Mark Twain
In a church bulletin: The eighth-graders will be presenting Shakespeare's Hamlet in the Church basement Friday at 7 PM. The Congregation is invited to attend this tragedy.
"The biggest disease today isn't leprosy or tuberculosis, but the feeling of being unwanted."-- Mother Theresa
"The fickleness of the women whom I love is only equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me."-- George Bernard Shaw
There are people so addicted to exaggeration that they can't tell the truth without lying.
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.-- George Bernard Shaw
There are of course many problems connected with life, of which some of the most popular are `Why are people born?', `Why do they die?', `Why do they spend so much of the intervening time wearing digital watches?' (The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy)
No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.-- H. L. Mencken
Law of Hydrodynamics: When a body is immersed in water, the telephone rings.
Adult: A person that has stopped growing at both ends but not in the middle.
Man is the best computer we can put aboard a spacecraft ... and the only one that can be mass produced with unskilled labor.-- Wernher von Braun
He was just... well, like a lot of madmen. Somewhat accurate view of the problem, really insane view of the solution. (Kid Radd)
"If man could be crossed with the cat, it would improve man but deteriorate the cat."-- Mark Twain
The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears this is true.-- James Branch Cabell
"If pigs could vote, the man with the slop bucket would be elected swineherd everytime, no matter how much slaughtering he did on the side."-- Orson Scott Card
Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that numbers of people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience... Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem.-- Howard Zinn
"Play with each other. Play with yourselves. Just don't play with the squirrels, they bite."
355/113 -- Not the famous irrational number PI, but an incredible simulation.
Democracy according to the NRA: Firearms are necessary to protect individual liberties; most of all the right to own firearms.
"It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them."-- Fred Adler
AFPer: Terry, what the heck was going on at the end of Strata? I've just re-read the ending again and come up with another possible explanation which takes the total number into double figures.
TP: See? Other people would just have given you one or two. Amazing value, I think.-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)
"Public opinion sets bounds to every government, and is the real sovereign in every free one."-- James Madison
What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.-- Ursula K. Le Guin
"Being a graduate student is like becoming all of the Seven Dwarves. In the beginning you're Dopey and Bashful. In the middle, you are usually sick (Sneezy), tired (Sleepy), and irritable (Grumpy). But at the end, they call you Doc, and then you're Happy."
The beasts of the field and fowls of the air did know Ridcully the Brown. They'd got so good at pattern-recognition that, for a radius of about twenty miles around the Ridcully estates, they'd run, hide or in desperate cases attack violently at the mere sight of a pointy hat.-- Terry Pratchett (Moving Pictures)
"We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are."-- Anais Nin
We tend to see our own experiences as the normal process, so we are often amazed that anyone could have taken a different path. But when we do meet up, it's always fascinating to compare notes about the different ways to get there.-- Daniel Gilly
When in doubt, make a fool of yourself. There is a microscopically thin line between being brilliantly creative and acting like the most gigantic idiot in the universe- So what the hell, leap.
It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much -- the wheel, New York, wars and so on -- whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man -- for precisely the same reasons.-- Douglas Adams (The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy)
Of the delights of this world, man cares most for sexual intercourse, yet he has left it out of his heaven.-- Mark Twain
VIRGO (Aug 23 - Sept 22)
Learn something new today, like how to spell or how to count to ten without using your fingers. Be careful dressing this morning. You may be hit by a car later in the day and you wouldn't want to be taken to the doctor's office in some of that old underwear you own.
Computers make it easier to do a lot of things, but most of the things they make it easier to do don't need to be done.-- Andy Rooney
"The human mind treats a new idea the way the body treats a strange protein; it rejects it."-- P. B. Medawar
"The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards."-- Anatole France
To err is human, but when the eraser wears out ahead of the pencil, your're overdoing it.-- J. Jenkins
Strip away the phony tinsel of Hollywood and you find the real tinsel underneath.-- Oscar Levant
Have you noticed the way people's intelligence capabilities decline sharply the minute they start waving guns around?-- Dr. Who
The only thing that separates us from the animals is our ability to accessorize. (Steel Magnolias)
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarrely inexeplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.-- Douglas Adams (The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio scripts)
Normal is an illusion. What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly.-- Morticia Adams
"God, so atrocious in the Old Testament, so attractive in the New--the Jekyll and Hyde of sacred romance."-- Mark Twain
"We all suffer from the preoccupation that there exists ... in the loved one, perfection."-- Sidney Poitier
Anticiparcellate (an ti si par' sel ate), v: Waiting until the mailman is several houses down the street before picking up the mail, so as not too appear too anxious.-- Rich Hall ("Sniglets")
�...Because the establishment never gets it. That�s how it is with paradigm shift. The establishment does not see where the next wave is coming from. And even if they hire someone to tell them where the next wave is coming from, they never believe them.�-- Ted Nelson
"When people are bored, it is primarily with their own selves that they are bored."-- Eric Hoffer
Speer's 1st Law of Proofreading: The visibility of an error is inversely proportional to the number of times you have looked at it.
No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says; he is always convinced that it says what he means.-- George Bernard Shaw
I like being single. I'm always there when I need me.-- Art Leo
"To live outside the law you must be honest."-- Bob Dylan
Manners are one of the truly lost causes.-- John Simon
I'll say it again for the logic impaired.-- Larry Wall
The unique operations of the (human) brain are the result of natural selection operating through the filter of culture. They have suspended us between the two antipodal ideals of nature and machine, forest and city, the natural and the artifactual, relentlessly seeking, in the words of geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, an equilibrium not of this world.-- Edward O. Wilson ("Biophilia")
"It is a besetting vice of democracies to substitute public opinion for law. This is the usual form in which masses of men exhibit their tyranny."-- James Fenimore Cooper
"You ever hear of the Spartans, Lewis? Ancient Greece...traditional enemies of the Athenians? They were a warrior society. I'll try to make it simple for you...they were Klingon." (The Rhipodon Society)
In a church bulletin: This evening at 7 P.M. there will be a hymn sing in the park across from the Church. Bring a blanket and come prepared to sin.
Some men are alive simply because it is against the law to kill them.-- Ed Howe
"Y'ever notice how Man is often likened to a virus or a cancer, spreading across the globe, using up resources, changing ecosystems? How come these people never talk about the prehistoric plants and trees that spread across the earth, converting all that carbon dioxide to oxygen and leaching nitrogen and other nutrients out of the soil? As their dead carcasses piled on top of each other over the millenia, they decomposed into pools of hydrocarbons, forming petroleum and coal. Directly and indirectly, plants are the true despoilers of the planet, taking pure and sweet solar energy and perverting it into hideous (dare I say, evil) carbon compounds.
"'Green' alternatives my ass! Kill a plant today and stop the destruction of Earth's pristine beauty!"-- Gerry Deckert
"Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea."-- Robert A. Heinlein
"When your world looks kind of mean, and you wish that you weren't there.... Just close your eyes and look beneath, and you can be anywhere...." (Muppet Babies Theme Song)
"Mobile phones are the only subject on which men boast about who's got the smallest."-- Neil Kinnock
"Make lots of money", "enjoy the work", "operate within the law": choose 2-- Brian Anderson
Arithmetic: An obscure art no longer practiced in the world's developed countries.
"Naturally the common people don't want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."-- Hermann Goering (at the Nuremberg Trials, April 18, 1946)
If the automobile had followed the same development as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year killing everyone inside.-- Robert Cringely ("InfoWorld")
Cats are smarter than dogs. You can't make eight cats pull a sled through the snow.
People want stories about things they can relate to: life and death, good and evil.
It is easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.-- Alfred Adler
From the 'Rules for women':
Women wearing Wonderbras and low-cut blouses lose their right to complain about being stared at.
"All the parts falling off this car are of the very finest British manufacture"-- Bumper sticker
Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.-- Oscar Wilde
"We apologize for the error in last week's paper in which we stated that Mr. Arnold Dogbody was a defective in the police force. We meant, of course, that Mr. Dogbody is a detective in the police farce." (Correction Notice in the Ely Standard)
The defect of equality is that we only desire it with our superiors.-- Henry Becque
On-line, adj: The idea that a human being should always be accessible to a computer.
On the menu of a Swiss restaurant:
"Our wines leave you nothing to hope for."
"The degree of normality in a database is inversely proportional to that of its DBA"
Piety, n: Reverence for the Supreme Being, based on His supposed resemblance to man.
"I have learnt silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers."-- Kahlil Gibran
Unfortunately, there are like five people in the world who understand the X keyboard model--I'm not one of them--and three are insane. It's that bad.-- Tim Showalter
"You think fairy tales are only for girls? Here’s a hint - ask yourself who wrote them. I assure you, it wasn’t just the women. It’s the great male fantasy - all it takes is one dance to know that she’s the one. All it takes is the sound of her song from the tower, or a look at her sleeping face. And right away you know - this is the girl in your head, sleeping or dancing or singing in front of you. Yes, girls want their princes, but boys want their princesses just as much. And they don’t want a very long courtship. They want to know immediately."-- David Levithan and Rachel Cohn
"[Re: extinction of species, and the desperate need to blame someone]
> There are 3,500 species of ant.
Today. To the best of our knowledge. How many were there before the great Hexapodia Race Wars three thousand years ago, when the Better Red Than Dead Alliance destroyed the Polka-Dot League, slaughtering thousands of billions of thinking, feelering individuals in an act of genocide unmatched since the K-T event when the Brontosaurus' attempt at a space program using their largest-ever catapult went horribly wrong?"
"I really didn't foresee the Internet. But then, neither did the computer industry. Not that that tells us very much of course - the computer industry didn't even foresee that the century was going to end."-- Douglas Adams
Part of the difference of learning something by interest or necessity is how we file it, with what urgency, and how we think of it when we think of it again.
"The Hindenburg crash had 62 survivors and 35 fatalities. Of the 35 deaths, 27 resulting from jumping from the airship. Many of the remaining 8 deaths resulted from burns and injuries due to the ensuing diesel fuel fire."-- Dan Egnor
Talk to your kids about sex. Tell them just how absolutely incredible it really is. (The Covert Comic)
"They keep saying the right person will come along. I think mine got hit by a truck."
Absent, adj: Exposed to the attacks of friends and acquaintances; defamed; slandered.
A winning formula can be obliterated simply by the change to an ingorant new manager.
Cigarette, n: A fire at one end, a fool at the other, and a bit of tobacco inbetween.
The avalanche has already started. It is too late for the pebbles to vote.-- Ambassador Kosh
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)
X-Chromosome: A genetic double-cross that empowers women with the ability to bear children and reserves for men the right to be color-blind hemophiliacs. (Cynic's Dictionary)
What do you mean, "If a woodchuck could chuck wood"? What's the point in calling it a "woodchuck" if it can't ?-- David Gunter
Poetry is the mixture of common sense, which not all have, with an uncommon sense, which very few have.-- John Masefield
The ability to ask questions like `Where am I and who is the "I" that is asking?' is one of the things that distinguishes mankind from, say, cuttlefish. [Footnote: Although of course it's not the most obvious thing and there are, in fact, some beguiling similarities, particularly the tendency to try to hide behind a big cloud of ink in difficult situations]-- Terry Pratchett (The Last Continent)
"I learned early... If you don't have anything intelligent to say, you should probably keep your mouth shut until you do. Gives them the illusion that you're smarter than you really are."
-- Amanda Firefox
"Children are like TV sets. When they start acting weird, whack them across the eyes with a big rubber basketball shoe."-- Hunter S. Thompson
C makes it easy for you to shoot yourself in the foot. C++ makes that harder, but when you do, it blows away your whole leg.-- Bjarne Stroustrup
In the past, men created witches; now they create mental patients.-- Tom Szasz
"The problem is not that there are problems. The problem is expecting otherwise and thinking that having problems is a problem."-- Theodore Rubin
Law of Cat Landing:
A cat will always land in the softest place possible; often the mid-section of an unsuspecting, reclining human.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.-- Henry David Thoreau
"Talents are best nurtured in solitude; character is best formed in the stormy billows of the world."-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"Mosquitoes have caused more deaths than all the wars. Guppies devour mosquito larvae so may be the best defense against them...We budget billions for military systems. Preposterous! Spend it on guppies!" (letter to the editor, Eugene newspaper)
Politicians should be changed frequently, like diapers - and for much the same reason.
Q: Why did the astrophysicist order three hamburgers?
A: Because he was hungry.
If a tree falls in a forest and lands on a politician, even if you can't hear the tree or the screams, I'll bet you'd at least hear the applause.-- Paul Tindale
There are only two industries that refer to their customers as 'users.'-- Edward Tufte
The rich aren't like us, they pay less taxes.
Nine-tenths of the people were created so you would want to be with the other tenth.-- Horace Walpole
Once in a while it really hits people that they don't have to experience the world in the way they have been told to.-- Alan Keightley
The older I get, the more I think you ever learn is either further subtleties, or further distractions.
Is there no accounting for taste? There isn't even a budget for it.-- Sean Levy
I'm opposed to millionaires, but it would be dangerous to offer me the position.-- Mark Twain
Sign in a hotel elevator in Paris:
"Please leave your values at the front desk."
Aquadextrous, adj: Possessing the ability to turn the bathtub faucet on and off with your toes.-- Rich Hall ("Sniglets")
"On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good and not quite all the time."-- George Orwell
The irony is that Bill Gates claims to be making a stable operating system and Linus Torvalds claims to be trying to take over the world.
Abnormal, adj:
Not conforming to standard. In matters of thought and conduct, to be independent is to be abnormal, to be abnormal is to be detested. Wherefore the lexicographer adviseth a striving toward the straiter [sic] resemblance of the Average Man than he hath to himself. Whoso attaineth thereto shall have peace, the prospect of death and the hope of Hell.-- Ambrose Bierce (The Devil's Dictionary)
"Nothing defines humans better than their willingness to do irrational things in the pursuit of phenomenally unlikely payoffs. This is the principle behind lotteries, dating, and religion."-- Scott Adams
"The strongest man in the world is he who stands alone."-- Henrik Ibsen
"Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial 'we'."-- Mark Twain
"Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim."-- Bertrand Russell
The skin of civilization is only 7 meals thick
"Doing what we please is not freedom, is not liberty; rather, it is the abuse of true liberty and freedom."-- Cardinal Hayes
"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public."-- Theodore Roosevelt
Motrin and espresso. The breakfast of champions.-- Sweet Poly
"The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to be insane in such a useful way that they can't commit you."-- Mark Edwards
Everyone has their first date... and the object is to hide your flaws. And then you're in a relationship and it's all about hiding your disappointment. Then once you're married it's about hiding your sins. (Dollhouse)
On applause: They named it Ovation from the Latin ovis, a sheep.-- Plutarch
"I don't need to be told how to do my job."
"I hope not, because it's by ass on the line and I'm up to my neck in it." (The Thin Blue Line)
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
"A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything."-- Nietzsche
"You know how sometimes the last sentence you said, like, echoes in your brain, and it just keeps sounding stupider? and you have to say something else, just to make it stop?"-- Angela Chase (my so-called life)
My life has a superb cast but I can't figure out the plot.
-Ashleigh Brilliant
Among economists, the real world is often a special case.-- Horngren
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.-- T.S. Eliot
All esoteric teachings seek to apprehend the unseen happenings in the psyche, and all claim supreme authority for themselves.-- Carl Jung
You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing we call failure is not the falling down, but the staying down.-- Mary Pickford
"Character may be manifested in the great moments, but it is made in the small ones."-- Phillips Brooks
Confession is good for the soul only in the sense that a tweed coat is good for dandruff.-- Peter de Vries
C gives you enough rope to hang yourself. C++ also gives you the tree object to tie it to.
Primus in orbe Deus fecit timor.
"It was fear that introduced gods into the world."
Humor is just another defense against the universe-- Mel Brooks
When nothing else remains, one must scream. Silence is the ultimate crime against humanity.-- Nadezhda Mandelstam
Arthur felt happy. He was terribly pleased that the day was for once working out so much according to plan. Only twenty minutes ago he had decided he would go mad, and now he was already chasing a Chesterfield sofa across the fields of prehistoric Earth.-- Douglas Adams (Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy)
"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."
The world, especially for the middle and upper classes, is much more fool-proof then it used to be. A fool-proof environment causes an increase in the number of fools.-- Hillel Gazit
What do people mean when they say the computer went down on them?-- Marilyn Pittman
The water under the lid was inky black and, according to rumour, bottomless; the Ogg grandchildren were encouraged to believe that monsters from the dawn of time dwelt in its depths, since Nanny believed that a bit of thrilling and pointless terror was an essential ingredient of the magic of childhood.
In summer she used it as a beer cooler.-- Terry Pratchett (Wyrd Sisters)
I'm sick of tattoos, sick of piercings, sick of temporary tattoos. They are the white stilettos of the '90s.-- Shirley Manson
did you know that in McDonaldland, you can get a license to hamburgle? It's true, the Hamburgler actually pays Grimace the purple guy for the same hamburgers he burgles, just for the opportunity to steal them for sport. He's neither a criminal nor an anarchist, he's a sycophant to the clown plutocracy.-- puddle (#xkcd)
“How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself.”-- Anais Nin
At a silly valley place I just visited [..] they have a parrot that 'rings'. It'll 'ring' a couple times, presumably because it enjoys the power of being able to make everyone in the room do the Macarena, and then it will answer itself. "Hello!"-- Gary S. Callison (a.s.r.)
No group of parents should have the right either to prevent other people's children from being educated or to require--as a quid pro quo--that they be equally exposed to the religious doctrines of Christian fundamentalism. It's bad enough that these parents may be denying their own children the educational tools necessary to cope with the diverse society into which they will be graduating. It is too much to give them a veto over the education of the rest of our children.-- Alan Dershowitz
The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.-- Mark Twain
The loom works perfectly well without the steam powered wig darner and shortbread cutter stapled to the side.-- Peter da Silva
"In corporate religions as in others, the heretic must be cast out not because of the probability that he is wrong but because of the possibility that he is right."-- Antony Jay
The name Coca-Cola in China was first rendered as Ke-kou-ke-la. Unfortunately, the Coke company did not discover until after thousands of signs had been printed that the phrase means "bite the wax tadpole" or "female horse stuffed with wax" depending on the dialect. Coke then researched 40,000 Chinese characters and found a close phonetic equivalent, "ko-kou-ko-le," which can be loosely translated as "happiness in the mouth."
Bozone, n: The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating.
Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance.-- Confucius
When ideas fail, words come in very handy.-- Goethe
"The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad."-- Friedrick Nietzsche
One of the main causes of trouble in the world is dogmatic and fanatical belief in some doctrine for which there is no adequate evidence.-- Bertrand Russell
"Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good."
-- Vaclav Havel
I once listed all the good things I did over the past year, and then turned them into resolution form and backdated them. That was a good feeling.-- Robert Fulghum
[A] thing is symmetrical if there is something we can do to it so that after we have done it, it looks the same as it did before.-- Richard Feynman
It swims through a sublogical fantasy world where there are no rules that can't be violated by the set designer, where everybody is really thin and beautiful and wears really cool clothes, and where death is everywhere.-- Stephen Hunter (The Washington Post, review of 'The Cell')
If we couldn't laugh at things that didn't make sense,
we couldn't react to a lot of the world around us." (Calvin & Hobbes)
"I think we better split up."
"Good idea. We can do more damage that way." (Ghostbusters)
Imaginative writers are valuable colleagues and their testimony is to be rated very highly because they draw on sources that we have not yet made accessible to science. The portrayal of the psychic life of human beings is, of course, the imaginative writer's most special demand. He has always been the forerunner of science and thus scientific psychology, too.-- Sigmund Freud
"You know they've reintroduced the death penalty for insurance company directors?"
"Really?" said Arthur. "No I didn't. For what offense?"
Trillian frowned. "What do you mean, offense?"
"I see."-- Douglas Adams (The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy)
He believes in the fine arts with all the earnestness of a man who does not understand them.-- George Bernard Shaw
"Forget all those health clinics and gyms. Sex is the best cure for everything, especially stress. If I have a good night of sex, all my problems are gone by 10 o' clock in the morning."-- Grace Jones
They say that every man has a price at which he'll do anything. I like to think it's the other way around; every man has a line, a line he won't cross over, no matter what the cost.-- Fraser Sr. (Due South)
Law of Cat Inertia:
A cat at rest will tend to remain at rest, unless acted upon by some outside force - such as the opening of cat food, or a nearby scurrying mouse.
"We say that the hour of death is uncertain, but when we say this we think of that hour as situated in an obscure and distant future. It does not occur to us that it can have any connection with the day already begun, or that death could arrive this same afternoon, this afternoon which is so certain and which has every hour filled in advance".
Maybe that explains Perl: Larry Wall let a kitten have its way with the bash, sed, and expr doc, then implemented the result.-- Jay Maynard
"To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; to leave the world a little better; whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is the meaning of success."-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Sodd's Second Law: Sooner or later, the worst possible set of circumstances is bound to occur.
"This site is intended for people over 18, but only because kids shoot each other if they hear the word 'fuck'."
The fewer clear facts you have in support of an opinion, the stronger your emotional attachment to that opinion.
"Never go off on tangents, which are lines that intersect a curve at only one point and were discovered by Euclid, who lived in the 6th century, which was an era dominated by the Goths, who lived in what we now know as Poland." (Nov. 1998 issue of Infosystems Executive)
If all the girls who attended the Yale prom were laid end to end, I wouldn't be a bit surprised.-- Dorothy Parker
Spagmumps, n: Any of the millions of Styrofoam wads that accompany mail-order items.-- Rich Hall ("Sniglets")
"The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the co-operation or consent of his deliberate reason."-- Bertrand Russell
Proof by eminent authority: I saw Karp in the elevator and he said it was probably NP-complete.
Stand and fight, you misbegotten spawn of the perverse breeding between a pixie and a squirrel!
There are three kinds of lies: Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics.-- Disraeli
"To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love."-- George Santayana
The greatest possible mint of style is to make the words absolutely disappear into the thought.-- Nathaniel Hawthorne
Support bacteria - they're the only culture some people have.-- Steven Wright
Bring ideas in and entertain them royally, for one of them may be the king.-- Mark Van Doren
"Greek mythology says that whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad. I'd never been sure whether 'mad' meant crazy or angry. Either way, the gods were working on me pretty good right now."-- Darien Fawkes (The Invisible Man)
If at first you don't succeed, try, try, again. Then quit. There's no use being a damn fool about it.-- W. C. Fields
"If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a man and a dog."-- Mark Twain
"In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law ... That would lead to anarchy. An individual who breaks a law that his conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law."-- Martin Luther King
PATRIOTISM, n:
1) The inability to distinguish between the government and one's 'country';
2) A highly praiseworthy virtue characterized by the desire to dominate and kill;
3) A feeling of exultation experienced when contemplating heaps of charred 'enemy' corpses;
4) The first, last, and perennial refuge of scoundrels.-- Chaz Bufe (The Devil's Dictionaries ("American Heretic's Dictionary" section))
"One day you make a wrong turn, or take a detour, and you end up in some crazy place you can't even find on the map, doing something you never thought you would do. Maybe you feel a little lost while it's happening, but later you realise that was the best bit of the trip." (<a href="http://us.imdb.com/Title?0111418">Threesome</a>)
Baby-sitter, n: A teenager acting like an adult, while the adults are out acting like teenagers.
Friends may come and go, but enemies accumulate.-- Thomas Jones
If the brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't.
"America wasn't founded so that we could all be better. America was founded so we could all be anything we damn well please."-- P.J. O'Rourke
See my big frustration here is that my main squeeze has turned out to be a Late Blooming Nerd, and is in the habit of (in the midst of cuddling) saying sweet things like "you think if I disable the caching it would work?"-- Ro Reid
America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.-- Georges Clemenceau (1 December 1945)
"Once a new technology rolls over you, if you're not part of the steamroller, you're part of the road."-- Stewart Brand
The average girl would rather have beauty than brains because she knows that the average man can see much better than he can think. (Ladies' Home Journal)
"[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)
One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.-- Plato
"A book should serve as an axe to the ice inside us."-- Franz Kafka
Seeing is forgetting the name of that which one sees.-- Paul Valery
"And the thing is, I like my evil like I like my men--evil. You know, straight up, black hat, 'Tied to the train tracks, soon my electro-ray will destroy metropolis' bad."-- Buffy (Buffy The Vampire Slayer)
"Aaaarghhhh."
This was the noise made as he missed the lurching Thing by several meters and was realising that, if you have tied a rope to the top of a very high and extremely solid stone tower and are now swinging towards it, failing to hit something on the way is an error which you will regret for the rest of your truncated life.-- Terry Pratchett (Moving Pictures)
"To build may have to be the slow and laborious task of years. To destroy can be the thoughtless act of a single day."
-- Winston Churchill
What is inconceivable about the universe is that it is at all conceivable.-- Albert Einstein
The world is moving so fast these days that the man who says it can't be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it.-- Harry Emerson Fosdick
Almost everything alive is about some kind of balance. Heck, even a lot of things that are not alive are about balance. However, thinking a particular balance is the only balance is often a mistake.
"Show me the books he loves and I shall know the man far better than through mortal friends."-- S. Weir Mitchell
Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before.-- Mae West.
Additional: Our biggest enemy is going space crazy through loneliness. The only thing that helps me maintain my slender grip on reality is the friendship I share with my collection of singing potatoes.-- Holly (Red Dwarf II, Queeg)
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.-- Albert Einstein
"Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable."-- Henry Louis Mencken
"Ergotism is what you get if you overuse the word "therefore". Egotism on the other hand is a form of "I" strain."-- Paul Martin
"Know thyself? If I knew myself, I'd run away."-- Goethe
Natural vs. unnatural is a pretty worthless distinction.
-- Greg Parkinson
Only to someone such as yourself, with a deliberate disability to perceive the difference.
-- Bob Sarver
But easy for someone like you, who can manufacture the difference on the spot.-- Mike Batchelor
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)
Descartes described how his father taught him how to swim by throwing him into the Seine: "I sink, therefore I swam."
"The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places."-- Hemingway
"The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions."-- Susan Sontag
Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I've come to realize there is a very close resemblance to the first.-- Ronald Reagan
Stretch pants - the garment that made skiing a spectator sport.-- Anonymous
"Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never of the correctness of a belief."-- Arthur Schnitzler
The world is full of willing people; some willing to work, the rest willing to let them.-- Robert Frost
Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.-- Brian Kernighan
"Some people are afraid of what they might find if they try to analyze themselves too much, but you have to crawl into your wounds to discover where your fears are. Once the bleeding starts, the cleansing can begin."-- Tori Amos
"Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews."-- John Updike
"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)
[American Family Association Targets MTV] Thank God we know we're right; thank God we know we possess the Truth; thank God we know the proper values to give to our children, so that we need not teach them to think for themselves; thank God we have passed beyond the stage of needing to ask questions; thank God we have been given the Vision of the perfect world; thank God we have a decision procedure for telling the difference between Gospel hymns and rock video music. I hope God has a sense of humour, and I hope She doesn't give up on us for following our silly, narrow-minded, self-important ways.-- Joel Parthemore
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool.-- Richard Feynman
Einstein argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer.-- Fred Brooks
Unfortunately, as Usenet gets out to the masses it will become diluted.
-- Nelson Minar
*Again*!?!?
-- David Preston
Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only the relations of men to women, but the relation of women to themselves.-- John Berger
"Most people do not watch TV because they want to watch TV. They watch TV to relieve themselves of the burden of finding something actually enjoyable to do."
"If I have any more caffeine, I'm going to end up running down the hallway naked." (Someone on Slashdot)
Q: What's tiny and yellow and very, very, dangerous?
A: A canary with the super-user password.
We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection.-- Anais Nin
"Everybody winds up kissing the wrong person good night."-- Andy Warhol
"Women are like cell phones. They like to be held and talked to, but push the wrong button, and you'll be disconnected."
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.-- Albert Einstein
"A wizard cannot do everything; a fact most magicians are reticent to admit, let alone discuss with prospective clients. Still, the fact remains that there are certain objects, and people, that are, for one reason or another, completely immune to any direct magical spell. It is for this group of beings that the magician learns the subtleties of using indirect spells. It also does no harm, in dealing with these matters, to carry a large club near your person at all times."-- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Volume VIII
"I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book."-- Groucho Marx
I think that I shall never see
A billboard lovely as a tree.
Perhaps, unless the billboards fall
I'll never see a tree at all.-- Ogden Nash
"There is nothing wrong with the software that rm won't cure."-- Arnie Romo
Being called a poetess brings out the terroristress in me.-- Audre Lorde
"Whoever ceases to be a student has never been a student."-- George Iles
"When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other."-- Eric Hoffer
Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there.-- Will Rogers
"They call him the Sand Spider"
"Why do they call him that?"
"Probably because it sounds scary." (True Lies)
The weirder you are, the better you have to be if you still want to get paid.-- Ben Aveling
Glossofacilia: A tendency to use very large words to explain very small phenomena. Glossofacilia drives to complexify rather than simplify and is the natural instinct of reactionaries to an age of change.-- Jim Taylor
The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.-- Anais Nin
"Men are like pumpkins. It seems like all the good ones are either taken or they've had everything scraped out of their heads with a spoon."
"The murals in restaurants are on a par with the food in museums."-- Peter De Vries
'Be yourself' is about the worst advice you can give to people.-- Tom Masson
An idea isn't responsible for the people who believe in it.-- Don Marquis
"All truth passes through three stages: first, it is ridiculed; second, it is violently opposed; third, it is accepted as being self-evident"-- Schopenhauer
"Misquotation is, in fact, the pride and privilege of the learned. A widely-read man never quotes accurately for the rather obvious reason that he has read too widely."-- Hesketh Pearson
Apparently a real radio transcript conversation off the coast of Newfoundland.
Canadians: Please divert your course 15 degrees the South to avoid a collision.
Americans: Recommend you divert your course 15 degrees the North to avoid a collision.
Canadians: Negative. You will have to divert your course 15 degrees to the South to avoid a collision.
Americans: This is the Captain of a US Navy ship. I say again, divert YOUR course.
Canadians: No. I say again, you divert YOUR course.
Americans: THIS IS THE AIRCRAFT CARRIER USS LINCOLN, THE SECOND LARGEST SHIP IN THE UNITED STATES' ATLANTIC FLEET. WE ARE ACCOMPANIED BY THREE DESTROYERS, THREE CRUISERS AND NUMEROUS SUPPORT VESSELS. I DEMAND THAT YOU CHANGE YOUR COURSE 15 DEGREES NORTH, I SAY AGAIN, THAT'S ONE FIVE DEGREES NORTH, OR COUNTER-MEASURES WILL BE UNDERTAKEN TO ENSURE THE SAFETY OF THIS SHIP.
Canadians: This is a lighthouse. Your call.
'The main reception foyer was almost empty but Ford nevertheless weaved his way through it.'
(Ford making his way out of Milliways whilst under the influence of enough alchol to make a rhino sing) (The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy)
Arachnoleptic fit, n: The frantic dance performed just after you accidentally walk through a spider web.
"Always do right- this will gratify some and astonish the rest."-- Mark Twain
The definition of a beautiful woman is one who loves me.-- Sloan Wilson
I save about twenty drafts -- that's ten meg of disc space -- and the last one contains all the final alterations. Once it has been printed out and received by the publishers, there's a cry here of 'Tough shit, literary researchers of the future, try getting a proper job!' and the rest are wiped.-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)
You measure democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists.-- Abbie Hoffman
In a church bulletin: "Ladies, don't forget the rummage sale. It's a chance to get rid of those things not worth keeping around the house. Don't forget your husbands."
"The Prophets teach us patience."
-- Vedek Bareil
"It appears they also teach you politics."-- Sisko (Star Trek: DS9)
The two women exchanged the kind of glance women use when no knife is handy.-- Ellery Queen
The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.-- H. L. Mencken
"A child does not have to be taught how to be happy or the ways of love. It is fear, hatred, & prejudice that have to be taught. And from the condition of the world we can see that unfortunately there are some very good teachers."-- Javan
Regrettable Necessity, n:
An avoidable atrocity. The term is often employed by presidents and prime ministers when announcing bombings of civilian targets and invasions of small countries.-- Chaz Bufe (The Devil's Dictionaries)
"So you want a realistic, down-to-earth show that's off-the-wall and full of magical robots?" (The Simpsons)
Teacher's First Law of Grading Lab Papers: If an experiment has perfect results, the student has cheated.
If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.-- Henry David Thoreau
The right to search for the truth implies also a duty; one must not conceal any part of what one has recognized to be the truth.-- Albert Einstein
If I kiss you, that is a psychological interaction.
On the other hand, if I hit you over the head with a brick, that is also a psychological interaction.
The difference is that one is friendly and the other is not so friendly.
The crucial point is if you can tell which is which.-- Dolph Sharp ("I'm O.K., You're Not So Hot")
"There's nothing like desire to prevent the things one says from having any resemblance to the things in one's mind."-- Marcel Proust
Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.-- Andre Gide
Listen to the Mustn'ts, child.
Listen to the Don'ts.
Listen to the Shouldn'ts,
The Impossibles, the Won'ts.
Listen to the Never haves,
Then listen close to me--
Anything can happen, child
Anything can be.-- Shel Silverstein
Dante Hicks: Theoretically, people see money on the counter, and no one around, they think they're being watched.
Veronica: Honesty through paranoia. (Clerks)
Ever since Hume's analysis of causation, it has been clear that events in the world are not connected by necessity. "Laws of nature" are descriptive, not legislative. They are devised by man for the purpose of organizing his expeience. Einstein wrote:
Science is the attempt to make the chaotic diversity of our sense-experience correspond to a logocally uniform system of thought. ... The sense-experiences are the given subject-matter. But the theory that shall interpret them is man-made. ... hypothetical, never completely final, always subject to question and doubt.
('Pragmatism and Science')
"We come to love not by finding the perfect person, but by learning to see an imperfect person, perfectly."
"I find imperfection the most interesting thing about a person"-- Jodi Foster
Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering.-- Tom Stoppard
A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory.-- Steven Wright
Innovation is not the product of logical thought, even though the final product is tied to a logical structure.-- Albert Einstein
"Crash programs fail because they are based on the theory that, with nine women pregnant, you can get a baby a month."-- Wernher von Braun
Psychiatrists say that one out of four people are mentally ill. Check three friends. If they're OK, chances are you're the one.
"The more I watch television, the more I wonder why I'm not already supreme ruler of Earth."-- Dogbert (Dilbert)
Humanity has in the course of time had to endure from the hands of science two great outrages upon its naive self-love. The first was when it realized that our earth was not the center of the universe, but only a speck in a world-system of a magnitude hardly conceivable... The second was when biological research robbed man of his particular privilege of having been specially created, and relegated him to a descent from the animal world.-- Sigmund Freud
Labeling something as sarcasm utterly undercuts the effect. The whole point about sarcasm is that it's risky; it depends on your hearer getting the literal meaning and then seeing that you can't mean that so you must mean something else and working out what that other thing must be. Your hearer has to do some interpretive work, and that work is the effect.-- Arnold Zwicky
Only when the last tree has died, and the last river been poisoned, and the last fish been caught, will we realize that we cannot eat money.-- 19th Century Cree Indian
I think that Vulcan is a geekocracy where the people who know the most about sci-fi get to rule.-- <br />
Keith Irwin
"You just realize you're not on Happy Days. It's the real world; You need to ignore what you are programmed by sitcoms to think your life should be."-- Trent Reznor
The advantage of emotions is that they lead us astray.-- Oscar Wilde