1462 hits
The voters have spoken, the bastards...
The bigger they are, the harder they hit.
The standard you walk past is the standard you accept.
We shame outselves for the sake of simplicity.
The soul would have no rainbow had the eyes no tears.
Cloning is the sincerest form of flattery.
we make happen the stuff we fear will happen
When ideas fail, words come in very handy.-- Goethe
"All the people stared as if we were both quite insane."-- The Hollies
Microsoft: Re-inventing the square wheel.
"If angst were a popsicle, I'd be suckin' the stick."
I'd love to change the world, but they won't give me the source code.
Funny. All the wireless people seem to be the marionettes.
I like the kind of people that can hold on to the the feeling they have after the song or movie ends.
Music soothes the savage beast. ...unless it's polka.
Television: the bland leading the bland.
The skin of civilization is only 7 meals thick
"Know thyself? If I knew myself, I'd run away."-- Goethe
The future exists first in the imagination, then in the will, then in reality.
In the beginning was the word, and the word was "aardvark".
Beauty lies in the hands of the beer holder.
"Must... defy... laws... of... physics!"-- The Tick
There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.-- Goethe
America is like a melting pot. The people at the bottom get burned, and the scum floats to the top.
Lecture, n: Where the notes of the professor become the notes of the student without passing through the mind of either one.
God must love assholes--she made so many of them.
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.
Don’t speak unless you can improve on the silence.
Of all the truths in the world, humor is the most satisfying and often the healthiest.
The day after tomorrow is the third day of the rest of your life.
The more sane often call themselves insane to avoid others' judgement.
A dark past creates a long path back to the surface.
Q: Why did the germ cross the microscope?
A: To get to the other slide.
The law should make men free. The problem is making the law free.
Monday is the root of all evil.
"The strongest man in the world is he who stands alone."-- Henrik Ibsen
Thinking: The talking of the soul with itself.-- Plato
I think it's a beautiful day to go to the zoo and feed the ducks.
To the lions.-- Brian Kantor (the SDM)
A bird in the hand is the best way to eat chicken.
The elephant is the only mammal that can't jump.
"Conviction is a luxury for those on the sidelines."
PMS, n: the short period of time when women act like men do all the time.
If the pen is mightier than the sword then how can actions speak louder than words?
Eiffel Tower: The Empire State Building after taxes.
Q: Why did the tachyon cross the road?
A: Because it was on the other side.
Half of the people in the world are below average.
"Remember the Golden Rule: Those who have the gold make the rules."
"The Schizophrenic: An Unauthorized Autobiography"
2, 3, 3, 37 - the prime factorization of the beast.
"The first 80% of software development is the easy part. The hard part is the next 80%"
Ass, n: The masculine of "lass".
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its de-evolution into the shiny things network.-- The Onion
Everything has been thought of before, but the problem is to think of it again.-- Goethe
If the pen is mightier than the sword, what happens when you run out of ink?
The rich aren't like us, they pay less taxes.
Join the army: meet interesting people, then kill them.
A real leader faces the music, even when he doesn't like the tune.
"News" is just the stuff they use to fill up all the empty space they couldn't sell for advertising.
Adolescence, n: The stage between puberty and adultery.
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
The BEST part of waking up? Hitting the snooze button and going back to sleep.
The applied mathematician can find the solution to any difficulty, whilst the pure mathematician can find the difficulty to any solution.
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
The meek shall inherit the earth. The rest of us are going to the stars.-- Robert A. Heinlein
Beware the fury of a patient woman.
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.
The future ain't what it used to be.
Ban the bomb. Save the world for conventional warfare.
Ask not for whom the bell tolls, let the machine get it.
And the pickles frolicked with the waffles, joyously.
Life is like a dog-sled team; If you ain't the lead dog, the scene never changes.
The more we disagree, the bigger the chance that at least one of us is right.
Insecurity is comparing our behind the scenes to others highlight reel.
He who laughs last found the dirty meaning.
Five-step methods are the surest sign of an uninspired plan.
The light at the end of a tunnel may be an oncoming train.
"The biggest disease today isn't leprosy or tuberculosis, but the feeling of being unwanted."-- Mother Theresa
Those who speak by the yard and think by the inch should be kicked by the foot.
"Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished."-- Goethe
The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.-- Steven Wright
"I'm not mad at the world... just at all the people in it."
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.
Is not that the nature of men and women--that the pleasure is in the learning of each other?
The problem with reality is the lack of background music.
Accuracy, n: The vice of being right.
Be alert. The world needs more lerts.
Make the most of yourself, because that's all the self you are going to get, buster.
"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
Only the good die young. Note the average age in Congress.
We accept the love we think we deserve
Stenderup's law: The sooner you fall behind, the more time you will have to catch up.
"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."
The revolution will NOT be televised.
The truth is not decided by democracy.
There are people so addicted to exaggeration that they can't tell the truth without lying.
Do unto others before they undo you.
Know thyself. If you need help, call the C.I.A.
"Bother," said the Borg, "We've assimilated Pooh."
"Making the simple complicated is easy. Making the complicated simple is brilliant."
The sooner you start to code, the longer the program will take.-- Roy Carlson
"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
Domestication is the enemy of romance.
"Play with each other. Play with yourselves. Just don't play with the squirrels, they bite."
Proof by omission: The reader may easily supply the details. The other 253 cases are analogous.
No one will ever win the battle of the sexes; there's too much fraternizing with the enemy.-- Henry Kissinger
Tact is the ability to tell a man he has an open mind when he has a hole in his head.
All New: The software is not compatible with any previous version.
"Many a man's reputation would not know his character if they met on the street."
"To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love."-- George Santayana
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.
The older I get, the more I think you ever learn is either further subtleties, or further distractions.
The probability of someone watching you is proportional to the stupidity of your action.
Cats are smarter than dogs. You can't make eight cats pull a sled through the snow.
Gina: "Isn't it customary for the suspect to leave the scene of the crime?"
Debra: "Definitely an amateur" (Empire Records)
"The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places."-- Hemingway
If it wasn't for the optimist the pessimist would never know how happy he isn't.
"One good turn gets most of the blankets"
Paul's Law: You can't fall off the floor.
Eat a live toad in the morning, and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.
The music is the magic carpet that the other things take naps on.-- Tori Amos
"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
The only way to amuse some people is to slip and fall on an icy pavement.
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)
"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
Just because you're not paranoid, doesn't mean they're not out to get you.-- The Register
On the sexes:
Brains times Beauty times Availability = Constant.
The chance of a lifetime is to be yourself.
The sun is like breasts - risky to look at unless you've got sunglasses.
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.
The reward for a job well done is more work.
One can't proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.
"Geologists know how to make the bedrock."
Do not meddle in the affairs of cats, for they are subtle and will piss on your computer.
QUOTE OF THE DAY: `
"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)
The sweetest of all sounds is praise.-- Xenophon
I get my kicks above the .sigline, Sunshine
If there is no such thing as justice then the best we can hope for is revenge
The only rose without thorns is friendship.
"Man gazing at the stars is proverbially at the mercy of the puddles in the road."-- Alexander Smith
"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
Sometimes you have more perspective than the situation, sometimes the situation has more perspective than you.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.-- Henry David Thoreau
Cat: Ethereal music wreathed in mystery.
How do you know if honesty is the best policy unless you've tried some of the others?
Sarchasm (n): The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
Where there is great love, there are always wishes.-- Willa Cather
Advisor: The guy who told you how to screw up.
The cost of living is going up, and the chance of living is going down.
Aftermath, n: The period following algebra.
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 only valid censorship of ideas is the right of people not to listen.-- Tommy Smothers
"I would rather believe that God did not exist than believe that He was indifferent."-- George Sand
Proof by eminent authority: I saw Karp in the elevator and he said it was probably NP-complete.
Renning's Maxim: Man is the highest animal. Man does the classifying.
The secret of happiness is not getting what you want but wanting what you get.
God, as some cynic has said, is always on the side which has the best football coach.-- Heywood Broun
Hope is the feeling you have that the feeling you have isn't permanent.
Idle hands are the air guitar's playground (Alas)
The best way to get rid of worries is to let them die of neglect.
If the brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't.
He who laughs last probably didn't understand the joke.
The way some people find fault, you'd think there was a reward.
Occam's eraser: The philosophical principle that even the simplest solution is bound to have something wrong with it.
Be the person you needed when you were younger.
355/113 -- Not the famous irrational number PI, but an incredible simulation.
The Pet Principle:
No matter which side of the door your dog or cat is on, it is the wrong side.
They don't make nostalgia like they used to.
"Well, to be fair I did have a couple of gadgets he probably didn't, like a teaspoon and an open mind."-- The Doctor
Bozone, n: The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating.
Some men are alive simply because it is against the law to kill them.-- Ed Howe
"Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt."-- Herbert Hoover
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)
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
Quantum mechanics: The dreams stuff is made of.
Deja moo: The feeling that you've heard this bull before.
Don't worry; it only seems kinky the first time.
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")
"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
"To the world you may be one person, but to one person you may be the world."
"Talents are best nurtured in solitude; character is best formed in the stormy billows of the world."-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.
Two guys walked into a bar. The third one ducked.
I want to die like my grandfather, peaceful and in my sleep - not screaming like the other people in the car.
In the fight between you and the world, back the world.-- Franz Kafka
Girls are such exquisite hell.-- Ovid
No one can feel as helpless as the owner of a sick goldfish.
"Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together."-- Anais Nin
"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
"They call him the Sand Spider"
"Why do they call him that?"
"Probably because it sounds scary." (True Lies)
The more things change, the more they stay insane.-- Tom Weller
Answer the phone naked. Callers will hear it in your voice.
It is a good thing to in your mind be able to seperate the artist from the art.
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.
pride is not the opposite of shame, but its source
Guru, n: A computer owner who can read the manual.
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.-- Oscar Wilde
In order to become the master the politician poses as the servant.-- Charles De Gaulle
Because these moments, as precious as they are, they're evil when they're gone.
Descartes described how his father taught him how to swim by throwing him into the Seine: "I sink, therefore I swam."
You must be the change you wish to see in the world.-- Gandhi
Nobody's creepy from the inside, Hazel. Some of them are sad, and some of them hurt, and some of them think they're the only real thing in the whole world. But they're not creepy.-- Neil Gaiman
Life is cheap. It's the accessories that kill you.
Adultery - two wrong people doing the right thing.
If the mind were exercised as much as the mouth, we would be a race of geniuses.
Theists think all gods but theirs are false. Atheists simply don't make an exception for the last one.
Piety, n: Reverence for the Supreme Being, based on His supposed resemblance to man.
Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.-- Aldous Huxley
The fewer clear facts you have in support of an opinion, the stronger your emotional attachment to that opinion.
"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)
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought"-- Basho
Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday.
If you're going to tell people the truth, you better make them laugh.
He was just... well, like a lot of madmen. Somewhat accurate view of the problem, really insane view of the solution. (Kid Radd)
I always used to wonder why the pope wore drag.
-- Tom Farrell
Who cares, as long as he looks faaabulous?!-- Gene Smith
"Laugh alone and the world thinks you're an idiot."
People often find it easier to be a result of the past than a cause of the future.
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
"Nothing in the world is friendlier than a wet dog."
"...the only place for 63,000 bugs is a rain forest"
"There is nothing wrong with the software that rm won't cure."-- Arnie Romo
"And the heat goes on... where the hand has been."-- Byrne/Eno
Never send a monster to do the work of an evil genius.
Politicians should be changed frequently, like diapers - and for much the same reason.
The difference between theory and practice is greater in practice than it is in theory.
One nice thing about egotists: They don't talk about other people.-- Lucille S. Harper
Learn from the mistakes of others. You won't live long enough to make them all yourself.
Alimony: the fee a woman charges for name-dropping.
"Nothing in man is more serious than his sense of humor; it is the sign that he wants all the truth."-- Mark Van Doren
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.
Pedestrian, n: The variable (and audible) part of the roadway for an automobile.
Most people deserve each other.
"To describe the beating of Egg Whites is almost as cheeky as advising how to lead a happy life."-- The Joy of Cooking
Men are like parking spaces: the good ones are taken and the rest are handicapped.
Education is what you get when you read the fine print; experience is what you get when you don't.-- Pete Seeger
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
Patageometry, n: The study of those mathematical properties that are invariant under brain transplants.
"The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug."-- Mark Twain
"So you want a realistic, down-to-earth show that's off-the-wall and full of magical robots?" (The Simpsons)
Honk if you've slept with Riker.
"The problem is not that there are problems. The problem is expecting otherwise and thinking that having problems is a problem."-- Theodore Rubin
"Sometimes the need to mess with their heads outweighs the millstone of humiliation."-- Fox Mulder (The X-Files)
Kisses are like tears. The only ones that are real are the ones you can't hold back.
The intensity comes from meaning, not from extremes.
It's not the men in my life, it's the life in my men.-- Mae West
Cashtration, n.: The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period.
"Microsoft is not the problem. Microsoft is the symptom."-- Eric S. Raymond
"If hackers ran the world, there'd be no war. Lots of accidents, maybe."
There has been opposition to every innovation in the history of man, with the possible exception of the sword.-- Benjamin Dana
The loom works perfectly well without the steam powered wig darner and shortbread cutter stapled to the side.-- Peter da Silva
Great Lover, n: A man who can breathe through his ears.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Kinky is when you use the whole chicken.
The principle difference between a cat and a lie is that the cat has only nine lives.
Adventure: The land between entertainment and panic.
I wouldn't touch the Metric System with a 3.048m pole.
"The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit."-- Maugham
The only substitute for good manners is fast reflexes.
"In all our searching, the only thing we found that makes the emptiness bearable, is each other" (Contact)
Why do people settle their minds? When they see or while they know that about 3 billion other people don't agree with them, why do they hardly consider a serious talk with one of them?
Democracy is the form of government where everyone gets what the majority deserves.
"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.�"
I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.
Sometimes I wake up grumpy, other times I let her sleep.
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
"Love makes you do the wacky"-- Willow
Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.
"Alcohol is the cause and the solution to many of life's problems."-- Homer Simpson
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.-- Steven Wright
The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.-- Anais Nin
"The great tragedy of science, the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact."-- Aldous Huxley
Whoever said women don't like porn just isn't talking to the right women. Or showing them the right porn.
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
The best way to accelerate hardware is at 9.8 m/sec/sec.
The Four Food Groups: Coffee, ice cream, beer and pizza.
"She says control it, then she says don't control it, then she says you're controlling the way she makes you crawl."-- Tori Amos ("She's Your Cocaine")
Confession is good for the soul only in the sense that a tweed coat is good for dandruff.-- Peter de Vries
"Television has lifted the manufacture of banality out of the sphere of handicraft and placed it in that of a major industry."-- Nathalie Sarraute
Well, there's a quantum computer that can factor [the number] 15, so those of you using 4-bit RSA should worry.-- Bruce Schneier
"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
The course of true love never did run smooth.-- Shakespeare
Sodd's Second Law: Sooner or later, the worst possible set of circumstances is bound to occur.
It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.-- Emerson
Never underestimate the falseness of a generalisation.
"We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are."-- Anais Nin
(as The Spice Girls play in background)
"What are they doing?"
"Psychological warfare." (Small Soldiers)
Even if you're paranoid, maybe the guy with the chainsaw really is after you.
Study the past, if you would divine the future.-- Confucius
"I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book."-- Groucho Marx
The question is not so much whether there is life on Mars as whether it will continue to be possible to live on Earth.
"I like to go to the beach and bury metal objects that say 'get a life' on them"
At the beginning and at the end of love, the two lovers are embarrassed to find themselves alone.-- La Bruyere
"Without freedom from the past, there is no freedom at all, because the mind is never new, fresh, innocent."
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.
If you can't be kind, at least have the decency to be vague.
The art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while Nature cures the disease.-- Voltaire
"People aren’t against you; they are for themselves."
You're probably the sort who would have Dorothy arrested for throwing water on the Wicked Witch of the West.-- Eric Holeman
"Programming graphics in X is like finding the square root of PI using Roman numerals."-- Henry Spencer
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."
It's a joke. Like the funny kind, but different.
Have you noticed the way people's intelligence capabilities decline sharply the minute they start waving guns around?-- Dr. Who
Destinesia: The act of entering a room and forgetting why.
Support bacteria - they're the only culture some people have.-- Steven Wright
The guns and the bombs, the rockets and the warships, are all symbols of human failure.-- Lyndon B Johnson
"Tact is the art of making a point without making an enemy."
"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
The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from.-- Andy Tanenbaum
Seeing is forgetting the name of that which one sees.-- Paul Valery
There are two ways spreading the light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.-- Edith Wharton
"This site is intended for people over 18, but only because kids shoot each other if they hear the word 'fuck'."
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 really matters is the name you succeed in imposing on the facts -- not the facts themselves.-- Cohen's Law
This must be morning. I never could get the hang of mornings.
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
The Two Rules of Success: 1. Don't tell everything you know.
Politics is storytelling. We just pick the one we like best.
"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
Q: What's tiny and yellow and very, very, dangerous?
A: A canary with the super-user password.
"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."
"When the people fear their government there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty."-- Thomas Jefferson
Normal is an illusion. What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly.-- Morticia Adams
Tell a man there are 300 billion stars in the universe and he'll believe you. Tell him a bench has wet paint on it and he'll have to touch to be sure.
"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
Frisbeetarianism: the belief that when you die, your soul goes up on the roof and gets stuck.
"The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad."-- Friedrick Nietzsche
The business of the mind is first and foremost the pure joy of knowing and comprehending, the pure joy of consciousness.-- Anais Nin
Nowadays, originality is the art of concealing your source.
The singing wasn't particularly good. The only word the singer appeared to know was "la," but she was making it work hard.-- Terry Pratchett (Wyrd Sisters)
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
"The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese."-- G. K. Chesterton
"There is nobody so irritating as somebody with less intelligence and more sense than we have."-- Don Herold
The goodness of morals depends upon what the morals say, not just the fact that they are morals.-- Rob Bernardo
"Dogs believe they are human. Cats believe they are God."
Heller's Law: The first myth of management is that it exists.
Dante Hicks: Theoretically, people see money on the counter, and no one around, they think they're being watched.
Veronica: Honesty through paranoia. (Clerks)
There's a nut loose on your keyboard.
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)
Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.
Q: Why did the astrophysicist order three hamburgers?
A: Because he was hungry.
Music is the science of manipulating emotion through sound.-- Angus Gray
"I'd like to meet the person who invented sex and see what they're working on now."
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
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.
There's so much comedy on television. Does that cause comedy in the streets?-- Dick Cavett
Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction.-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
My opinions may have changed, but not the fact that I am right.
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
Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same.-- Oscar Wilde
Come, let us retract the foreskin of misconception and apply the wire brush of enlightenment.
"Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind."-- Terry Pratchett
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
The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.-- Albert Einstein
Lunatic Asylum, n: The place where optimism most flourishes.
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
Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.-- H. L. Mencken
Cigarette, n: A fire at one end, a fool at the other, and a bit of tobacco inbetween.
"Mobile phones are the only subject on which men boast about who's got the smallest."-- Neil Kinnock
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
"As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand."
-- Josh Billings
If you can't take the heat, don't tickle the dragon.-- Scott Fahlman
Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.-- Oscar Wilde
The Feynman Problem Solving Algorithm:
1. Write down the problem.
2. Think very hard.
3. Write down the answer.
More to be feared than ignorance is the pretense of knowledge.
Things written above an urinal: 'The future is in your hands!'
The only thing that separates us from the animals is our ability to accessorize. (Steel Magnolias)
There's no problem so large it can't be solved by killing the user off, deleting their files, closing their account and reporting their REAL earnings to the IRS.-- Bastard Operator From Hell
There must be more to life than sitting there wondering if there is more to life.
Life is like a beautiful melody, only the lyrics are messed up.
"They keep saying the right person will come along. I think mine got hit by a truck."
Stretch pants - the garment that made skiing a spectator sport.-- Anonymous
The definition of easy work is work that someone else has to do.
Who cares whether the glass is half full or half empty? Shouldn't the question be who's been drinking out of my glass?
The phrase *I* like is: "Code as if the next guy to read it is a raving psychopath who knows where you live."
Following that by passing out a sheet asking them to list their names and addresses is optional, but recommended.
-- improving code quality - lessons from the SDM
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
"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
Patience is something you admire greatly in the driver behind you but not in the one ahead of you.
Law of Cat Landing:
A cat will always land in the softest place possible; often the mid-section of an unsuspecting, reclining human.
"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."
I'm an apatheist. The question is no longer interesting, and the answer no longer matters.-- petro (a.s.r)
Never run from anything immortal. It only attracts their attention. (The Last Unicorn)
"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)
Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.-- Andre Gide
Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves.-- Abraham Lincoln
Teacher's First Law of Grading Lab Papers: If an experiment has perfect results, the student has cheated.
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)
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
Oh yeah? You wanna step out of the giant robot and say that again?
“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
�...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
"Before you go and criticize the younger generation, just remember who raised them."
"The most merciful thing in the world...is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents."-- H.P. Lovecraft
America was founded by drug smugglers -- rum was the drug, but smugglers nonetheless.
"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."
"The stone age was marked by man's clever use of crude tools; the information age, to date, has been marked by man's crude use of clever tools."
"Question Authority. They usually know where the bathroom is."-- Daria
I do not like the man: he has all of the virtues I detest and none of the vices I admire.-- Winston Churchill
"Why do they lock gas station bathrooms? Are they afraid someone will clean them?"
The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.-- H. L. Mencken
"In America--as elsewhere--free speech is confined to the dead."-- Mark Twain
"There is no cause so right that one cannot find a fool following it." (Niven's Law #16)
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)
"Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed."-- Mark Twain
'Mundus vult decipi'
(the world wants to be deceived)
"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
"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
Selfish, adj.: Devoid of consideration for the selfishness of others.-- Ambrose Bierce
"In each of us are places where we have never gone. Only by pressing the limits do you ever find them."-- Dr. Joyce Brothers
I'm extraordinarily patient, provided I get my own way in the end.
"Simple pleasures are the last refuge of the complex."-- Oscar Wilde
"Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self-solicitude is the enemy of well-being."-- John Updike
"The bigger the information media, the less courage and freedom they allow. Bigness means weakness."-- Eric Sevareid
A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory.-- Steven Wright
The defect of equality is that we only desire it with our superiors.-- Henry Becque
Science may have found a cure for most evils, but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all--the apathy of human beings.-- Helen Keller
"You don't love a woman because she is beautiful, but she is beautiful because you love her."
"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
The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.-- Niels Bohr
"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
I'm sick of tattoos, sick of piercings, sick of temporary tattoos. They are the white stilettos of the '90s.-- Shirley Manson
"Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative."-- Oscar Wilde
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
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.
"We are at times too ready to believe that the present is the only possible state of things."-- Marcel Proust
"Do not the most moving moments of our lives find us without words?"
Science is the belief that we don't need belief to know most things.
Never underestimate the human capacity for cognitive dissonance.
"Confronted with the choice, the American people would choose the policeman's truncheon over the anarchist's bomb.-- Spiro T. Agnew
The herd instinct among economists makes sheep look like independent thinkers.
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
Given the pace of technology, I propose we leave math to the machines and go play outside. (Calvin & Hobbes)
"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)."
People must think I'm a mushroom. They constantly keep me in the dark and feed me bullshit.
Many a man fails to become a thinker for the sole reason that his memory is too good.-- Friedrich Nietzsche
The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.-- Mark Twain
X.400 is the mail system of the future, and I hope it stays that way.-- Erik Fair
"That's the trouble with women these days. They act like men and want to be treated like women" (An American in Paris)
"Character may be manifested in the great moments, but it is made in the small ones."-- Phillips Brooks
"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music."-- Friedrich Nietzsche
Why am I so soft in the middle when the rest of my life is so hard?-- Paul Simon
If all the world's a stage, I want to operate the trap door.-- Paul Beatty
"One of the CIA's few endearing traits is its penchant for making headlines. It is the world's most fully headlined secret agency."
You're just jealous because the voices are talking to me and not you.
"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!"
Being in a nudist colony probably takes all the fun out of Halloween.
If I have seen further than other men, it is by stepping on their glasses.-- Michael Swaine
"There's nothing like desire to prevent the things one says from having any resemblance to the things in one's mind."-- Marcel Proust
"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
Please storyteller, pull a tale from your pocket,
Spin me a story from your coat-tails so bare,
For my heart has turned cold, and my dreams are too old,
And I need to know the magic's still there-- Heather Alexander (Storyteller)
Diplomacy is the art of saying "nice doggy" until you can find a rock.
Never wrestle with a pig. You'll both get dirty, and the pig likes it.
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
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.
The first half of our life is ruined by our parents and the second half by our children.-- Clarence Darrow
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
Decafalon, n.: The grueling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.
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")
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)
"The human mind treats a new idea the way the body treats a strange protein; it rejects it."-- P. B. Medawar
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)
"The need of exercise is a modern superstition, invented by people who ate too much and had nothing to think about."-- George Santayana
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
Humor is just another defense against the universe-- Mel Brooks
Every time I have to pipe something into awk I get this mental picture of a big fat seagull with stdin connected at the wrong end.-- Arther van der Harg (a.s.r.)
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 state doesn't do what I tell it to do, which is fair, because I don't do what the state tells me to do.-- Desmodus Rotundus
A friend is one who knows you and loves you just the same.-- Elbert Hubbard
The truth shall make you free, but first it shall make you angry.
The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech.-- George Bernard Shaw
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
"I'd probably be famous now if I wasn't such a good waitress."-- Jane Siberry
"It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets."-- Voltaire
Drugs may lead to nowhere, but at least it's the scenic route.-- Steven Wright
"Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable."-- Henry Louis Mencken
"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
Always behave like a duck: keep calm and unruffled on the surface but paddle like the devil underneath.-- Jacob Braude
"When ET left, he told Drew Barrymore to be good. Boy, is he gonna be surprised when he comes back."-- Paul Rocci
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
Rincewind rather enjoyed times like this. They convinced him that he wasn't mad because, if he was mad, that left no word at all to describe some of the people he met.-- Terry Pratchett (Sourcery)
Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.-- Susan Sontag
"If houses were built the way software is built,
the first woodpecker would bring down civilization."
Never argue with an idiot. They drag you down to their level then beat you with experience.
Brought to you by the people who made "out of context" a household word.
The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation.-- George Bernard Shaw
"The worst thing about censorship is [deleted by censorship bereau]."
"The shortest distance between two points is under construction."-- Noelie Alito
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)
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
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."-- Nietzsche
A mathematician is a machine for converting coffee into theorems.
"Success consists of doing the common things of life uncommonly well."
Maybe love is letting people be just what they want to be. The door always must be left unlocked.
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
"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
"A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything."-- Nietzsche
The default Magic Word, Abracadabra, actually is a corruption of the Hebrew phrase ha-Bracha dab'ra which means "pronounce the blessing".
I've learned that you cannot make someone love you.
All you can do is stalk them and hope they panic and give in.
"Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them all."-- Henry David Thoreau
When you live in the shadow of insanity, the appearance of another mind that thinks and talks as yours does is something close to a blessed event.-- R. Pirsig
"Once a new technology rolls over you, if you're not part of the steamroller, you're part of the road."-- Stewart Brand
Love is like an hourglass, with the heart filling up as the brain empties.-- Jules Renord
Mary had a crypto key,
she kept it in escrow,
and everything that Mary said,
the Feds were sure to know.
"God, so atrocious in the Old Testament, so attractive in the New--the Jekyll and Hyde of sacred romance."-- Mark Twain
Commitment can be illustrated by a breakfast of ham and eggs. The chicken was involved; the pig was committed.
"Ergotism is what you get if you overuse the word "therefore". Egotism on the other hand is a form of "I" strain."-- Paul Martin
Choconiverous, adj: Biting off the head of the chocolate Easter bunny first.-- Rich Hall ("Sniglets")
Indifference is the key when dealing with a narcissistic megalomaniac.
"She who has the biggest sword gets to be the biggest bitch."-- Kymberli Morris
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.
Before Xerox, five carbons were the maximum extension of anybody's ego.
C++, the language in which only friends can access your private members.
Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.-- E. B. White
"To create man was a fine and original idea; but to add the sheep was tautology."-- Mark Twain
"The fickleness of the women whom I love is only equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me."-- George Bernard Shaw
Moral behavior is survival behavior above the individual level.-- Robert Heinlein
In the end, man is not entirely guilty — he did not start history. Nor is he wholly innocent — he continues it.-- Albert Camus
"There is a pleasure sure in being mad which none but madmen know."-- Dryden
"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)
Talk to your kids about sex. Tell them just how absolutely incredible it really is. (The Covert Comic)
"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 ..."
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
"It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution."-- Oscar Wilde
"As long as the music's loud enough, we won't hear the world falling apart."-- Derek Jarman
Reason, v.i: To weight probabilities in the scales of desire.-- Ambrose Bierce
"Opportunity may knock only once, but temptation leans on the doorbell."
Ford was humming something. It was just one note repeated at intervals. He was hoping that somebody would ask him what he was humming, but nobody did. If anybody had asked him he would have said he was humming the first line of a Noel Coward song called "Mad About the Boy" over and over again. It would then have been pointed out to him that he was only singing one note, to which he would have replied that for reasons which he hoped would be apparent, he was omitting the "about the boy" bit. He was annoyed that nobody asked.-- Douglas Adams (The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy)
"Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know."-- Ernest Hemingway
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
The good critic is he who narrates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces.-- Anatole France
"Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews."-- John Updike
Use the best: Linux for servers, Mac for graphics, Windows for Solitaire.
"There is no man that is worth your tears. When you find one who is, he won't make you cry."
"What do you give a man who has everything?" the pretty teenager asked her mother.
"Encouragement, dear..." she replied.
The world is full of willing people; some willing to work, the rest willing to let them.-- Robert Frost
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
Very funny, Scotty. Now beam down my clothes.
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)
I used to have a handle on life, then it broke.
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)
Organic chemistry is the chemistry of carbon compounds.
Biochemistry is the study of carbon compounds that crawl.-- Mike Adams
"The way I play is a bit torturous but... it's the only way I know how to play."-- Tori Amos
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
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.
Is there anything safer than TV-style seriousness--i.e., delivering the conventional wisdom as if it were the deeply important truth?-- Pauline Kael
Adult: A person that has stopped growing at both ends but not in the middle.
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")
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))
I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.-- Douglas Adams
He looked at me as if I was a side dish he hadn't ordered.
"The BBC is like a sausage machine: whatever you put in one end, you get Dr. Who out the other".-- Neil Gaiman
"No man chooses evil because it is evil;
he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks."-- Mary Wollstonecraft
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.
The advantage of emotions is that they lead us astray.-- Oscar Wilde
Conservative: a man who believes nothing should be done for the first time.
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
If you're not part of the freaks, you're part of the boredom.-- Perry Farrell
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
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."
Law of Hydrodynamics: When a body is immersed in water, the telephone rings.
Please do not duck the next time the clue-by-four swings your way.-- Ben Browning
The primary difference between a man and a woman is that a man gets his self-esteem when a woman says "yes" and a woman gets hers when she says "no". (Amy's Orgasm)
"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."
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.)
"The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he really is very good, in spite of all the people who say he is very good."-- Robert Graves
"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
Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds.-- Susan Sontag
Nine-tenths of the people were created so you would want to be with the other tenth.-- Horace Walpole
"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
"Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere."-- G. K. Chesterton
What do people mean when they say the computer went down on them?-- Marilyn Pittman
"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."-- Oscar Wilde
Spirtle, n: The fine stream from a grapefruit that always lands right in your eye.-- Rich Hall ("Sniglets")
The longer I live, the more I see that I am never wrong about anything, and that all the pains I have so humbly taken to verify my notions have only wasted my time.-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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.
A man said to the universe, "Sir, I exist."
"However," replied the universe, "the fact has not created in me a sense of obligation."-- Stephan Crane ("War is Kind," 1899)
Mom, romance is dead. It was acquired in a hostile takeover by Hallmark and Disney, homogenized, then sold off piece by piece.-- Lisa (The Simpsons)
In the past, men created witches; now they create mental patients.-- Tom Szasz
"Women are like cell phones. They like to be held and talked to, but push the wrong button, and you'll be disconnected."
The moral of the story is that with a contrived example, you can prove anything. Oops. No, that's not what I meant to say.-- Joel Spolsky
Theology is never any help; it is searching in a dark cellar at midnight for a black cat that isn't there.
"*snort* I'm waiting for the day when people realise that mainstream is a subset of SF without the speculation..."-- Emmet O'Brien
Education, then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great machinery.-- Horace Mann
Bring ideas in and entertain them royally, for one of them may be the king.-- Mark Van Doren
There are no shortcuts to any place worth going.
Insanity is the exception in individuals. In groups, parties, people, and times, it is the rule.-- Friedrich Nietzsche
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")
"The first thing to remember about Unix is that nothing is ever spelled correctly."-- Steve Lidie
The world that we have made as a result of the level of thinking that we have done so far, has created problems we cannot solve at the level of thinking at which we created them.-- Albert Einstein
...postmodernity, once the plaything of smarty-pants French guys, in truth belongs to the engagingly stupid. (Newsweek)
"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."
Nothing is so smiple that it can't be screwed up.
The nice men are ugly.
The handsome men are not nice.
The handsome and nice men are gay.
The handsome, nice and heterosexual men are married.
The men who are not so handsome, but are nice, have no money.
The nice, semi-handsome men with money think we are only after their money.
The men without money are after our money.
The handsome men, who are not so nice and somewhat heterosexual, don't think we are beautiful enough.
The men who think we are beautiful, that are heterosexual, somewhat nice, and have money, are cowards.
The men who are somewhat handsome, somewhat nice, have some money, and are heterosexual, are shy and NEVER MAKE THE FIRST MOVE.
The men who never make the first move automatically lose interest in us when we make the first move.
Technology is a way of organizing the universe so that man doesn't have to experience it.-- Max Frisch
The weirder you are, the better you have to be if you still want to get paid.-- Ben Aveling
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)
"The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do."-- Walter Bagehot
Politics is like coaching a football team. You have to be smart enough to understand the game but not smart enough to lose interest.
"Men have fiendishly conceived a heaven only to find it insipid, and a hell only to find it ridiculous."-- George Santayana
"Documentation is the castor oil of programming. Managers know it must be good because the programmers hate it so much."
What is wanted is not the will to believe but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.-- Bertrand Russell
Bathquake, n: The violent quake that rattles the entire house when the water faucet is turned on to a certain point.-- Rich Hall ("Sniglets")
As to marriage or celibacy, let a man take which course he will he will be sure to repent it.-- Socrates
"Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim."-- Bertrand Russell
Sleep is for wimps. Happy, healthy, well-rested wimps, but wimps nonetheless.
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
"The murals in restaurants are on a par with the food in museums."-- Peter De Vries
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
"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)
"What is a committee? A group of the unwilling, picked from the unfit, to do the unnecessary."-- Richard Harkness
"Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea."-- Robert A. Heinlein
Love thine enemies... it really pisses them off.
Jason squared his shoulders, drew the Sword of - I couldn't give a toss what it's supposed to be called, he said to himself, I shall call it Freckles - and took one step forward.-- Tom Holt ("Ye Gods!")
There are only two kinds of programming languages: those people always bitch about and those nobody uses.-- Bjarne Stroustrup
"The savage bows down to idols of wood and stone: the civilized man to idols of flesh and blood."-- George Bernard Shaw
"I loathe people who keep dogs. They are cowards who haven't got the guts to bite people themselves."-- August Strindberg
"The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions."-- Susan Sontag
Religion often gets credit for curing rascals when old age is the real medicine.
The senior wizard in a world of magic had the same prospects of long-term employment as a pogo stick tester in a minefield.-- Terry Pratchett (Moving Pictures)
The avalanche has already started. It is too late for the pebbles to vote.-- Ambassador Kosh
"Here's a horrible thought: You know how dumb the average person is? Well, half the human race is even dumber than that..."
Pride is what we have. Vanity is what others have.
Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.-- Mark Twain
Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.
-- Oscar Wilde
He said "It's all in your head", and I said "So's everything" but he didn't get it /
I thought he was a man but he was just a little boy.-- Fiona Apple (Paper Bag)
The next time you feel like downloading 'The Little Engine That Could' into a weapon of mass destruction: Don't.
"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
Remember, to be forewarned is to be forearmed, and to be forearmed is to be half octopus.-- Gene Smith
Children seldom misquote you. In fact, they usually repeat word for word what you shouldn't have said.
"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)
"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
On the menu of a Swiss restaurant:
"Our wines leave you nothing to hope for."
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.-- Oscar Wilde
"To live outside the law you must be honest."-- Bob Dylan
Few people are successful unless a lot of other people want them to be.-- Charles Brower
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
Auntie Em--Hate you. Hate Kansas. Taking the dog.-- Dorothy
As the main says, it has yet to be proven intelligence has any survival value.
Whether it deserves some respect is another matter.
The effort of using machines to mimic the human mind has always struck me as rather silly. I would rather use them to mimic something better.-- Edsger Dijkstra
"We all suffer from the preoccupation that there exists ... in the loved one, perfection."-- Sidney Poitier
"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)
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.-- Bertrand Russell
No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.-- H. L. Mencken
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)
"Every man has his follies, and often they are the most interesting thing he has got."-- Josh Billings
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 secret of staying young is to live honestly, eat slowly, and lie about your age."-- Lucille Ball
I told my girlfriend last night how much I loved her, and she said that I must have been out drinking again. I asked her why she would say that, and she said, 'Because I'm your father.'-- Dave George
Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.
-- Henry Brooks Adams
"Show me the books he loves and I shall know the man far better than through mortal friends."-- S. Weir Mitchell
I'll say it again for the logic impaired.-- Larry Wall
Manners are one of the truly lost causes.-- John Simon
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
The two women exchanged the kind of glance women use when no knife is handy.-- Ellery Queen
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
My life has a superb cast but I can't figure out the plot.
-Ashleigh Brilliant
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
"If man could be crossed with the cat, it would improve man but deteriorate the cat."-- Mark Twain
On applause: They named it Ovation from the Latin ovis, a sheep.-- Plutarch
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.
"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
He believes in the fine arts with all the earnestness of a man who does not understand them.-- George Bernard Shaw
"For flavor, instant sex will never supercede the stuff you have to peel and cook."-- Quentin Crisp
"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."
A city is a large community where people are lonesome together-- Herbert Prochnow
Let not young minds be smothered out before
They do quaint deeds and fully flaunt their pride
It is the world's one crime its babes grow dull
Its poor are ox-like, limp, and leaden-eyed.
Not that they starve, but that they starve so dreamlessly.
Not that they sow, but that they seldom reap.
Not that they serve, but that they have no gods to serve.
Not that they die, but that they die like sheep.-- Vachel Lindsay
"The tragedy of life is not that it ends so soon, but that we wait so long to begin it."
The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.-- Edsger Dijkstra
A tall man with long grey hair falling untidily over the collar of his dark blue suit leaned against the parapet eating an ice cream. Although impeccably dressed, he was palpably all wrong, and the two policemen looked at each other with pleasant anticipation.
"Drugs?" suggested the first policeman.
"More like dirty books," said the other. "If he's armed, it's my turn."
"It's always your turn," grumbled his companion. The first policeman shrugged his shoulders.
"Oh, all right then," he said. "But I get to drive back to the station."-- Tom Holt ("Expecting Someone Taller")
"The degree of normality in a database is inversely proportional to that of its DBA"
Democracy according to the NRA: Firearms are necessary to protect individual liberties; most of all the right to own firearms.
John (still confused): "They're not real. They're cartoons. This is reality."
The Warners (looking at each other, then at the audience): "We won't tell him if you won't." (Farscape: Toonscape)
On-line, adj: The idea that a human being should always be accessible to a computer.
'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)
Behaviorism is the art of pulling habits out of rats.-- O'Neill
"I sound like a fruitcake sitting here saying all this shit."-- Trent Reznor
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
People who claim they don't let little things bother them have never slept in a room with a single mosquito.
Arithmetic: An obscure art no longer practiced in the world's developed countries.
Sign in a hotel elevator in Paris:
"Please leave your values at the front desk."
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 computer world is like a great big toy store. But all the toys are broken."-- Steve Witham
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
"Mystical explanations are considered deep. The truth is that they are not even superficial."-- Friedrich Nietzsche
"So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked what is the root of all money?"-- Ayn Rand
To err is human, but when the eraser wears out ahead of the pencil, your're overdoing it.-- J. Jenkins
As the cheetah said to the chameleon:
You can hide, but you can't run!-- Alan Williams
"The more I watch television, the more I wonder why I'm not already supreme ruler of Earth."-- Dogbert (Dilbert)
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)
"Programming is like sex: one mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life."-- Michael Sinz
A winning formula can be obliterated simply by the change to an ingorant new manager.
Hang in there, retirement is only thirty years away!
Most children grow up to be adults in spite of their parents, not because of them.
Speer's 1st Law of Proofreading: The visibility of an error is inversely proportional to the number of times you have looked at it.
When it comes to thought some people stop at nothing.
"Speak when you're angry and you'll make the best speech you'll ever regret."-- Henry Ward Beecher
"Ah," said the president [Reagan] with great lucidity, "It's true we shipped weapons to Iran, but they were defensive weapons."
If the man had a brain, he'd play with it.-- Molly Ivins
Don't talk to me about the public not being able to stomach the abnormal, man -- most people get too used to lying to themselves about anything uncomfortable at so early an age that they themselves are not a reliable source.-- Susan Juroff
Everything we hear is an opinion, not fact. Everything we see is an perspective, not the truth.-- Marcus Aurelius
Take my word for it, the silliest woman can manage a clever man, but it needs a very clever woman to manage a fool.-- Kipling
"Dreams are the answers to questions that we haven't yet figured out how to ask."-- Fox Mulder (The X Files)
Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.-- George Santayana
Men are all alike in their promises. It is only in their deeds that they differ.-- Moliere
"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)
If truth is beauty, how come no one has their hair done in the library?-- Lily Tomlin
I know Karate, Kung Fu, and 47 other dangerous words.
...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)
"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)
The average, healthy, well-adjusted adult gets up at seven-thirty in the morning feeling just plain terrible.-- Jean Kerr
Artificial Intelligence: the art of making computers that behave like the ones in movies.-- Bill Bulko
Strip away the phony tinsel of Hollywood and you find the real tinsel underneath.-- Oscar Levant
Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable.
"Make lots of money", "enjoy the work", "operate within the law": choose 2-- Brian Anderson
Do not go gentle into that good night... Rage, rage against the dying of the light.-- Dylan Thomas
Men are like a fine wine.
They start out as grapes, and it's up to women to stomp the living shit out of them until they turn into something acceptable to have dinner with.
The two most common elements in the Universe are hydrogen and stupidity.-- Harlan Ellison
Sometimes I wonder if men and women really suit each other. Perhaps they should live next door and just visit now and then.-- Katharine Hepburn
C gives you enough rope to hang yourself. C++ also gives you the tree object to tie it to.
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)
Tell you what. When the vast majority of straight folks in this country learn how to have a private life privately, learn how to "just be themselves without telling it to everybody", why then I'll try to learn from them how to do the same.-- Elaine May
The greatest possible mint of style is to make the words absolutely disappear into the thought.-- Nathaniel Hawthorne
Practical philosophy: The glass is neither half empty nor half full. It is twice as large as it needs to be.
Ellen Ripley: Whenever he says anything, you say, "right," Brett. You know that?
Brett: Right. (Alien)
Absent, adj: Exposed to the attacks of friends and acquaintances; defamed; slandered.
"Que sera, seratonin! (Meep.)"-- Mercy
The less people know about how sausages and laws are made, the better they'll sleep at night.-- Otto Von Bismarck
"All children are morbid. It is their one saving grace."-- Truman Capote
Primus in orbe Deus fecit timor.
"It was fear that introduced gods into the world."
"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)
First law of debate: Never argue with a fool. People might not know the difference.
There is no snooze button on a cat who wants breakfast.
Those who say they 'sleep like a baby' haven't got one.
The truth of a proposition has nothing to do with its credibility. And vice versa.-- Robert A. Heinlein
The past does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.-- Mark Twain
There are lots of things I'd like to be someday, but "normal" is definitely not one of them.-- Nelson Minar
There are multitudes in me. But not if I have to behave.
Some mornings, it's just not worth chewing through the leather straps.-- Emo Philips
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.
Take it from the staff of a five-cat house: A group of cats is a "conceit." They'd like to be a "pride" but that would fool no one.-- Morely Dotes
On going to war over religion:
You're basically killing each other to see who's got the better imaginary friend.
"Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go."-- Oscar Wilde
Bees are very busy souls
They have no time for birth controls
And that is why in times like these
There are so many Sons of Bees.
"A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject."-- Winston Churchill
"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
All esoteric teachings seek to apprehend the unseen happenings in the psyche, and all claim supreme authority for themselves.-- Carl Jung
"The people I distrust most are those who want to improve our lives but have only one course of action."-- Frank Herbert
"The essence of intelligence is skill in extracting meaning from everyday experience."
"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
Be careful of the closeness of the signs lunch and lesbian. If you sign, "I'm hungry, let's eat lesbians", you should be sure that's what you meant.-- Steve Eastman
It is man's natural sickness to believe that he possesses the Truth.-- Blaise Pascal
Sleep deprivation is fun -- you see such pretty colors.
"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
Ask anything of men. Ask them to achieve wealth, fame, love, brutality, murder, self-sacrifice. But don't ask them to achieve self-respect. They will hate your soul.-- Dominique (The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand)
'Impossible' tends to be an opinion rather than a fact.
"I am not part of the problem; I am a Republican."-- Dan Quayle
The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, 'Is there a meaning to music?' My answer would be, 'Yes.' And 'Can you state in so many words what the meaning is? My answer to that would be, 'No.'-- Aaron Copland
"Men show their character in nothing more clearly than by what they find laughable."
"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
"To limit the press is to insult a nation; to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves."-- Claude Adrien Helvetius
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
The haunting fragrance of her mysterious perfume lingered with me long after the blinding sting of her pepper spray had faded.-- Nick DeCamp
"I picked up a Magic 8-Ball the other day and it said 'Outlook not so good.' I said, 'Sure, but Microsoft still ships it.'"
"The imposition of stigma is the commonest form of violence used in democratic societies."-- R. A. Pinker
Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there.-- Will Rogers
You think Oedipus had a problem--Adam was Eve's mother.
"The most overlooked advantage to owning a computer is that if they foul up, there's no law against whacking them around a little."-- Porterfield
Belief is that which explains that we cannot reason. Therefore it is almost impossible to change someone's belief.
Motrin and espresso. The breakfast of champions.-- Sweet Poly
"The country has charms only for those not obliged to stay there."-- Edouard Manet
We may begin to see reality differently simply because the computer ... provides a different angle on reality.-- Heinz Pagels
"Use what talent you possess: the woods would be very silent if no birds sang except those that sang best."-- Henry Van Dyke
"All the parts falling off this car are of the very finest British manufacture"-- Bumper sticker
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
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)
We think in language, therefore the quality of our thoughts can only ever be as good as the quality of our language.-- George Carlin
The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears this is true.-- James Branch Cabell
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
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
His philosophy was a mixture of three famous schools -- the Cynics, the Stoics and the Epicureans -- and summed up all three of them in his famous phrase, `You can't trust any bugger further than you can throw him, and there's nothing you can do about it, so let's have a drink.'-- Terry Pratchett
Headline: Iraqi Head Seeks Arms
Notice in a hotel lobby in Bucharest:
"The lift is being fixed for the next day. During that time we regret that you will be unbearable."
"[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?"
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
So just what are time flies, and why do they like an arrow?
Can there be, when you think about it, a more improbable sentiment than 'Get fucked!'? We might as well snarl 'Make a lot of money!' or 'Have a nice day!'-- Bill Bryson (The Mother Tongue)
This is one of those episodes which makes you want to call up the screenwriter and ask to see their slash. `Cause you know they write it.-- Rhipodon Society
Of the delights of this world, man cares most for sexual intercourse, yet he has left it out of his heaven.-- Mark Twain
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
Dead men tell no tales, but then, neither do mimes.-- Wade Kwon
"The final delusion is the belief that one has lost all delusions."-- Maurice Chapelain
"On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good and not quite all the time."-- George Orwell
Genies rarely have nightmares, for the same reason that elephants don't usually worry about being trampled underfoot. With the possible exception of bottles, there's nothing in the cosmos large enough or malicious enough to frighten them, or stupid enough to try.-- Tom Holt ("Djinn Rummy")
He flung himself flat on the swaying roof, held out the crossbow, shut his eyes and fired.
In accordance with ancient narrative practice, the shot ricocheted off someone's helmet and brought down an innocent bird some distance away, whose only role was to expire with a suitable humorous squawk.-- Terry Pratchett (The Last Continent)
A GUI is to a command-line as a TV is to a book.-- Scott Hess
The human language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out a tune for a dancing bear, when we hope with our music to move the stars.-- Gustave Flaubert
"There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart's desire. The other is to gain it."-- George Bernard Shaw
Some women get excited about nothing, and then marry him.
We are always too busy for our children; we never give them the time or interest they deserve. We lavish gifts upon them; but the most precious gift - our personal association, which means so much to them - we give grudgingly.-- Mark Twain
Among economists, the real world is often a special case.-- Horngren
"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
This is a work of fiction. All the characters in it, human and otherwise, are imaginary, excepting only certain of the fairy folk, whom it might be unwise to offend by casting doubts on their existence. Or lack thereof.-- Neil Gaiman ("The Books of Magic")
Since before the Earth was formed and before the sun burned hot in space, cosmic forces of inexorable power have been working relentlessly toward this moment in space-time -- you receiving this fortune.
I trusted him like a brother -- which is to say, not at all.
"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!'"
Isn't it interesting that the same people who laugh at science fiction listen to weather forecasts and economists?-- Kelvin Throop III
Aquadextrous, adj: Possessing the ability to turn the bathtub faucet on and off with your toes.-- Rich Hall ("Sniglets")
Be one of those upon whom nothing is lost.-- Henry James
Sometimes you have to bite people hard on the lip before they realize you're not kissing them, so keenly do they yearn for approval.-- Jess Anderson
It is a well known fact that warriors and wizards do not get along, because one side considers the other side to be a collection of bloodthirsty idiots who can't walk and think at the same time, while the other side is naturally suspicious of a body of men who mumble a lot and wear long dresses. Oh, say the wizards, if we're going to be like that, then, what about all those studded collars and oiled muscles down at the Young Men's Pagan Association? To which the heroes reply, that's a pretty good allegation from a bunch of wimpsoes who won't go near a woman on account, can you believe it, of their mystical power being sort of drained out. Right, say the wizards, that just about does it, you and your leather posing pouches. Oh yeah, say the the heroes, why don't you...-- Terry Pratchett (The Light Fantastic)
Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on.-- Winston Churchill
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
"And if you give us any more trouble, I shall visit you in the small hours and put a bat up your nightdress."-- Basil Fawlty
AQUARIUS (Jan 20 - Feb 18)
You have an inventive mind and are inclined to be progressive. You lie a great deal. On the other hand, you are inclined to be careless and impractical, causing you to make the same mistakes over and over again. People think you are stupid.
'I think,' he said slowly, 'that the only reason people think you can't kill a vampire by shoving its head up its own arse is because nobody's ever actually tried it. What do you think, guys?'-- Tom Holt ("My Hero")
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)
Luxury is the main cause of boredom; Boredom is a main cause of extreme thoughts, eg. violence.
"Warning: Dates in Calendar are closer than they appear."
"[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)
The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.-- Dorothy Parker
Fanaticism consists of redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.-- George Santayana
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."
[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
Why shouldn't truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction after all has to make sense, right?
Why can't some people take a joke? Well, maybe because they're honest, and the joke doesn't belong to them.-- Matt Diamond
"Mankind will someday realize that we are actually in contact with the dead and with the other world, whatever it is; right now we could predict, if we only exerted enough mental will, what is giong to happen within the next hundred years and be able to take steps to avoid all kinds of catastrophes. When a man dies he undergoes a mutation in his brain that we know nothing about now but which will be very clear someday if scientists get on the ball. The bastards right now are only interested in seeing if they can blow up the world."-- Bull (On the Road)
The human animal differs from the lesser primates in his passion for lists of "Ten Best".-- H. Allen Smith
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?-- T. S. Eliot
There's old proverbs to suit about anything you want to do.
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.
Dustin Pons, an American high-school student who attended a Soviet school for three weeks, as quoted in the New York Times: "American teenagers are more socially advanced. For instance, in their free time Soviets would rather read a book or walk in the park or play the piano. American teenagers would probably go out and watch TV, go to a movie, or something more actively inclined." ("The Progressive")
"Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial 'we'."-- Mark Twain
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')
The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves which make us wonder at the possibility that there may be something to them we are missing.-- Gamel Abdel Nasser
"The greatest happiness of life it the conviction that we are loved, loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves."-- Victor Hugo
Psychiatrists say that one out of four people are mentally ill. Check three friends. If they're OK, chances are you're the one.
Stand and fight, you misbegotten spawn of the perverse breeding between a pixie and a squirrel!
I dread success. To have succeeded is to have finished one's business on earth, like the male spider, who is killed by the female the moment he has succeeded in his courtship. I like a state of continual becoming, with a goal in front and not behind.-- George Bernard Shaw
I think the strangest (or, perhaps, at least the most inappropriate) conversation I've ever had during sex with anyone was a long discussion (punctuated by the obvious noises) of analytic means of setting a bound on the primality of generalised Fibonacci numbers.-- Kay Dekker
"Love is not the dying note of a twisted violin - it's the triumphant twang of a bedspring."-- S.J. Perelman
"The west won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-westerners never do."-- Samuel P. Huntington
> 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
"A sense of humor is the only thing that keeps intelligent people from hanging themselves."-- Voltaire
What luck for the rulers that men do not think.-- Adolf Hitler
Q. What's the difference between an aerobics instructor and a well-mannered professional torturer?
A. The torturer would apologize first.
"Some people have a large circle of friends while others have only friends that they like."
The time for action is past! Now is the time for senseless bickering!-- Ashleigh Brilliant
"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)
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
Baby-sitter, n: A teenager acting like an adult, while the adults are out acting like teenagers.
Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance.-- Confucius
"That all men should be brothers is the dream of people who have no brothers."-- Charles Chincholles
"When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other."-- Eric Hoffer
"A book should serve as an axe to the ice inside us."-- Franz Kafka
Never put off until tomorrow what you can avoid altogether.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.
If you put a million monkeys at a million keyboards, one of them will eventually write a Java program.
The rest of them will write Perl programs.
The poor little wooden boy could only sit helplessly and watch while the old puppet maker, his father, whom he had just told how a nice fairy had turned him into a living boy, worked on a life-sized puppet of a young woman with big hooters.
Every day we slaughter our finest impulses.
That is why we get a heart-ache when we read those lines writtenby the hand of a master and recognize them as our own,
as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faithto believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty.
Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself,
Is capable of uttering profound truths.
We all derive from the same source.
There is no mystery about the origin of things.
We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians;
we have only to open up, to discover what is already there.-- Henry Miller, Sexus
"Love is the answer, but while you are waiting for the answer, sex raises some pretty good questions."-- Woody Allen
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")
Much learning does not teach understanding.-- Heraclitus
Learn from the mistakes of others. You can't live long enough to make them all yourself.-- Eleanor Roosevelt
"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
"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
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")
When Parker Pen marketed a ballpoint pen in Mexico, its ads were supposed to say "It won't leak in your pocket and embarrass you." However, the company mistakenly thought the spanish word "embarazar" meant embarrass. Instead the ads said that "It wont leak in your pocket and make you pregnant."
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka!" (I found it!) but "That's funny ..."-- Isaac Asimov
Do not condemn the judgment of another because it differs from your own. You may both be wrong.-- Dandemis
Technical people are better off not looking at patents. If somebody sues you, you change the algorithm or you just hire a hit-man to whack the stupid git.-- Linus Torvalds
The nuclear arms race is like two sworn enemies standing waist deep in gasoline, one with three matches, the other with five.-- Dr. Carl Sagan
"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
"In California everyone goes to a therapist, is a therapist, or is a therapist going to a therapist."-- Truman Capote
I have just returned from Boston. It is the only thing to do if you find yourself up there.-- Fred Allen
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
"Love doesn't make the world go 'round. Love is what makes the ride worthwile."-- Franklin P. Jones
Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before.-- Mae West.
[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 fellow who thinks he knows it all is especially annoying to those of us who do.-- Harold Coffin
"If you're one in a million, there are ten of you in New York."
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)
Thermalophobia (thur muh lo fo' be uh), n: The fear when showering that someone will sneak in, flush the toilet, and scald you to death.-- Rich Hall ("Sniglets")
In a church bulletin: Barbara remains in the hospital and needs blood donors for more transfusions. She is also having trouble sleeping and requests tapes of Pastor Jack's sermons.
From the 'Rules for women':
Women wearing Wonderbras and low-cut blouses lose their right to complain about being stared at.
Nana is now 99, in a nursing home, healthy, and still as sharp as a tack (not the best situation when you're surrounded by the demented, but she makes do).
-- Steve Dyer
Ah, then she'd have no problem relating to Usenet...-- David Preston
"The Constitution only gives people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself."-- Ben Franklin
There's an argument to be made that beneath every cynic there is a frustrated romantic. (Fringe)
"We've always been ready for female superheroes because women want to be them and men want to do them."-- Famke Janssen
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)
Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.-- Thomas Jefferson
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")
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
"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
Political tags - such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth - are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surely curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort.-- Robert A. Heinlein
"If I have any more caffeine, I'm going to end up running down the hallway naked." (Someone on Slashdot)
"Politics is the entertainment branch of industry."-- Frank Zappa
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
"I ask people why they have deer heads on their walls. They always say because it's such a beautiful animal. There you go. I think my mother is attractive, but I have photographs of her."-- Ellen DeGeneres
Psychoanalysis is the mental illness it purports to cure.-- Karl Kraus
"Whether you believe you can do a thing or not, you are right."
I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy
Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.-- Douglas Adams
"You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you."-- Eric Hoffer
The biggest communication problem is we do not listen to understand.
We listen to reply.
The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence that it is not utterly absurd; indeed, in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more often likely to be foolish than sensible.-- Bertrand Russell
"For every problem, there is one solution which is simple, neat and wrong."-- H. L. Mencken
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.
Critics think that things should be done in good taste. Most people think that things should just taste good.-- Gene Simmons
The great enemy of truth is often not the lie -- deliberate, contrived and dishonest -- but the myth -- persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.-- John F. Kennedy
"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
Elbonics, n: The actions of two people maneuvering for one armrest in a movie theater.-- Rich Hall ("Sniglets")
"Theory: when you have ideas. Ideology: when ideas have you."
Stability itself is nothing else than a more sluggish motion.
If all the girls who attended the Yale prom were laid end to end, I wouldn't be a bit surprised.-- Dorothy Parker
"All the president is, is a glorified public relations man who spends his time flattering, kissing, and kicking people to get them to do what they are supposed to do anyway."-- Harry S. Truman
We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection.-- Anais Nin
But I wouldn't try to please the stupid people. That's what some homosexuals think we should try to do. It won't work because the bigotry comes not from the behavior of the minority but from the mind of the bigot. A sexually inadequate person like Patrick Buchanan has a need within himself to have this attitude toward homosexuality. His attitude is not based on observation of homosexuals. It comes from within himself. It's the same as anti-Semitism. The New York Times is a Jewish paper, and it is extremely respectful. But an anti-Semite is going to say, well these are just rich Park Avenue Jews. He is not going to draw his observation based on the behavior of the Times; it's going to come from within himself. He has a need to be anti-Semitic. You can't please these people.-- Boyd McDonald
"I met a lady in the meads
Full beautiful, a faery's child;
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild."-- Keats
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
He raised his hand, pointed the Colt and fired.
It would be an exaggeration to say that the whole of Skinner's life flashed before his eyes, because he'd had a long and interesting life and there simply wasn't time. He'd got as far as his sixth birthday party, when Jenny Mason ate too much jelly roll and was sick on Mom's new carpet, when he realised he was still alive.-- Tom Holt ("My Hero")
Adolescence is when children start bringing up their parents.
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)
"It's gone wrong."
Professor George Eisenkopf, resident nuclear genius at the University of Chicopee Falls, Iowa, and the State Department's leading authority on civilian atomic power, scratched his nose with the plastic coffee-stirrer he'd been given on the plane.
"It isn't working properly," he added, in case there were any laymen present.-- Tom Holt ("Odds and Gods")
It's only by NOT taking the human race seriously that I retain what fragments of my once considerable mental powers I still possess.-- Roger Noe
... Now you're ready for the actual shopping. Your goal should be to get it over with as quickly as possible, because the longer you stay in the mall, the longer your children will have to listen to holiday songs on the mall public-address system, and many of these songs can damage children emotionally. For example: "Frosty the Snowman" is about a snowman who befriends some children, plays with them until they learn to love him, then melts. And "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" is about a young reindeer who, because of a physical deformity, is treated as an outcast by the other reindeer. Then along comes good, old Santa. Does he ignore the deformity? Does he look past Rudolph's nose and respect Rudolph for the sensitive reindeer he is underneath? No. Santa asks Rudolph to guide his sleigh, as if Rudolph were nothing more than some kind of headlight with legs and a tail. So unless you want your children exposed to this kind of insensitivity, you should shop quickly.-- Dave Barry ("Christmas Shopping: A Survivor's Guide")
Giving help doesn't mean dashing in and doing what seems like a good idea to you. It means doing what the other person wants. If what the person wants is for you leave them alone, it means doing that.-- John Fisher
"Americans have different ways of saying things. They say 'elevator', we say 'lift' ... they say 'President', we say 'stupid psychopathic git'...."-- Alexi Sayle
When you dig straight down, you won't reach the other end of the earth. There's a couple of reasons:
-You will drown in the water.
-If you brought scuba gear, you will burn because the center of the earth is too hot.
-If you even thought of that and brought a portable black hole� with you, you'll become disoriented, partly due to gravity, and start digging in circles.
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forget their use.-- Galileo Galilei
Sign in a Nairobi restaurant:
"Customers who find our waitresses rude ought to see the manager."
The problem with people who have no vices is that generally you can be pretty sure they're going to have some pretty annoying virtues.-- Elizabeth Taylor
"Oh, you hate your job? Why didn't you say so? There's a support group for that. It's called EVERYBODY, and they meet at the bar."-- Drew Carey
"Loved by some, accepted by others and misunderstood by most."
Weinberg's Second Law: If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.
"I love writing but hate starting. The page is awfully white and it says, 'You may have fooled some of the people some of the time but those days are over, *giftless*. I'm not your agent and I'm not your mommy, I'm a white piece of paper, you wanna dance with me?'"-- Aaron Sorkin
People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought which they avoid.-- Kierkegaard
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
Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature... Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.-- Helen Keller
"Last week a cop stopped me in my car. He asked me if I had a police record. I said 'no, but I have the new Devo album'. Cops have no sense of humor."
The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
May you get to Heaven a half hour before the Devil knows you're dead.-- Irish Proverb
Half of what I say is meaningless; but I say it so that the other half may reach you.-- Kahlil Gibran
"What shall we do?" said Twoflower.
"Panic?" said Rincewind hopefully. He always held that panic was the best means of survival; back in the olden days, his theory went, people faced with hungry sabretoothed tigers could be divided very simply into those who panicked and those who stood there saying "What a magnificent brute!" and "Here, pussy."-- Terry Pratchett (The Light Fantastic)
"Mom and dad say I should make my life an example of the principles I believe in. But every time I do, they tell me to stop it." (Calvin & Hobbes)
The obvious mathematical breakthrough [to break modern encryption] would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers.-- Bill Gates (The Road Ahead)
Computers save man a lot of guesswork, but then, so do bikini's.
"Sure it's simple, writing for kids. Just as simple as bringing them up. All you do is take all the sex out, and use little short words, and little dumb ideas, and don't be too scary, and make sure there's a happy ending. Right? Nothing to it."-- Ursula K. Le Guin
There is no pleasure in having nothing to do; the fun is in having lots to do and not doing it.-- Mary Little
"It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end."-- Ursula K. Le Guin
No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says; he is always convinced that it says what he means.-- George Bernard Shaw
"When you stop putting yourself on the line, and you don't touch your own heart, how do you expect to touch other people?"-- Tori Amos
If a man carefully examines his thoughts, he will be surprised to find how much he lives in the future. His well-being is always ahead. Such a creature is probably immortal.-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
It's strange that men should take up crime when there are so many legal ways to be dishonest.-- Sunshine magazine
'Be yourself' is about the worst advice you can give to people.-- Tom Masson
When I hear someone say they give '110%' to whatever they're doing, it makes me feel good inside, because I know I'm not as big a moron as that person is.-- Jim Rosenberg
In a lecture on dairy physics: "We have on the left a spherical cow of uniform density, on the right is a spherical hay stack of uniform density. The two are separated by an infinite fence of infinitesimal thickness delta. Now, before looking at the governing relationships...let's make some assumptions."-- Alain Bouchard
O'Brien: It's funny. I've served on half a dozen different ships and none of them have had cloaking devices except the Defiant. Now that we're not using it, I feel naked.
Worf: It is disconcerting, to say the least.
Sisko: Gentlemen, I feel the same breeze you do.
O'Brien to Dax: What you you smiling at?
Jadzia Dax: I don't know, I guess it's just being in the same room as so many naked men. (Star Trek: DS9 (Broken Link))
"Whenever I say something they find hard to hear /
they chalk it up to my anger and never to their own fear."-- Ani Difranco (Pretty Girl)
Therapy is expensive. Poppin' bubble wrap is cheap! You choose.
"Everybody winds up kissing the wrong person good night."-- Andy Warhol
Shin: a device for finding furniture in the dark.-- Steven Wright
"To fall in love is easy, even to remain in it is not difficult; our human loneliness is cause enough. But it is a hard quest worth making to find a comrade through whose steady presence one becomes steadily the person one desires to be."-- Anna Louise Strong
"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)
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool.-- Richard Feynman
Being called a poetess brings out the terroristress in me.-- Audre Lorde
An idea isn't responsible for the people who believe in it.-- Don Marquis
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)
Lactomangulation - n. Manhandling the "open here" spout on a milk carton so badly that one has to resort to using the "illegal" side.-- Rich Hall ("Sniglets")
Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow they may cancel your VISA.
"The Prophets teach us patience."
-- Vedek Bareil
"It appears they also teach you politics."-- Sisko (Star Trek: DS9)
A BBC correspondent, reporting on plans to build a McDonalds amidst ancient Roman ruins: 'To really get into the spirit of Pompeii, the restaurant would have to be buried in volcanic ash. And if you ask me, that's not a bad idea.'
These days, impulsive decisions are wanted; You're expected to have one more fancy term in your pocket than the other guy; Dogmatic egos are nearly trained to exist and prevail. I often wonder why so many middle-aged and older people want to 'keep with the times' and try to like everything their kids do. It just doesn't make sense.
"Hunting is not a sport. In a sport, both sides should know they're in the game."-- Paul Rodriguez
"The law isn't justice. It's a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law was ever intended to be."-- Raymond Chandler
You, along with other heterosexuals, clearly have the power to ensure that my child be taught by her teachers that homosexuality is wrong or to pretend that we don't exist. You, collectively, have the power to deny her the protection of her stepmother's health insurance should I become unable to work. You have the power to make sure that my pension benefits are unavailable to my partner. You have the power to ensure that in order to protect my family I must pretend in public that my partner and I do not have the deeply committed relationship that we do in fact share. You have the power to send my child the message that her family is not real and her parents are bad people. I do not believe that it is in your best interest to do these things. More importantly, I will never, ever, acquiesce in them. I cannot.-- Doretta Schrock
"A photograph never grows old. You and I change, people change all through the months and years, but a photograph always remains the same. How nice to look at a photograph of mother or father taken many years ago. You see them as you remember them. But as people live on, they change completely. That is why I think a photograph can be kind."-- Albert Einstein
"Legend -- a lie that has attained the dignity of age."-- H. L. Mencken
Friends help you move. Real friends help you move bodies.
Mustard: Are you trying to make me look stupid in front of the other guests?
Wadsworth: You don't need any help from me, sir.
Mustard: That's right! (Clue)
I usually shoot for that threshold of coffee strength that's just *short* of the coffee achieving sentience.-- Gretchen Wright
"Always do right- this will gratify some and astonish the rest."-- Mark Twain
We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.-- Albert Einstein
The definition of a beautiful woman is one who loves me.-- Sloan Wilson
Arachnoleptic fit, n: The frantic dance performed just after you accidentally walk through a spider web.
Do you know the difference between involvement and commitment? Think of ham and eggs. The chicken is involved. The pig is committed.-- Martina Navratilova
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')
Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.-- H. L. Mencken
"Until we take how we see ourselves (and how we see others) into account, we will be unable to understand how others see and feel about themselves and their world. Unaware, we will project our intentions on their behavior and call ourselves objective."-- Stephen Covey
If I'm not always happy, that doesn't mean I'm doing something wrong. It means I am doing something real.-- Laurie Seligman
"Logic, meet emotions.
Complex, meet logic and emotions.
Now, if you would, Logic, please club these two clueless fuckers upside the head"
"We come to love not by finding the perfect person, but by learning to see an imperfect person, perfectly."
He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.-- John Stuart Mill
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so sure of themselves but wiser people are full of doubts.-- Bertrand Russell
Work like you don't need the money
Love like you've never been hurt
Fuck like you're being filmed
"The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed."-- Carl Gustav Jung
On emulating hormones and long-range neurotransmitters:
"If your job is delivering packages and all the packages are very small and your boss doesn't care who you give them to as long as it's on the correct continent and you have until the next ice age to get the work done, then you don't have a very difficult profession. I see no reason why simulating that anachronism would present the slightest difficulty."-- John K. Clark
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)
If I asked for a cup of coffee, someone would search for the double meaning.-- Mae West
"If you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your own mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that's really the essence of programming. By the time you've sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you've certainly learned something about it yourself. The teacher usually learns more than the pupil."-- Douglas Adams (Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency)
What is the nature of God? His nature is entirely dependent upon the age or culture that has reinvented him.-- Solomon Skink
They both savoured the strange warm glow of being much more ignorant than ordinary people, who were only ignorant of ordinary things.-- Terry Pratchett ("Equal Rites")
"In America sex is an obsession; in other parts of the world it is a fact."-- Marlene Dietrich
"The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken."-- Samuel Johnson
When they broadcast this footage, they proceeded it with something like "KRON has learned that a group of paedophiles has been meeting in a public library." They implied over and over again that these people, whose faces they were showing on TV, were criminals. Hell, maybe half of them are, but the other half have been slandered and had their reputations ruined. It's supposed to be innocent until proven guilty, not innocent until caught in the wrong place on a slow news day.-- David Preston
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.-- Albert Einstein
"Either what you've said is so vague that it's meaningless or I disagree with you completely."-- Tom Maddox
There's a million fine looking women in the world, dude. But they don't all bring you lasagna at work. Most of 'em just cheat on you.-- Silent Bob (Clerks)
I think that Vulcan is a geekocracy where the people who know the most about sci-fi get to rule.-- <br />
Keith Irwin
Never put off till tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.-- Mark Twain
To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.-- Aldous Huxley
There's a difference between knowing something and realizing it.
The goal of Computer Science is to build something that will last at least until we've finished building it.
The job of the poet is to render the world -- to see it and report it without loss, without perversion. No poet ever talks about feelings. Only sentimental people do.-- Mark Van Doren
The simple rights, the civil liberties from generations of struggle must not be just fine words for patriotic holidays, words we subvert on weekdays, but living, honored rules of conduct amongst us... I'm glad the American Civil Liberties Union gets indignant, and I hope this will always be so.-- Adlai Stevenson
"If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual."-- Frank Herbert
Headline: Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim
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)
Saying that the just overturned systems of eastern Europe are proof the socialism isn't good or doesn't work, is sort of like saying that a particular Christian church that failed in producing ethical behavior in its adherents is proof that we need to abandon the Golden Rule and start being nasty to each other.-- Rob Bernardo
When you look at someone through rose colored glasses, all the red flags just look like flags. (BoJack Horseman)
Practical or mean and sneaky? - getting a permanent heart tatoo on your arm and getting three-day temporary tatoos for the names.
"There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult."-- C. A. R. Hoare
Basically, to learn Unix you learn to understand and apply a small set of key ideas and achieve expertise by expanding both the set of ideas and your ability to apply them-- Paul Murphy
The fun with white chocolate macadamia nut cookies is telling which white fatty substance is which. I can't.
"Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never of the correctness of a belief."-- Arthur Schnitzler
Strangely enough, this is the past that somebody in the future is longing to go back to.-- Ashleigh Brilliant
What's the matter, darling? Don't you recognize me with my clothes on?-- Tallulah Bankhead
“Our culture has accepted two huge lies. The first is that if you disagree with someone’s lifestyle, you must fear or hate them. The second is that to love someone means you agree with everything they believe or do. Both are nonsense. You don’t have to compromise convictions to be compassionate.”-- Rick Warren
Why is it that when we talk to God we're said to be praying, but when God talks to us we're schizophrenic?
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
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
Science fiction is an existential metaphor that allows us to tell stories about the human condition. Isaac Asimov once said, "Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinded critics and philosophers of today, but the core of science fiction, its essence, has become crucial to our salvation, if we are to be saved at all." (Stargate SG-1)
Is there no accounting for taste? There isn't even a budget for it.-- Sean Levy
The only good strategy is one that no one else understands.-- Tracy Kidder
Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.-- Bertrand Russell
"Complex problems have simple, easy to understand wrong answers."
"We need a president who's fluent in at least one language."-- Buck Henry
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
"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
The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice.-- R. D. Laing
On two occasions I have been asked, ‘Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’ I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.-- Charles Babbage
Lead me not into temptation; I can find the way myself.-- Rita Mae Brown
"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
With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not necessarily a good idea. It is hard to be sure where they are going to land, and it could be dangerous sitting under them as they fly overhead. (RFC 1925)
It is always the best policy to speak the truth, unless, of course, you are an exceptionally good liar.-- Jerome K. Jerome
"I find imperfection the most interesting thing about a person"-- Jodi Foster
Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering.-- Tom Stoppard
In a nonsmoking area:
"If we see smoke, we will assume you are on fire and take appropriate action."
'The whole world loves a lover' is an interesting theory, but a very bad legal defense.-- Keith Sullivan
We're not into science fiction because it's good literature, we're into it because it's weird. Follow your weird, ladies and gentlemen. Forget trying to pass for normal. Follow your geekdom. Embrace your nerditude. In the immortal words of Lafcadio Hearn, a geek of incredible obscurity whose work is still in print after a hundred years, "woo the muse of the odd."-- Bruce Sterling
"Relationships are hard. It's like a full-time job, and we should treat it like one. If your boyfriend or girlfriend wants to leave you, they should give you two weeks' notice. There should be severance pay, and before they leave you, they should have to find you a temp."-- Bob Ettinger
Those parts of the system that you can hit with a hammer are called hardware; those program instructions that you can only curse at are software.-- Richard P. Brennan
Nerb, n: a noun used as a verb. For example: ''They didn't language the proclamation very well''. nerb, nerbing, nerbed v. the act of using nouns as verbs in a sentence.-- Rich Hill
The first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it.-- Abbie Hoffman
"The brotherhood of man is not a mere poet's dream: it is a most depressing and humiliating reality."-- Oscar Wilde
"Hey, Aeryn's gorgeous--she can change any guy's tune. She can also change 'im from tenor to soprano, but that's beside the point."-- Grace
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
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
'You're a hero. Heroes are supposed to know these things.'
'Get stuffed,' replied the hero.
'You're formulating a plan of campaign, aren't you?'
'Get real. I'm trying to get this pxy chunk of gravel out of my - ah, that's got it. Right, where were we?'-- Tom Holt ("My Hero")
"If you weren't Cindy Crawford, you didn`t get to ride in the little cart. I saw them take her off on a little cart, and I thought, 'I'm in the wrong profession!'"-- Tori Amos (Chicago Tribune, October 8, 1992)
"Life's a bitch, then you die. Then your necromancer daughter resurrects you, and life is still a bitch."
"There are things that I refuse to deal with except through my music... because I don't trust humanity that much, and I don't know if I trust me that much. But I trust the songs."-- Tori Amos (CD Booklet)
They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.-- Francis Bacon
"County library? Reference desk, please. Hello? Yes, I need a word definition. Well, that's the problem. I don't know how to spell it and I'm not allowed to say it. Could you just rattle off all the swear words you know and I'll stop you when...Hello??" (Calvin & Hobbes)
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
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.'
"Well, it's weird when you play a show somewhere and there's a disproportionate number of people backstage talking about how they're witches. And that there's a cool place to go - 'Hey, you guys want to go out tonight after the show?' 'Yeah, where?' ' Well, there's a great place. There's this old abandoned church that these satanic cults hang out at.' It's not, 'Let's go down to the bar.' It's like, 'Let's go out and slaughter a cow.' What the fuck? It's the last thing you're expecting. And they assume that you must be into that. I've got someone coming up to me saying, 'The promoter is telling everyone you're a warlock.' I think a lot of spare time breeds incredible weirdness. They're looking for some way to rebel. I don't know."-- Trent Reznor
If people behaved like governments, you'd call the cops.-- Kelvin Throop
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)
"God is my co-pilot, but the Devil is my bombardier."-- Bumper sticker
She's not my girlfriend. I find her interesting because she's a client and she sleeps above her covers. Four feet above her covers.-- Dr. Peter Venkman (Ghostbusters.)
Work is a necessity for man. Man invented the alarm clock.-- Pablo Picasso
"I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours."
Any research done on how to efficiently use computers has been long lost in the mad rush to upgrade systems to do things that aren't needed by people who don't understand what they are really supposed to do with them.-- Graham Reed
Any member introducing a dog into the Society's premises shall be liable to a fine of one pound. Any animal leading a blind person shall be deemed a cat. (Rule 46, Oxford Union Society, London)
"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
"Reality is the leading cause of stress for those in touch with it."-- Jack Wagner
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."-- James D. Nicoll
A bit of tolerance is worth a megabyte of flaming.-- Henry Spencer
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
You measure democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists.-- Abbie Hoffman
What a man knows at fifty that he didn't know at twenty is, for the most part, incommunicable.-- Adlai Stevenson
Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.-- Mark Twain
Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn't have to do it himself.-- A. H. Weiler
"I read somewhere that 77% of all the mentally ill live in poverty. Actually, I'm more intrigued by the 23% who are apparently doing quite well for themselves."-- Jerry Garcia
"People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use."-- Kierkegaard
Magrat shivered. She told herself that a witch had absolute control over her own body, and the goosepimples under her thin nightdress were just a figment of her own imagination. The trouble was, she had an excellent imagination.-- Terry Pratchett (Wyrd Sisters)
[Disk] quotas are evil; they discourage users from learning how their greed impacts others. We're not here to parent users, we just provide a model electronic ecosystem. If they deplete their resources, they become extinct. A very simple concept.-- Eric P. Scott
Venkman: I'm a little hazy on this good/bad stuff. What exactly is bad?
Igon: Imagine life as you know it stopping instantaneously and all the molecules in your body exploding at the speed of light.
Venkman: That would be bad. (Ghostbusters)
Sin lies only in hurting other people unnecessarily. All other 'sins' are invented nonsense. (Hurting yourself is not sinful-- just stupid.)-- Robert A. Heinlein
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
"Don't keep a man guessing too long--he's sure to find the answer somewhere else."-- Mae West
Lust comes at first sight, love comes after staring at the same person for elongated periods of time.-- lj user slvrstarlight
When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. It's much more fulfilling to freeze them and throw them at life's Porsche when he drives by. That'll teach his lemon-giving ass a lesson.
Sometimes the appropriate response to reality is to go insane.-- Philip K Dick
"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."-- John Gilmore
"The Ten Commandments contain 297 words. The Bill of Rights is stated in 463 words. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address contains 266 words. A recent federal directive to regulate the price of cabbage contains 26,911 words." (Atlanta Journal)
It is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.-- Audre Lorde
"Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others."-- Edward Abbey
America isn't easy. America is advanced citizenship. You've got to want it bad, because it's going to put up a fight. It's going to say, "You want free speech? Let's see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil; who's standing center stage, advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours. You want to claim that this land is the land of the free? Then the symbol of your country cannot just be a flag. The symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest."
Now show me that. Defend that. Celebrate that in your classrooms. Then you can stand up and sing about the land of the free.-- President Andrew Shepard (The American President)
The only unnatural sex act is that which you cannot perform.-- Alfred Kinsey
"When you, the writer, integrate your own material in your psyche, it changes you forever. Some writers allow songs to come through them, but don't take it in, so they don't grow. If they don't let it bring up questions in their own beings, they're just translators."-- Tori Amos
Relationships are like sharks, Liz. If you’re not left with several bite marks after intercourse, then something’s wrong.-- Jenna
Dear Miss ---
I have read about sixteen pages of your manuscript ... I suffered exactly the same treatment at the hands of my teachers who disliked me for my independence and passed over me when they wanted assistants ... keep your manuscript for your sons and daughters, in order that they may derive consolation from it and not give a damn for what their teachers tell them or think of them. ... There is too much education altogether.-- Albert Einstein (To a student)
"If you think about it, somewhere there's a Logrus master with Amelia Earhart, a whole squadron of P-51's, and a mile-high pile of socks and keys."
Wadsworth: The game's up, Scarlet. There are no more bullets left in that gun.
Scarlet: Oh, come on, you don't think I'm gonna fall for that old trick?
Wadsworth: It's not a trick. There was one shot at Mr. Boddy in the study. Two for the chandelier, two at the lounge door, and one for the singing telegram.
Scarlet: That's not six.
Wadsworth: One plus two plus two plus one.
Scarlet: Uh, uh. There was only one shot that got the chandelier. That's one plus two plus one plus one.
Wadsworth: Even if you are right, that would be one plus one plus two plus one, not one plus two plus one plus one.
Scarlet: Okay, fine. One plus two plus one--Shut up! (Clue)
"There weren't a lot of answers for why some mothers lose their children and other women are beating up theirs in the mall in front of you. It doesn't make a lot of sense sometimes. Especially when people call it 'God's will.' If that wasn't the philosophy - if it were looked on as, 'Oh, well, it's a feeble planet and there are no guarantees,' that's one thing. But if it's God's will that I lose mine, then why is it God's will that these are being beaten? If that's God's will, I really need to have a margarita with him."-- Tori Amos
There was something - difficult to describe, when you've only got shoddy, post-modernist adjectives to work with - cheerfully revential in his manner, as if he had just seen the Messiah and remembered that the Messiah owed him twenty quid.-- Tom Holt ("My Hero")
"Our generation has an incredible amount of realism, yet at the same time it loves to complain and not really change. Because, if it does change, then it won't have anything to complain about."-- Tori Amos
Brandolini's law: The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it.
Innovation is not the product of logical thought, even though the final product is tied to a logical structure.-- Albert Einstein
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 have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated.-- Hannah Arendt
"Those who danced were thought to be quite insane by those who could not hear the music."-- Angela Monet
Wood is highly ecological, since trees are a renewable resource. If you cut down a tree, another will grow in its place. And if you cut down the new tree, still another will grow. And if you cut down that tree, yet another will grow, only this one will be a mutation with long, poisonous tentacles and revenge in its heart, and it will sit there in the forest, cackling and making elaborate plans for when you come back.Wood heat is not new. It dates back to a day millions of years ago, when a group of cavemen were sitting around, watching dinosaurs rot. Suddenly, lightning struck a nearby log and set it on fire. One of the cavemen stared at the fire for a few minutes, then said: "Hey! Wood heat!" The other cavemen, who did not understand English, immediately beat him to death with stones. But the key discovery had been made, and from that day forward, the cavemen had all the heat they needed, although their insurance rates went way up.
-- Dave Barry (Postpetroleum Guzzler)
Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't.-- Erica Jong
"Ten people who speak make more noise than ten thousand who are silent."
Most of us ask for advice when we know the answer but we want a different one.-- Ivern Ball
The chief danger in life is that you may take too many precautions.-- Alfred Adler
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
It's is not, it isn't ain't, and it's it's, not its, if you mean it is. If you don't, it's its. Then too, it's hers. It isn't her's. It isn't our's either. It's ours, and likewise yours and theirs. (Oxford University Press)
I have so little sex appeal that my gynecologist calls me 'sir.'-- Joan Rivers
"The learned fool writes his nonsense in better language than the unlearned, but still 'tis nonsense."-- Benjamin Franklin
"We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. To quote from Whitman, 'O me! O life!... of the questions of these recurring; of the endless trains of the faithless--of cities filled with the foolish; what good amid these, O me, O life?' Answer. That you are here--that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. That the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?"-- Tom Schulman (Dead Poets Society)
Intelligence appears to be the thing that enables a man to get along without an education. Education appears to be the thing that enables a man to get along without the use of his intelligence.-- A. E. Wiggan
Sometimes before bed, I look in the mirror and wonder just what I'll be doing in ten years. Then I look at the clock and think, 'Probably flossing.'-- April Van Scherpe
"Verily and forsooth," replied Goodgulf darkly.
"In the past year strange and fearful wonders I have seen. Fields sown with barley reap crabgrass and fungus, and even small gardens reject their artichoke hearts. There has been a hot day in December and a blue moon. Calendars are made with a month of Sundays and a blue-ribbon Holstein bore alive two insurance salesmen. The earth splits and the entrails of a goat were found tied in square knots. The face of the sun blackens and the skies have rained down soggy potato chips."
"But what do all these things mean?" gasped Frito.
"Beats me," said Goodgulf with a shrug, "but I thought it made good copy."-- Harvard Lampoon ("Bored of the Rings")
"Did I love her? I thought so. But from my new vantage point I realize that love is nothing more than a messy conglomoration of need, desperation, fear of death, insecurity about penis size, and the self-involved, ego-driven need to college other people's hearts." (Human Nature)
It's a mistake to underestimate the human capacity for self-delusion.-- Robert Park
"Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life."-- Terry Pratchett
"Life is like a game of cards. The hand that is dealt you represents determinism; the way you play it is free will."-- Jawaharal Nehru
Brain, n: The apparatus with which we think that we think.-- Ambrose Bierce
What's wrong with being drunk in bed? Being drunk on the floor of the garage, I can understand someone objecting to. But drunk in bed?-- Brad DeLong
If you think that mental illness interferes with financial success, just look at the average television evangelist.
All the world's a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed.-- Sean O'Casey
As far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.-- Bertrand Russell
I don't worry about safely using my hp calculator or yacc, or the ruler and pencil on my desk. Why should we accept the attitude that it is ok to need to worry about safely using the rest of our tools. Today there is a legitimate safety issue for computer users that we should all be aware of. The answer is not acceptance of a necessary amount of paranoia.-- Bill Mangione-Smith
I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.-- Voltaire
"Children are like TV sets. When they start acting weird, whack them across the eyes with a big rubber basketball shoe."-- Hunter S. Thompson
"A commercial, and in some respects a social, doubt has been started within the last year or two, whether or not it is right to discuss so openly the security or insecurity of locks. Many well-meaning persons suppose that the discussion respecting the means for baffling the supposed safety of locks offers a premium for dishonesty, by showing others how to be dishonest. This is a fallacy. Rogues are very keen in their profession, and already know much more than we can teach them respecting their several kinds of roguery. Rogues knew a good deal about lockpicking long before locksmiths discussed it among themselves, as they have lately done. If a lock -- let it have been made in whatever country, or by whatever maker -- is not so inviolable as it has hitherto been deemed to be, surely it is in the interest of *honest* persons to know this fact, because the *dishonest* are tolerably certain to be the first to apply the knowledge practically; and the spread of knowledge is necessary to give fair play to those who might suffer by ignorance. It cannot be too earnestly urged, that an acquaintance with real facts will, in the end, be better for all parties." (Charles Tomlinson's Rudimentary Treatise on the Construction of Locks, published around 1850)
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
"Almost every culture, every group, quote, unquote, has a way it wants to perceive things. And when I write songs, the Christians feel that because I'm not speaking the way they would like me to, that I don't believe in God, that I'm not part of the Christian formula. But being a minister's daughter, I know it very well."-- Tori Amos
"The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists -- that is why they invented hell."-- Bertrand Russell
Sniglet, n: Any word that doesn't appear in the dictionary, but should.-- Rich Hall ("Sniglets")
She wanted a holiday in Australia, she said, and if I turned it into work she'd hit me--so I gave in, because I did not want to be beaten about the Bush.-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)
"Homo sapiens, the first truly free species, is about to decommission natural selection, the force that made us.... Soon we must look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become."-- Edward O. Wilson
A healthy attitude also includes faults.
Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others.-- Groucho Marx
I'm tired of being this pristine little socially acceptable monstrosity
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.)
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
In business, your judged by what you say... nothing can kill the confidence of a perspective client faster then a proposal littered with grammatical, usage or punctuation errors. (Ad for RightWriter, The Grammar Checker)
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.-- William James
"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)
In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.-- Carl Sagan
"The disappearance of a sense of responsibility is the most far-reaching consequence of submission to authority."-- Stanley Milgram
The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.-- Oscar Wilde
"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
It says a lot about the US when they ban lawn darts but you can still buy semi-automatic weapons in a department store.-- Brian Manz
"We are the flaming, exploding, CGI-movie saturated MTV generation after all. If it isn't bright pink and green, naked, on fire and computer animated, I just yawn and walk away." (Someone on Slashdot)
If you tell a joke in the forest, but nobody laughs, was it a joke?-- Steven Wright
"...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
"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
"I like the word 'indolence'. It makes my laziness seem classy."-- Bern Williams
Power doesn't always corrupt. Power always reveals. When you have enough power to do what you always wanted to do, then you see what the guy always wanted to do.
C, n.: A programming language that is sort of like Pascal except more like assembly except that it isn't very much like either one, or anything else. It is either the best language available to the art today, or it isn't.-- Ray Simard
"You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements."-- Norman Douglas
"Truth, in matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived."-- Oscar Wilde
"It's a strange thing, but every sentient race has its own version of these Swedish meatballs. I suspect it's one of those great universal mysteries which will either never be explained or which would drive you mad if you ever learned the truth."-- G'Kar (Babylon 5)
Love your enemies: they'll go crazy trying to figure out what you're up to.
"Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated."-- George Santayana
"It's foolish to be prejudiced. There are so many reasons to hate people on an individual basis."-- Dennis Miller
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
Why can't they have gay people in the army? Personally, I think they are just afraid of a thousand gay guys with M16s going, "Who'd you call a faggot?"-- John Stewart
Mirth prolongeth life and causeth health.
"The main differences between a computer salesman and a used car salesman is that the used car salesman can probably drive and knows when he's lying."-- Peter da Silva
"Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone."-- Mark Twain
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
Christian Fundamentalism: The doctrine that there is an absolutely powerful, infinitely knowledgeable, universe spanning entity that is deeply and personally concerned about my sex life.-- Andrew Lias
For a long time it puzzled me how something so expensive, so leading edge, could be so useless, and then it occurred to me that a computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things. They are, in short, a perfect match.-- Bill Bryson
At a doctors office in Rome:
"Specialist in women and other diseases"
"In matters of conscience, the law of majority has no place."-- Mahatma Gandhi
We would often be sorry if our wishes were gratified.-- Aesop
He who hesitates is a damned fool.-- Mae West
Newton's Fourth Law: Every action has an equal and opposite satisfaction.
"I understand your question and the answer is 'You're thinking too hard.'"-- Jose Garcia
Life may seem unfair, but Life never cheats the way people do.-- Stewart Kramer
"Anger is natural. It's part of the force. You just have to learn to hang out with it."-- Tori Amos
DW is based on a slew of old myths, which reach their most 'refined' form in Hindu mythology, which in turn of course derived from the original Star Trek episode 'Planet of Wobbly Rocks where the Security Guard Got Shot'.-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)
Bypasses are devices that allow some people to dash from point A to point B very fast while other people dash from point B to point A very fast. People living at point C, being a point directly in between, are often given to wonder what's so great about point A that so many people from point B are so keen to get there and what's so great about point B that so many people from point A are so keen to get there. They often wish that people would just once and for all work out where the hell they wanted to be.-- Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)
"The proverb warns that 'You should not bite the hand that feeds you.' But maybe you should if it prevents you from feeding yourself."-- Thomas Szasz
It seems more people are bitten by new yorkers per year than by sharks.
More to the point, new yorkers can be anywhere, not being limited by water. Fear them.
-- Gifts for Men --
Men are amused by almost any idiot thing--that is why professional ice hockey is so popular--so buying gifts for them is easy. But you should never buy them clothes. Men believe they already have all the clothes they will ever need, and new ones make them nervous. For example, your average man has 84 ties, but he wears, at most, only three of them. He has learned, through humiliating trial and error, that if he wears any of the other 81 ties, his wife will probably laugh at him ("You're not going to wear that tie with that suit, are you?"). So he has narrowed it down to three safe ties, and has gone several years without being laughed at. If you give him a new tie, he will pretend to like it, but deep inside he will hate you.
If you want to give a man something practical, consider tires. More than once, I would have gladly traded all the gifts I got for a new set of tires.-- Dave Barry ("Christmas Shopping: A Survivor's Guide")
The difference between pornography and erotica is lighting.-- Gloria Leonard
I'm opposed to millionaires, but it would be dangerous to offer me the position.-- Mark Twain
The UNIX system has a command, 'nice', which allows a user to voluntarily reduce the priority of his process, in order to be nice to other users. Nobody ever uses it.-- Andy Tanenbaum
"I don't have to choose, nyaah, nyaaah, nah nyaah nyaah."-- Sandra Hereld
Your manuscript is both good and original, but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.-- Samuel Johnson
I pity you if you feel that the 'support' of such fair-weather 'friends' is more important than self-respect. Such friends offer no support, but rather slavery in a different cell: that of their approval.-- Clay Bond
"I open up more when it's conversational. Otherwise, they're proving how smart they are, and I'm proving how smart I am. It's a penis race, and we're both losing. I'd rather just hang out and see where it can go."-- Tori Amos (The Orlando Sentinel, April 12, 1996)
"If you insist on leaving your fate to the gods, then the gods will repay your weakness by having a grin or two at your expense. Should you fail to pilot your own ship, don't be surprised at what inappropriate port you will find yourself docked."-- Tom Robbins (Jitterbug Perfume)
Humans need fantasy to be human. To be where the falling angel meets the rising ape.
"Tooth Fairies? Hogfathers? Little--"
Yes. As practice. You have to start out learning to believe the little lies.
"So we can believe the big ones?"
Yes. Justice. Mercy. Duty. That sort of thing.
"They're not the same at all!"
You think so? Then take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder and sieve it through the finest sieve and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy. And yet... Death waved a hand. And yet you act as if there is some ideal order in the world, as if there is some... rightness in the universe by which it may be judged.
"Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point--"
My point exactly-- Terry Pratchett (Death and Susan in <em>Hogfather</em>)
"There comes a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide."-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The whole problem with this idea of obscenity and indecency, and all of these things — bad language and whatever — it's all caused by one basic thing, and that is: religious superstition," "There's an idea that the human body is somehow evil and bad and there are parts of it that are especially evil and bad, and we should be ashamed.-- George Carlin
When man calls an animal "vicious", he usually means that it will attempt to defend itself when he tries to kill it.
"If you do not think about the future, you cannot have one."-- John Galsworthy
IRC is not 'more than a toy'. It's LESS than... a belch on a windy day. IRC is a little ant exploring the inside of a microwave oven for all five seconds of its short, happy, exploding life."-- Kibo
Religion is for people afraid of going to hell. Spirituality is for people who have already been there.
"In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted."-- Bertrand Russell
Man is, and always has been, a maker of gods. It has been the most serious and significant occupation of his sojourn in the world.-- John Burroughs
"Life was so much easier when your clothes didn't match and boys had cooties"
In closing, I'd like to repost my 3 axioms of Usenet. I originally posted these in 1987 and 1988. In my opinion as a semi-pro curmudgeon, I think they've aged well:
Axiom #1:
"The Usenet is not the real world. The Usenet usually does not even resemble the real world."
Corollary #1:
"Attempts to change the real world by altering the structure of the Usenet is an attempt to work sympathetic magic--electronic voodoo."
Corollary #2:
"Arguing about the significance of newsgroup names and their relation to the way people really think is equivalent to arguing whether it is better to read tea leaves or chicken entrails to divine the future."
Axiom #2:
"Ability to type on a computer terminal is no guarantee of sanity, intelligence, or common sense."
Corollary #3:
"An infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of keyboards could produce something like Usenet."
Corollary #4:
"They could do a better job of it."
Axiom #3:
"Sturgeon's Law (90% of everything is crap) applies to Usenet."
Corollary #5:
"In an unmoderated newsgroup, no one can agree on what constitutes the 10%."
Corollary #6:
"Nothing guarantees that the 10% isn't crap, too."-- Gene Spafford
"I'll fight for you, but I will not compete for you... There's a difference."
If you sat a monkey down in front of a keyboard, the first thing typed would be a UNIX command.-- Bill Lye
"To stimulate creativity, one must develop the childlike inclination for play and the childlike desire for recognition."-- Albert Einstein
"Well, I'm not a religious person myself. I'm an atheist. I think religion serves a lot of different purposes in people's lives, and I can recognize the value of that, you know, the value of ceremony, the value of community, or even just having a forum to get together and talk about ideas, about morals--that's a cool concept. But then, of course, institutional religions are so problematic."-- Ani Difranco (on religion)
(After watching the movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey)
Isaac Asimov : "HAL's breaking First Law! He's breaking First Law!"
Carl Sagan : "So, strike them with lightning, Isaac."
I worry that the person who thought up Muzak may be thinking up something else.-- Lily Tomlin
"Advertising may be described as the science of arresting human intelligence long enough to get money from it."-- Stephen Butler Leacock
I braved the contempt of my friends last week and ventured out to see "Bambi", the Disney rerelease that is proving to be a hit once again in the box office. I was looking forward to a gentle, soothing, late afternoon relief from the Washington Summer. Instead I was traumatized. As a psycho-sexual return to the horrors of early adolescence, it couldn't be more effective. For the first half-hour, you're lulled into an agreeable sense of security and comfort. Birds twitter; small rabbits turn out to be great conversationalists. Pop is what Senator Moynihan would describe as an absent father, but Mom's there to make you feel OK in the odd thunderstorm.
You make great friends, fool around on the ice, discover the meadow, generally mellow out. Then, without any particular warning, your mom gets shot, your voice breaks, huge growths start appearing on your head, and your peers start heading off into the clover with the apparent intention of having sex. Next thing you know, the forest burns down. If I were still eight, I think I'd prefer Rambo III."-- Townsend Davis
[I was] out for a stroll and came across a bunch of the usual teens hanging out having an argument, the local police officers part of the crowd, leaning on the fence, listening quietly. It was dark out.
"Stupidness isn't a word, dummy," one said.
"Yes it is, stupidness, that's what it is."
I deduced quickly that they'd wandered away from a previous topic.
"It's stupidity not stupidness."
"Maybe it's both."
The debate raged on. I felt like I was on the net.-- Max Vasilatos
Now, in the Overall Schema Of The Universe, I would imagine that this sort of thing ranks somewhere down around gnat's eyelashes.-- George Madison
Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young.-- W. Somerset Maugham
"Even the AI hated [my book]?"
"The AI loved it. That's when we knew for sure that people were going to hate it."-- Dan Simmons (Hyperion)
"We all live in the protection of certain cowardices which we call our principles."-- Mark Twain
"Doing what we please is not freedom, is not liberty; rather, it is the abuse of true liberty and freedom."-- Cardinal Hayes
A day without a pun is a day without sunshine; there is gloom for improvement.
Dublin University contains the cream of Ireland: Rich and thick.-- Samuel Beckett
High heels were invented by a woman who had been kissed on the forehead.-- Christopher Morley
"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
Expecting something for nothing is the most popular form of hope.-- Arnold Glasgow
No matter what temperature the room is, it's always room temperature.-- Steven Wright
A linguistics professor was lecturing to his class one day.
"In English," he said, "A double negative forms a positive. In some languages, though, such as Russian, a double negative is still a negative. However, there is no language wherein a double positive can form a negative."
A voice from the back of the room piped up, "Yeah, right."
I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, and makes you laugh at life's realities."-- Dr. Theodore Dreissel (Dr. Seuss)
Mother is far too clever to understand anything she does not like.-- Arnold Bennett
I listen so that I may decipher the mystery of myself and become more whole.-- Richard Moss
Bagdikian's Observation:
Trying to be a first-rate reporter on the average American newspaper is like trying to play Bach's 'St. Matthew Passion' on a ukelele.
The last good thing written in C was Franz Schubert's Symphony #9.-- Erwin Dietrich
What Wouldn't Jesus Do?
We can assume He wouldn't skulk outside an abortion doctor's kitchen window and shoot him. Jesus wouldn't picket a gay man's funeral and shout "God hates fags." Jesus wouldn't vote a straight Republican ticket. He wouldn't give the commencement address of Bob Jones University. He wouldn't picket the play Corpus Christi. He would not feel the need to defend his heterosexuality. And finally, Jesus would not wear a shirt that read "What would the Trinity do?"-- Tony Norman
Ignorance simplifies any problem.-- R. Lucke
"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
"That's a hell of an ambition, to be mellow. It's like wanting to be senile."-- Randy Newman
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
Accountant - someone who can put two and two together and make a living from it.
"Truman's Law - If you can't convince them, confuse them."-- Harry S. Truman
Grandpa: "I'm an old man, no one listens to me."
Lisa: "I'm a young girl, no one listens to me."
Homer: "I'm a white male aged 18 to 49, everyone listens to me, no matter how dumb my suggestions are."
*homer walks over to the cabinet and takes out a can labeled "Nuts and Gum: Together At Last"* (The Simpsons)
The man who strikes first admits that his ideas have given out.-- Chinese Proverb
If you put a frog in a pot of boiling water it will jump to safety, but if you put that same frog in a pot of cold water and turn on the heat, it will stay and be scalded to death.-- Everett Dirksen
Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off the goal.-- Hannah More
Modern times are an awkward spectacle. On the one hand, our public selves compete for scarce window space, for the opportunity to see in and to where power is decided and used. On the other, private life recedes like a glacier, a translucent corner of heaven meant only to be photographed, never settled.-- Revel
Common sense: The collection of prejudices acquired by age 18.-- Albert Einstein
There are those who believe knowledge is something that is aquired - a precious ore hacked, as it were, from the grey strata of ignorance.
There are those who believe that knowledge can only be recalled, that there was some Golden Age in the distant past when everything was known and stones fitted together so you could hardly put a knife between them, you know, and it's obvious they had flying machines, right, because of the way the earthworks can only be seen from above, yeah? and there's this museum I read about where they found a pocket calculator under the altar of this ancient temple, you know what I'm saying? but the government hushed it up... [Footnote: It's amazing how good governments are, given their track record in almost every other field, at hushing up things like alien encounters.
One reason may be that the aliens themselves are too emberrassed to talk about it.
It's not known why most of the space-going races of the universe want to undertake rummaging in Earthling underwear as a prelude to formal contact. But representatives of several hundred races have taken to hanging out, unsuspected by one another, in rural corners of the planet and, as a result of this, keep on abducting other would-be-abductees. Some have in fact abducted while waiting to carry out an abduction on a couple of other aliens trying to abduct the aliens who were, as a result of misunderstood instructions, trying to form cattle into circles and mutilate crops.
The planet Earth is now banned to all alien races until they can compare notes and find out how many, if any, real humans they have actually got. It is gloomily suspected that there is only one - who is big, hairy and has very large feet.
The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head.]-- Terry Pratchett (Hogfather)
Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.-- Kahlil Gibran
"I used to teach Sunday school. I had the biggest class...I had like 70 kids. But that was because I wore red leather pants to church."-- Tori Amos
Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.-- Kurt Vonnegut Jr
On the internet, no one knows you're a CHICKEN! A GIANT CHICKEN!-- Denis Moskowitz
"Well... no," he admitted wryly, "we drank all the beer, taught the kittens to Cha-Cha, watched Baywatch Nights and then you passed out."
"We WHAT?"
"We drank all the beer..."
"No, no, not that." Xander looked horrified. "We watched Baywatch Nights? That's it. That's really it! I'm never drinking again!" (Xander has kittens, Spurglie)
"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
The American public knows what it wants, and deserves to get it good and hard.-- H. L. Mencken
Women treat us just as humanity treats its gods. They worship us and are always bothering us to do something for them.-- Oscar Wilde
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.-- Aristotle
Computer literacy is a contact with the activity of computing deep enough to make the computational equivalent of reading and writing fluent and enjoyable. As in all the arts, a romance with the material must be well under way. If we value the lifelong learning of arts and letters as a springboard for personal and societal growth, should any less effort be spent to make computing a part of our lives?-- Alan Kay (``Computer Software'', Scientific American)
Let's get out of these wet clothes and into a dry martini.-- Robert Benchley
Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.-- Thomas Jefferson
"A conservative is someone who admires radicals a century after they're dead."
They say it's never too late to learn to play the piano, but at 2 am, I really wish my roommate would quit and go to bed.-- Nathan Hansar
I like being single. I'm always there when I need me.-- Art Leo
"I don't want to join the kind of a club that accepts people like me as members."-- Groucho Marx
You'll go to Heck if you don't believe in Gosh.
"A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer."-- Robert Frost
"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)
There are only two industries that refer to their customers as 'users.'-- Edward Tufte
Anger and intolerance are the twin enemies of correct understanding.-- Mahatma Gandhi
"The world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel."-- Horace Walpole
"The cat could very well be man's best friend but would never stoop to admitting it."-- Doug Larson
"Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does."
"It is up to you to give [life] a meaning."-- Jean-Paul Sartre
On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.-- Virginia Woolf
Practical uses of physics laws:
Student to teacher:
"I determined the momentum of my homework's so accurately that, according to Heisenberg, it could be anywhere in the universe by now..."
"My concept of the great spirit is not the controlling force that is in institutional religion. When I say God, I'm talking about judgments over thousands of years that are horrific - love your neighbor but do what we say or we'll rape your women."-- Tori Amos
Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.-- Oscar Wilde
"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
Pigslice, n: The last unclaimed piece of pizza that everyone is secretly dying for.-- Rich Hall ("Sniglets")
It may be that your whole purpose in life is simply to serve as a warning to others.
He's come up with half of the algorithms used in the 20th century, but wouldn't actually recognize an actual computer if you dropped it on him.-- Jason Riek (about Dana Scott)
Cops and reporters are much alike. Both are absolutely dedicated to doing the job at hand, regardless of obstacles. And both, deep down, really believe the rules don't apply to them.-- Jim Barlow (Houston Chronicle)
Now art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.-- Oscar Wilde
Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.-- Albert Einstein
Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and weigh only 1 1/2 tons. (Popular Mechanics, March 1949)
Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea--massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it.-- Gene Spatford
"The laws of probability, so true in general, so fallacious in particular."-- Edward Gibbon
People do not seem to realize that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
And even priests were coming to spend some time in it, because of the collection of religious books. There were one thousand, two hundred and eighty-three religious books in there now, each one--according to itself--the only one any man need ever read. It was sort of nice to see them all together.-- Terry Pratchett (Small Gods)
Wit is a form of arousal.
We challenge one another to be funnier and smarter.
It's high-energy play.
It's the way friends make love to one another.-- Anne Gottlieb