247 hits
Accuracy, n: The vice of being right.
In case of emergency, speak in cliches.
Monday is the root of all evil.
The chance of a lifetime is to be yourself.
If the mind were exercised as much as the mouth, we would be a race of geniuses.
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")
You can't spell evil without vi.
The cost of living is going up, and the chance of living is going down.
Given the pace of technology, I propose we leave math to the machines and go play outside. (Calvin & Hobbes)
Luxury is the main cause of boredom; Boredom is a main cause of extreme thoughts, eg. violence.
QUOTE OF THE DAY: `
Never send a monster to do the work of an evil genius.
Anything is good if it's made of chocolate.
In case of doubt, make it sound convincing.
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.
We shame outselves for the sake of simplicity.
Is not that the nature of men and women--that the pleasure is in the learning of each other?
"The essence of intelligence is skill in extracting meaning from everyday experience."
That's what friendship means: sharing the prejudice of experience.-- Charles Bukowski
pride is not the opposite of shame, but its source
"The disappearance of a sense of responsibility is the most far-reaching consequence of submission to authority."-- Stanley Milgram
All good work is done in defiance of management.-- Bob Woodward
Most children grow up to be adults in spite of their parents, not because of them.
The advantage of emotions is that they lead us astray.-- Oscar Wilde
Music is the science of manipulating emotion through sound.-- Angus Gray
In case of nuclear war, prayer in schools will be okay.
The best way to get rid of worries is to let them die of neglect.
Destinesia: The act of entering a room and forgetting why.
I refuse to have a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent.
Antisocial arrogance is only for those of us who deserve it.
People often find it easier to be a result of the past than a cause of the future.
Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.-- Mark Twain
More to be feared than ignorance is the pretense of knowledge.
The definition of easy work is work that someone else has to do.
Part of the difference of learning something by interest or necessity is how we file it, with what urgency, and how we think of it when we think of it again.
On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.-- Virginia Woolf
Pigslice, n: The last unclaimed piece of pizza that everyone is secretly dying for.-- Rich Hall ("Sniglets")
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
Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.-- H. L. Mencken
"The degree of normality in a database is inversely proportional to that of its DBA"
The more we disagree, the bigger the chance that at least one of us is right.
Manners are one of the truly lost causes.-- John Simon
On an American Airlines package of nuts: Instructions: Open package, eat nuts.
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
"As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss."-- Noam Chomsky
Because these moments, as precious as they are, they're evil when they're gone.
Come, let us retract the foreskin of misconception and apply the wire brush of enlightenment.
Rule of Defactualization: Information deteriorates upward through bureaucracies.
He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.-- John Stuart Mill
Be one of those upon whom nothing is lost.-- Henry James
People want stories about things they can relate to: life and death, good and evil.
A bit of tolerance is worth a megabyte of flaming.-- Henry Spencer
Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong
And I am Marie of Roumania.-- Dororhy Parker
How do you know if honesty is the best policy unless you've tried some of the others?
The course of true love never did run smooth.-- Shakespeare
Remember: Silly is a state of Mind, Stupid is a way of Life.-- Dave Butler
"So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked what is the root of all money?"-- Ayn Rand
The haunting fragrance of her mysterious perfume lingered with me long after the blinding sting of her pepper spray had faded.-- Nick DeCamp
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 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)
"Some people have a large circle of friends while others have only friends that they like."
I love you not because of who you are, but because of who I am when I am with you.-- Sara-Jane Linton
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
Lecture, n: Where the notes of the professor become the notes of the student without passing through the mind of either one.
To be modest is to understand oneself as being capable of all men's weaknesses.-- Bernard of Clairvaux
Seeing is forgetting the name of that which one sees.-- Paul Valery
"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."
It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.-- Emerson
We suffer primarily not from our vices or our weaknesses, but from our illusions. We are haunted, not by reality, but by those images we have put in place of reality.-- Daniel J. Boorstin
Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before.-- Mae West.
"Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative."-- Oscar Wilde
"Simple pleasures are the last refuge of the complex."-- Oscar Wilde
Clique: A group of insiders who greet outsiders with their backsides; a closed circle of asses. (Cynic's Dictionary)
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
"It is a man's own mind, not his enemy or foe, that lures him to evil ways."-- Buddha
I don't suffer from insanity. I enjoy every minute of it.-- Woody Allen
"Whoever named it necking was a poor judge of anatomy."-- Groucho Marx
"To describe the beating of Egg Whites is almost as cheeky as advising how to lead a happy life."-- The Joy of Cooking
"You assist an evil system most effectively by obeying its orders and decrees. An evil system never deserves such allegiance. Allegiance to it means partaking of the evil. A good person will resist an evil system with his or her whole soul."-- Mahatma Gandhi
The Pet Principle:
No matter which side of the door your dog or cat is on, it is the wrong side.
Brandolini's law: The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it.
Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.-- Susan Sontag
The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
These lovers of esoterica seem to derive a great deal of intellectual satisfaction out of not quite understanding what they are doing.
Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.-- Harry S. Truman
"Television has lifted the manufacture of banality out of the sphere of handicraft and placed it in that of a major industry."-- Nathalie Sarraute
"Abuse of words has been the great instrument of sophistry and chicanery, of party, faction, and division of society."-- John Adams
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
Politics: strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.-- Ambrose Bierce
The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.-- Niels Bohr
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.-- Oscar Wilde
"Reality is the leading cause of stress for those in touch with it."-- Jack Wagner
"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
"If you are a human being, you might as well face it. You are going to rub a lot of people the wrong way."-- Jane Wagner
"Not all moderators and FAQ-compilers eventually become power-mad and insane. Some of them started out that way."
Always behave like a duck: keep calm and unruffled on the surface but paddle like the devil underneath.-- Jacob Braude
The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice.-- R. D. Laing
"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
Thinking always of trying to do more brings a state of mind in which nothing seems impossible.-- Henry Ford
Every human being is capable of everything, no matter how exalted or depraved. Without twenty years of diligent domestication, it is in our nature to commit genocide, infanticide, and canabillism. And drink beer and howl at the moon.-- Donna Barr ("Desert Peach: the Good Uncle")
"Advertising may be described as the science of arresting human intelligence long enough to get money from it."-- Stephen Butler Leacock
The defect of equality is that we only desire it with our superiors.-- Henry Becque
Mind you, the Elizabethans had so many words for the female genitals that it is quite hard to speak a sentence of modern English without inadvertently mentioning at least three of them.-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)
Education, then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great machinery.-- Horace Mann
History, n. An account, mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.-- Ambrose Bierce
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.
"No man chooses evil because it is evil;
he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks."-- Mary Wollstonecraft
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
Human behavior changes only under the impact of new technology
(Paraphrase of Moon's First Law, from Schrodinger's Cat by R.A. Wilson)
The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.-- Anais Nin
There are lots of things I'd like to be someday, but "normal" is definitely not one of them.-- Nelson Minar
Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.
-- Oscar Wilde
I personally think we developed language because of our deep need to complain.-- Lily Tomlin
"It is a besetting vice of democracies to substitute public opinion for law. This is the usual form in which masses of men exhibit their tyranny."-- James Fenimore Cooper
"A sense of humor is the only thing that keeps intelligent people from hanging themselves."-- Voltaire
"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)
If you think nobody cares if you're alive, try missing a couple of car payments.-- Earl Wilson
No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.-- H. L. Mencken
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
"Love is not the dying note of a twisted violin - it's the triumphant twang of a bedspring."-- S.J. Perelman
"The more I watch television, the more I wonder why I'm not already supreme ruler of Earth."-- Dogbert (Dilbert)
Gina: "Isn't it customary for the suspect to leave the scene of the crime?"
Debra: "Definitely an amateur" (Empire Records)
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)
Rational, adj: Devoid of all delusions save those of observation, experience and reflection.-- Ambrose Bierce
The chief product of an automated society is a widespread and deepening sense of boredom.-- Cyril Parkinson
Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.-- Thomas Jefferson
In art, as in no other form of endeavor, there is meaning apart from success.-- Joseph Conrad
Godwin's Rule of Nazi Analogies:
As a USENET discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.
Nine-tenths of the people were created so you would want to be with the other tenth.-- Horace Walpole
"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."
"Any idiot can face a crisis - it's this day-to-day living that wears you out."-- Anton Chekhov
In America, anybody can be president. That's one of the risks you take.-- Adlai Stevenson
Bring ideas in and entertain them royally, for one of them may be the king.-- Mark Van Doren
"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
An unrestricted satisfaction of every need presents itself as the most enticing method of conducting one's life, but it means putting enjoyment before caution, and soon brings its own punishment.-- Sigmund Freud
Imagination, n: A warehouse of facts, with poet and liar in joint ownership.-- Ambrose Bierce
"One of the CIA's few endearing traits is its penchant for making headlines. It is the world's most fully headlined secret agency."
One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.-- Plato
"Sometimes the need to mess with their heads outweighs the millstone of humiliation."-- Fox Mulder (The X-Files)
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
You can tell how far we have to go when FORTRAN is the language of supercomputers.-- Steven Feiner
"In corporate religions as in others, the heretic must be cast out not because of the probability that he is wrong but because of the possibility that he is right."-- Antony Jay
The fellow who thinks he knows it all is especially annoying to those of us who do.-- Harold Coffin
"All the parts falling off this car are of the very finest British manufacture"-- Bumper sticker
Beware the fury of a patient woman.
"Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives."-- William Dement
I do not like the man: he has all of the virtues I detest and none of the vices I admire.-- Winston Churchill
His lack of education is more than compensated for by his keenly developed moral bankruptcy.-- Woody Allen
Sex without love is an empty experience, but, as empty experiences go, it's one of the best.-- Woody Allen
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
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)
PHP is a minor evil perpetrated and created by incompetent amateurs, whereas Perl is a great and insidious evil, perpetrated by skilled but perverted professionals.-- Jon Ribbens
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)
"I didn't understand this at first, but YOUR CONVINCING USE OF CAPITAL LETTERS HAS MADE IT ALL CLEAR TO ME."-- J. Nairn
"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it."-- Donald E. Knuth
Education is a method whereby one acquires a higher grade of prejudices.-- Laurance J. Peter
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
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 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
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.
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
"Well, to be fair I did have a couple of gadgets he probably didn't, like a teaspoon and an open mind."-- The Doctor
"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)
"Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's jobs with yesterday's tools."-- Marshall McLuhan
Domestication is the enemy of romance.
"We are at times too ready to believe that the present is the only possible state of things."-- Marcel Proust
Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear - kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor - with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it.-- Gen. Douglas MacArthur
Traditionally, emotional and social problems have been judged as the moral shortcomings of an individual. Someone suffering from a psychiatric illness or an addiction is rarely viewed as a person who has a disorder or who is taxed by overwhelming circumstances. Instead the affliction is becomes a metaphor for a host of evils; it serves a testimony of the individual's unworthiness, a cause for condemnation.-- Ellen L. Bassuk ("Scientific American", December 1991)
"God, so atrocious in the Old Testament, so attractive in the New--the Jekyll and Hyde of sacred romance."-- Mark Twain
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.-- Bertrand Russell
Q: What do you call a principal female opera singer whose high C is lower than those of other principal female opera singers?
A: A deep C diva.
"The greatest happiness of life it the conviction that we are loved, loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves."-- Victor Hugo
No one will ever win the battle of the sexes; there's too much fraternizing with the enemy.-- Henry Kissinger
"If we can dispel the delusion that learning about computers should be an activity of fiddling with array indexes and worrying whether X is an integer or a real number, we can begin to focus on programming as a source of ideas."-- Harold Abelson
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.
As far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.-- Bertrand Russell
The day after tomorrow is the third day of the rest of your life.
"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."
"One good turn gets most of the blankets"
A penny saved is 2.5 grams of zinc alloy.
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)
I fell so hard and I took it so well that I felt like if I were any more of a happy-go-lucky klutz that I'd be an anime character-- Puddle (#xkcd)
"Popcorn is good with Parmesan cheese. It makes much more of a meal. You get your grains, you get your dairy, it's hot food. It works, I'm telling you."
"The people I distrust most are those who want to improve our lives but have only one course of action."-- Frank Herbert
"Nothing in man is more serious than his sense of humor; it is the sign that he wants all the truth."-- Mark Van Doren
Cloning is the sincerest form of flattery.
Poetry is the mixture of common sense, which not all have, with an uncommon sense, which very few have.-- John Masefield
Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.-- George Orwell
What is the nature of God? His nature is entirely dependent upon the age or culture that has reinvented him.-- Solomon Skink
"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
9 out of 10 doctors will agree that 1 out of 10 doctors is an idiot.
Rule of Feline Frustration: When your cat has fallen asleep on your lap and looks utterly content and adorable, you will suddenly have to go to the bathroom.
To some extent any use of language (and conceptual categories) distorts reality by coercing instances into types.-- Rob Bernardo
...people with a moebius strip of a mind...
"Doing what we please is not freedom, is not liberty; rather, it is the abuse of true liberty and freedom."-- Cardinal Hayes
Imagine a stegosaurus wearing rocket powered roller skates, and you'll get a fair idea of its elegance, stability and ease of crash recovery.-- Lionel Lauer
Beauty lies in the hands of the beer holder.
Well, there's a quantum computer that can factor [the number] 15, so those of you using 4-bit RSA should worry.-- Bruce Schneier
"Success consists of doing the common things of life uncommonly well."
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")
Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; a sense of humor to console him for what he is.-- Francis Bacon
"In America, through pressure of conformity, there is freedom of choice, but nothing to choose from."-- Peter Alexander Ustinov
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
"The world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel."-- Horace Walpole
One of the problems with learning that many teachers fail to see is that until you really understand something, any argument made out of that understanding context tends to be pretty useless.
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)
It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it; consequently, the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning.-- George Orwell
Machine learning, n: Automation of your biases
The skin of civilization is only 7 meals thick
"Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer; nothing is more difficult than to understand him."-- Fyodor Dostoyevski
"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)."